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  • Writer's pictureJim Khong

Globalisation of food

Updated: Jan 19


“Polly Ann’s is well-known in San Francisco, particularly among the Asian community, for their unusual ice cream flavors.” - Anthony Bourdain. How many cultures can you see here?

People tend to think of globalisation as something that happened only recently but in truth globalisation has been ongoing since neolithic times.  Archaeologists have long noted similarities in techniques in tools and art found in places far apart, indicating that objects or knowledge travelled from one distant location to another. The well-known Old Silk Road linking China and Europe was a leap in globalisation some two millennia ago.  Julius Caesar was said to have started an fashion trend in ancient Rome when he appeared at a theatre draped in Chinese silk, boosting international trade at that time.

 

In this article however, I would like to focus more on food globalisation and how they mingled, giving rise to new foods or local variations of someone else’s food from far away.

 


Food origins


There is just so much myth about origins of food and most of what we think as its origins are often just plain wrong.

 

Fish and chips

Pescado frito is still a thing in Spain. The battered version was a Sabath dish among Sephardic Jews. The Brits just added beer in the batter.

Fish and chips are often seen as quintessentially British.  In reality, they were only combined in Britain, probably in the middle of the nineteenth century.  The fried fish component was brought into Britain in the seventeenth century by Jewish immigrants from North Africa, probably refugees from the reconquista.  Victorian recipes referred to ‘fried fish, Jewish fashion’.

 

Chips appeared in Dicken’s works and were actually Belgian in origin.  Belgians, particularly in Wallonia, will proudly serve you Belgian fries when you visit.  It is, however, known to the rest of the world as French fries, probably because American soldiers were introduced to them by French-speaking Wallonians during the Second World War. 


Same thing. Different name.

The British called them chips because you really can’t call your national food fish and French fries, could you?  But calling them chips had a complication because chips in the rest of the world refer to deep-fried thin potato slices, like those marketed by Pringles.  So, in Britain, what the rest of the world called French fries are called chips and what the rest of the world called potato chips are called crisps in Britain.  Make sure you ask for the right thing in a British shop

 

But when you stop to think about it, the roots of chips came from even further away.  Where do potatoes come from?  They come from Peru and were really introduced to Europe when the Spanish brought them back from their conquests.  Centuries later, however, it became so entrenched into the food culture of Europe that one now thinks of European food as based on potatoes.  Indeed, within three centuries of its introduction, potatoes became so critical in Europe that there was a famine in Ireland when crops field.

 

Lent food

Food of two fasting months: falafel, on far right, originated by Christians for Lent, now associated with Muslims in Ramadan

Falafel is controversially claimed by Lebanese, Israelis and Egyptians, but most food historians agree it originated in Egypt, from where it spread as street food throughout the Arab world.  Lebanese restauranteurs were quick to include it into their menus, cementing its association as a Muslim food, particularly popular during the fasting month of Ramadan.  Mainstream theory though is that falafel was first made by Coptic Christians 1000 years ago as a Lent food.  That is why falafel contains only vegetable fillings.


Not one is meat because of its Lenten origins

The most surprising Lent food to me is probably the Japanese tempura, so identified with Japanese cuisine that one wouldn’t think that it has origins in the west.  But it did: it was introduced by Portuguese Jesuits in the 15th century from a particular Portuguese fish dish called peixinhos da horta.  In fact, the name tempura is actually Latin in origin, coming from the word tempore, a short form of the term Tempore Quadragesima Dies, or period of 40 days, the official Church term for Lent.  That is why you only have seafood or vegetable tempura but never meat tempura.


The halo is for an angel at prayer

Just as a digression, pretzels are really Lent food from Germany.  They are always meat free and their particular shape is really that of an angel at prayer.  But today, pretzels are made everywhere in all shapes and sizes and contains all sorts of ingredients including the canonically unaccepted meat. And pancakes on the Pancake Tuesday before the start of Lent is to clear out eggs that Christians were to abstain from on all of Lenten season. The tradition is from England, where they celebrate Pancake Tuesday with a pancake race.

 

Food imported into America

So many foods have been brought into America from elsewhere and adapted beyond recognition that they are no longer accepted by the legacy culture. 

 

A South American fruit first used in Canada to represent Hawaii in an Americanised food, on an Italian base, imported from Persia via Greece, sharing origins with Middle Eastern and Indian breads.

