Y
ou
can’t
scroll
through
your
news
feed
without
encountering
the
latest
Insider
video
highlighting
some trendy restaurant with some weird
food. The latest trends fall into several
categories: lots of cheese, extra desserts,
colorful combinations and fusion food.
Now that millennials are killing chain
restaurants, a successful business is all
about avoiding uniformity, and with
that has come a wave of ethnic cuisines
mutilated by whitewashed fusion food.
When done right, combining different
cultural influences in food can lead
to fantastic new dishes. Some of the
best cuisines developed over years of
mixing cultures in experimental dishes
(Vietnamese food famously combines
French and Asian influences).
But I’m not here to talk about culinary
exploration. I’m here to bitch about a new
explosion of “trendy” fusion food, which
all too often whitewashes a beautiful
cuisine to make it more appealing and cool
for the hipster crowd.
Leave My Dumplings Alone
Dumplings (or jiaozi) are an honored
tradition in my house. They are made
for every special occasion: Chinese New
Year? Dumplings. Mid-Autumn Festival?
Dumplings. Birthday? Dumplings. Family
reunion? Dumplings!
My mother taught me how to make them
from scratch, which she learned from her
mother. Dumplings are more than a food
— they are a bonding activity with cultural
importance. My Chinese family makes
fun of my cousin for her lack of dumpling
making skills, teasing she will never be
able to find a husband if she can’t make a
decent dumpling.
Dumplings
are
simple,
delicious
and carry sentimental and traditional
importance for my family and culture.
Then white hipsters found them:
Pho Dumplings.
French Onion Soup Dumplings.
Reuben and Pastrami Bao.
Hamburger Dumplings.
Nutella Dumplings.
Each combination more disturbing
than the last. In some cases, it is a Chinese
restaurateur creating the food, but the
market is always hipster millennials for
whom regular “ethnic food” is so 2005. It’s
2018 — if your food isn’t one of a kind or
including avocado, how can you expect to
draw the right crowd?
Gone is appreciating simple, well-
prepared
food
made
with
fresh
ingredients. Gone is my mother’s and
grandmother’s
kitchens
smelling
of
noodles and stir-fry. Instead, you take my
food, put a cheap chocolate spread inside
and call it revolutionary.
That’s Not A Burrito
Mexican or other Latin American
cuisine is far from my cultural area of
expertise. I know that the Chipotle concept
of a burrito is nowhere near what a real
burrito is like, and we have taken the idea
of a burrito and turned it into something
different entirely.
It started with the breakfast burrito
and has since evolved into burger burritos,
cheesy Turkish street food burritos, pho
burritos, ramen burritos, Korean barbeque
burritos, orange chicken burritos, chicken
parmesan burritos, Indian curry burritos
and, of course, the sushi burrito.
Why are people obsessed with putting
a perfectly nice dish inside of a tortilla
and calling it a burrito? Do you want to
eat with your hands that badly? Did you at
least wash them first?
None of these things are burritos, and
you are just ruining good food by eating it
this way. Why do you want to eat a burrito
full of noodles? Are you just embarrassed
because you can’t use chopsticks? Tortillas
(especially the Americanized wheat-flour
kind) don’t add much flavor so what are
you adding to the food by eating it this
way?
Stop trying to be trendy and just go
support a local restaurant of your desired
cuisine run by people actually from that
region.
Stop Ruining Sushi
While I am not Japanese, I do have a
deep appreciation of sushi. Outside of
dumplings, there has been nothing more
disappointing than watching all the
variations of sushi, each more elaborate
and difficult to eat.
It started with the sushi burrito, which
was my first real experience with this type
of trendy fusion food. It was the summer
of 2016 and I was in Philadelphia when
I encountered a food truck catering the
sushi burrito that I had seen plastered all
over my social media. So I tried it.
This triggered my hatred of fusion food.
Sushi, in its purest form, is all about the
fresh fish on its own or with a simple bed of
rice. With the sushirrito, I was faced with
a giant lump of rice, aggressively average
salmon and some vegetables all shoved in
soggy seaweed, which was difficult to bite
through.
Sushi is already bite size — why do you
have to make it more difficult to eat? It is
a convenient and delicious meal that fits
perfectly between your chopsticks and in
your mouth.
Since I have seen a wave of new types
of “sushi:” sushi donuts, cheesy sushi,
sushi cake, sushi pizza, fried sushi topped
with potatoes, flaming hot Cheetos sushi
burrito, just to name a few.
Sushi is a perfect food and does not
deserve this perversion.
*****
The larger issue here is not just the
destruction of delicious foods, but the
connotations they carry.
My sisters and I used to complain when
my mom sent us Chinese food for school
lunch, because we wanted to fit in. In
middle school, I laughed along with my
friends at the Korean girl eating what
we called a meat Popsicle. Meanwhile,
at home, my mom prepared dishes like
chicken feet or “stinky” tofu.
Then Chinese food became trendy, but
only if it was prepared in a way geared
towards affluent white people. The crowd
at P.F. Chang’s is very different than my
family’s favorite hole-in-the-wall noodle
joint. Mapo dofu and hot pot become
orange chicken and lo mein. How are
lettuce wraps and miso salmon supposed
to be Chinese? Foods from minority
groups are stigmatized as exotic until rich
hipsters decide they are mainstream.
This Americanized food has now taken
on a new shape in the fad fusion food
industry in an attempt to capture the
younger audience who is bored of chain
restaurants yet still craves their trendy,
inauthentic “ethnic” food.
Culinary innovation is a good thing, but
telling a group that their food is inferior
for years to pervert its original form into
something flashy and disgusting does no
favors to the culinary world.
2B
Managing Statement Editor:
Brian Kuang
Deputy Editors:
Colin Beresford
Jennifer Meer
Rebecca Tarnopol
Photo Editor:
Amelia Cacchione
Editor in Chief:
Alexa St. John
Managing Editor:
Dayton Hare
Copy Editors:
Elise Laarman
Finntan Storer
Wednesday, February 7, 2018// The Statement
Let’s Bitch About It: Fusion Food
statement
THE MICHIGAN DAILY | FEBRUARY 7, 2018
BY LYDIA MURRAY, COLUMNIST
ILLUSTRATION BY EMILY KOFFSKY