Ever since reading The Noodle Narratives: The Global Rise of an Industrial Food into the Twenty-First Century (Errington, Gewertz and Fujikura 2012) late last year, I have somehow never been able to get ramen out of my mind. Then again, I have always enjoyed eating ramen. So imagine my surprise when I heard that there is a Korean version that is made with cheese. Ramen with cheese sounds very unappetizing, but when I heard that a restaurant in town that serves it, […]
At one restaurant in Beijing, market capitalism has found an answer to the city’s now legendary air pollution—ordering the right foods off the menu. While collectively dealing with the causes of pollution is not a political option available to Beijing residents, according to the restaurant menu the effects of the pollution can be addressed through correct individual consumption. On the menus at Jindingxuan Restaurant (金鼎轩地坛店) specific foods are designated as “resisting haze and clearing out toxins” (抗霾排毒)—specifically good for “saying no” to smog. The […]
Categories: China, Consumption, Food • Tags: air pollution, Anti-Haze, Beijing, 金鼎轩地坛店, market capitalism, menu, pollution, smog, 抗霾排毒
What makes a breakfast “American?” I considered this question after ordering an “American Breakfast” at a restaurant at Narita Airport. If the first meal of the day had an elementary mythological form the meal served to me was a Levi-Straussian ideal. It was an hr-breakfast—a meal reduced through the necessity of rough translation to its barest essential “American” form. Its bland color pallet, processed form and simple textures and flavors spoke to its role as simple morning fuel. Its […]
Categories: Food • Tags: American, American Breakfast, breakfast, food, Japan, Narita Airport
This weekend while at the Comic Con in Minneapolis I happened upon the most fascinating food abomination—The Walking Taco. It is basically a bag of Doritos sliced along one side with a scoop of meat, topped with iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, salsa, cheese and a dollop of sour cream. While I was happy to see that the food didn’t generate tons of trash by using disposable styrofoam and plastic, that joy was tempered by the fact that the “food” was basically […]
Categories: Food, Mystery Objects • Tags: Doritos, fast food, Walking Taco
香港將於33年後毀滅 Hong Kong will be destroyed after 33 years Tiananmen Conference 2014: Keeping the Memory Alive at Harvard Say Goodbye to ‘Peaceful Unification’ Medicinal Soft Drinks and Coca-Cola Fiends: The Toxic History of Soda Pop Jail House Recipes: Prison Cuizine Jennifer 8 Lee: The Hunt For General Tso Ephemera: Ethics of the Brand Why We’re in a New Gilded Age Aral: Fishing […]
Categories: Food, Surveillance • Tags: Aral Sea, brands, Coca-Cola, Hong Kong, Peaceful Unification, recipies, Science Fiction, storytelling, surveillance, Taiwan, Tiananamen, Tiananmen Conference, Windows XP
In the summer of 2012 I wrote a short post about a breakfast that I was served on a United Airlines flight back from China—how the meal’s plastic beauty fascinated me and how intrigued I was about the mix of exotic processed proteins that had been used to create it. For me, the inflight fakery evoked comparisons to meals served in dystopic science fiction futures. Yesterday while on an Air France flight from Casablanca to Paris, however, I was served […]
Categories: Care, Food, Random Reflections • Tags: Air France, airplane food, breakfast, cheese, croissant, faux food, inflight meals, meal, real meal, United Airlines
Between tourist stops in Marrakech we passed a Marjane Hypermarket. Since I have done some work in Walmart stores in China, I was curious what a supermarket in Morocco might look like—especially because most of the products we saw for sale were in local markets. With only about 30 minutes to stop I made a quick walkthrough of the store and, since I wasn’t sure about photography, I just took a few photos with my iPhone. The layout of the […]
Categories: Consumption, Food, Toys • Tags: Barbie, flour, Gender, Made in China, Marjane, Marrakech, Marvel Superheroes, Morocco, ramen, superheroes, supermarket
A basic methodological assumption of anthropology is cultural relativism—that people in specific cultures have reasons for what they do that are contextually meaningful and that understanding of the things they do should be examined in context. Understanding aspects of what people do and explaining them cross-culturally—say in an undergraduate classroom, for example—is therefore an act of translation. Teaching anthropology can be tricky because it is easy for “far out” behaviors, from the perspective of students in the classroom, to simply be left […]
Categories: Anthropology, Food, Introduction to Anthropology, Teaching • Tags: Anthropology class, cultural relativism, eating dog, food culture, Sidney Mintz, translation, uncrustables®
Over the past few years a number of friends, colleagues and acquaintances have forwarded an interesting email to me. The email, usually titled “Welcome to Chinese Walmart” features a series of images taken at Walmart stores in China. Judging from the number of times the email is indented—indicating that it has been quoted and forwarded–each of the emails circulated many dozens of times. Folks send it to me with good intentions because they know that I have spent some time […]
Categories: China, Food, Mythologies • Tags: culture, curiosities, email, exotic, Orientalism, sensational images, Walmart, walmart stores
Categories: Food, Scripts • Tags: Chinese Food, Chopsticks
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