Think Hawaiian pizza, a marriage of what a Canadian (yes, it was invented by a Greek man in Canada, not in America) thought of Hawaiian culture being represented by a slice of pineapple, and put on what he thought was an Italian import.  Hawaiians I spoke to laugh at this characterisation of themselves, noting that nobody ever asked them. Pineapples are not indigenous to Hawaii (if you want to know, pineapples are from South America).  Pizza, on the other hand, probably originated from Persian flatbread and probably share a genealogy with Arab pita bread and the Indian naan.  Naples where modern pizza was said to have evolved, zealously insist that there are only two types of pizza – margherita and marinara – anything else is sacrilege and so have disowned any novelty even if a century old.

 

When given a fortune cookie, people in China often ask whether they eat the paper

Chop Suey and fortune cookies do not exist in Chinese restaurants outside of America.  Try giving a fortune cookie to a Chinese in China and they will be puzzled as to what you’re supposed to do with it.  Actually, Chinese fortune cookies were invented by a Japanese-American, likely from a Japanese tradition.  Chinese cooking in America and Europe has become so localised that we often hear that apocryphal story of the visitor in Hong Kong, upset that he is not getting authentic Chinese food in a Hong Kong restaurant.  By the way, what most people think of as Chinese cooking is really Cantonese, the dialect in Hong Kong, the source of most Chinese migration in the twentieth century.  There are plenty of other regional cuisines in China that one can explore, from steamed buns from the north and spicy hot pots in Sichuan.

 

Hamburgers was supposed to refer to a person from Hamburg, but all the earliest references to hamburger were in America, even if referring to immigrants eating it on the way there. If a person in Hamburg makes a hamburger it would be an American one, there being no local original variant.  Eggs and cream was added to an Italian cheese and butter sauce to make alfredo sauce but that was in America: Italians don’t add cream to sauce.


Are we supposed to say "As English as apple pie?"

On the other hand, some food deemed as American as apple pie just was not.  Apple pie was not an American invention: the first recipes already existed in England two centuries before the first colony in America was even attempted.  Oh, and apples really originate from Asia. 


Macaroni and cheese?  Thomas Jefferson apparently brought it to America after enjoying it in Paris.  And according to the National Peanut Board, ancient Incans and Aztecs were roasting and then grinding peanuts into peanut butter well before George Washington Carver was born.


Curry

Let’s talk about curry.  We all know that chicken tikka masala is now starting to displace fish and chips as the national food of Britain.  Chicken tikka masala is offered in Indian restaurants in Britain but do not exist in India.  In fact, the term curry does not exist in Indian languages.  The English word actually derives from a Tamil word for sauce.  And when you consider the fact that most Indian restaurants in Britain are owned by Bangladeshis, chicken tikka masala is really a dish masquerading as an Indian curry, developed by Bangladeshis for British people.

 

This Japanese curry house chain just opened a branch in India

This shows how much curry has expanded world-wide.  In Japan, they love their curries and they have developed a particular sweetish form of curry, very much similar to the Anglo-British curry on which it was based.  When the Japanese Navy modelled itself on the Royal Navy when Japan reopened its doors during the Meiji period, curry popular among British sailors, came along for the ride.  There are curry museums in Yokohama and Osaka but none that I know of in India.  And some Japanese did try to patent curry back in 1999.  Japanese curry is rare in Japanese menus in restaurants in America and Europe because curry is not something that one tends to associate with Japanese food, but in Japan, curry dishes are probably as common as that other import, the tempura.

 

Curry today is probably most associated with India. What ingredients would you mostly associate with curry? Chilies? Think about it: where does chilli come from? From Mexico, and again it is only introduced to India via the Spanish and the Portuguese in the 16th and 17th century. Which then begs the question, how did the Indians cook curry before they had chilli?

 

Spices

One spice not from Asia. Paprika so identified as Hungarian is made from chilis, which originate from Mexico

So, from chilis we go to spices.  It shaped the world a lot more than most people think.  Spices were useful to Europeans in the Middle Ages because they could mask the smell of rotten meat.  Europeans were introduced to spices by Crusaders returning from the Middle East and from there the European appetite for spices just grew.  Spices however were grown only in South Asia & Southeast Asia but the route to the supply was via the Middle East, which at that time was controlled by the Turks.  After giving the Venetians a lot of money from the trade of spices (yes, St Mark Square with its picturesque canals was made with spice money), Europeans took to the oceans to find alternative routes to the east. This led to the rise of European powers, colonialism and the consequential export of European culture, clothing, way of life, languages and many, many other things to Asia and the rest of the world in exchange for profits, Asian words, Asian food and spices.  In other words, globalisation

 

 

Food fight

Food is never exclusive to any one people or culture. It is just too important to be owned by anyone.

