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Enshrining food as bland versus seasoned, mild versus spicy, white versus…not—this has become a signifier, a shorthand, even a way to perform the very self. The French social scientist Claude Fischler writes that “[t]o incorporate a food”—that is, to consume food, to take it into our bodies—is “to incorporate all or some of its properties: we become what we eat.” This incorporation forms the foundation of identity, Fischler writes: “Human beings mark their membership of a culture or a group by asserting the specificity of what they eat, or more precisely…by defining the otherness, the difference of others.”
That seems especially true in the invocation of the binary, which is defined by the perceived differences between one “kind” of cuisine and its antithesis. Jokes and memes about colonizers’ bland-ass food resonate, and not because of their originality or comedic genius; implicit in those quips is a declaration of allegiance with people whose ancestral lands were once plundered by colonial powers for spices and other riches. This reversal in contemporary culinary clout is payback for all the decades, if not centuries, that our food and our flavors were once maligned as strange, smelly, alien, oily, and maybe even immoral.
Or maybe, more realistically, the joke is just that: a joke. Still, its premise is unflatteringly reductive. Insisting, however unseriously, that the cuisines of all people of color are alike in their spices and seasonings flattens the variances and intricacies that make gastronomy delightful, and renders non-white people and their food a monolith. Plenty of cuisines do not fit within the popular idea that non-white food must taste spicy and extra seasoned—or must look like that, in light of the increasingly common expectation that all food must be heavily coated in dried spices to taste good.
Hainanese chicken, in all its pale glory, appears to be the epitome of “white people food,” and is routinely mocked as such. Despite it being one of the most flavorful chicken dishes around, comments under TikTok videos about it span from “It looks so bland” to the meta “If a white person did this everyone would be like ‘where’s the seasonings??’” Emily Mariko, a cooking and lifestyle influencer on TikTok famous for her salmon rice recipe, has been accused of making bland food even when she prepares umami-rich Japanese dishes like chicken teriyaki (Mariko is half Japanese). With critiques like this, it’s only a matter of time before sushi is considered a “white people food”—oh wait, that already happened.
