[BREITBART] Referring to food as "exotic" creates distance between individuals and groups and "reinforces xenophobia and racism," according to a recent Washington Post article which, instead, suggests people ask themselves why they are unfamiliar with certain foods and question their willingness to change that.I was once stationed in Northern Thailand. I lived in a little house up on posts to keep the snakes out. My landlady welcomed me when I moved in with a home-cooked meal. There was a really tasty omelette, some tam som, and a bowl of beetle soup. The tam som looked like cole slaw. I didn't think it was exotic until it scorched my gullet. I knew the beetle soup was exotic; it's not something you're offered routinely here in pizza-and-tacos land. I also ate most of it to be polite.
The Thursday article, written by the paper’s food section staff writer, Daniela Galarza, and titled "Stop calling food ’exotic,’" begins by quoting a couple who praised Afghan restaurants and referred to the cuisine served as "exotic," in an old Post essay.
When I was stationed in Vietnam, I liked most of the food. Thit bo xau han tay is merely beef and onions. There were about a dozen different types of rice; none of it that I saw was brown, but I liked them all. On the other hand, I considered fermented duck eggs "exotic." I couldn't get past the smell.
Though she admitted the couple "meant no harm," their use of the term "exotic" indicates that they see the world through a "presumptive Anglocentric perspective," according to Galarza.
More like a European perspective. I like coq au vin and Jaegerschnitzel and borscht and pirozhki (most of them, anyway). I love souvlaki, but I don't like tzatziki.
After receiving letters from readers critical of her inclusion of "exotic" spices and ingredients in her "Eat Voraciously" food-themed newsletter, she claimed the word hit her "like a slap," leading her to conclude that it has lost its essential meaning.
I like satay, even though it's "exotic." In Indonesia they use peanut butter when whuppin' up some barbecue sauce. The fact that it's "exotic" doesn't mean it's bad, or not tasty. It's not routine. Tacos used to be exotic. Spaghetti used to be exotic.
"What’s ’exotic’ to you isn’t ’exotic’ to my neighbor, might not be ’exotic’ to my mom, probably wouldn’t be ’exotic’ to my best friend," she wrote.
Creole cooking is European-descended, but I'm not fond of crawdads, exotic or not, and when I've "blackened" something that means I burned it. My father liked crawdads. He also ate ramps, and pickled pigs' feet, which aren't exotic, but which I've never tasted in my entire life. The smell, again.
She also claimed that use of the term, particularly regarding food, "indirectly lengthens the metaphysical distance between one group of humans and another, and, in so doing, reinforces xenophobia and racism."
Likewise my grandfather, the one from Italia, used to catch sparrows and eat them. I wouldn't, because to me they're cute little birdies. In Italy they're poor man's ortolans. The first time I saw him use chicken feet to make spaghetti sauce I laughed my eight-year-old butt off. Too exotic for my tastes now, but I ate it way back then.
Galarza then quotes Chandra D. L. Waring, professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, who claimed that the term is only used to describe something non-white.
I like lots of Indian food, even though it is "exotic," in the sense of unfamiliar, not on the sense of non-white. You don't get much whiter than lutefisk, but I find it pretty exotic. Confusing the terms "exotic" and "non-white" is something for a mind with nothing better to do with its time. Or maybe for someone who needs something to bitch about to show his/her/its superiority to the rest of us unwashed clods.