 

Evolving food

I often have conversations with people who are decry the loss of authentic food, when cooks localise recipes and lose the authentic nature of those dishes.  I disagree as I see it as the natural evolution of food and culture. Food and culture are constantly evolving.  They are constantly absorbing ideas and techniques from anywhere else.  They are inherently pragmatic: if a technique or an ingredient result in a dish that your family would eat, you’ll be silly not to include it in the next time round.


Thai beef noodles: the noodles are Chinese, the chili & sweet corn are Mesoamerican and Buddhist Thais originally did not eat beef. But, does it matter if we enjoy it?

I do not find anything wrong in food that is changed from its original cultural context.  In the first place what is the original cultural context?  As I have pointed out, many of these authentic dishes are never exclusively from that culture anyway.  We tend to freeze our image of food at a particular point of its evolution and say that that is authentic, like tempura after the Portuguese introduced it or Indian curry after chilies were added.  The only food that I can think of that is truly authentic without outside influence is probably wheat noodles in northern China – and even here you can see I have to be so specific.

 

I once discuss this with a British lady of West Indian origin and I can understand her desire for a search for her authentic culture, which many in her community felt to have been emasculated by the British colonial experience. However, that experience, bitter as it was, did give rise to a very colourful West Indian culture – culinary, dance, carnival and all.  Cultures evolve and cultures absorb from elsewhere.  A culture that does not and is frozen in a particular time belongs only to a museum and is largely a dead culture.  In the modern world, the only culture that is authentic and has not absorb anything from any other culture for the last 40,000 years is probably that tribe of neolithic hunter-gatherers living on Sentinel Island, which the Indian government has banned people from visiting.

 

Cultural cross fertilisation in South East Asia

The mamak in mee mamak refers to Indian Muslims but is now cooked by Indians in Malaysia irrespective of religion

Take the experience of culinary evolution in Malaysia for instance.  Malaysia is a mixture of three races: Malays, Chinese and Indians.  These three races have intermingled their cultures and the resulting cross-fertilisation of cultures gave rise to practices and cuisine that are not found in the respective legacy cultures.  For instance, Chinese generally do not cook curry except in Malaysia and Indians generally do not cook noodles except in Malaysia.  Chinese curry in Malaysia differs from Indian curry, which also differs from Malay curry: Chinese curry tends to be heavy in a coconut milk, making it very rich, while Indian curry tends to have lots of spices, making it spicy hot while Malay curry tends to be sweetish.  I am sure many other mixed culture countries can point to similar experiences, such as in the various Caribbean islands, in South Africa and elsewhere.  It all makes for a very rich culture.


Bakso is from Indonesia but Indonesia is a large country of many cultures & so, there many variations of bakso there

This cross fertilisation is very evident in South-East Asia.  The ubiquity of noodle dishes in all countries, for instance – khow suey in Myanmar, pad thai in Thailand, lot cha in Cambodia, pho in Vietnam, pancit in Philippines, bakso in Indonesia and many many more – all points to the influence of Chinese culture in south-east Asia, largely introduced by Chinese migration in the last three centuries.  Interestingly, I found out that the bak in bakso is the same as the bak in bak kut teh, a meat pork dish in common in Malaysia and Singapore because that is the word for meat in the Hokkien dialect, dominant in both Indonesia and Malaysia.

 

Food nationalism

I once heard a radio program where nasi goreng was introduce as a national dish of the Netherlands. It of course came from Indonesia, a former Dutch colony.

Every now and then, South East Asian social media gets rocked by another debate over which country owns which dish.  I find the debate a little silly, although I do recognise that many participated in it as a fun thing.  It really is hard for any one country to claim a dish as its very own, because most of these dishes were imported from elsewhere anyway, or at least some ingredients or techniques were.  And much of that importation often goes through several other countries, adapting itself along the way in each country.  So, you can always find a variant of the dish indigenous to that country, but generically the dish, or a key ingredient or technique would originate from outside the region anyway.

 

Food nationalism is probably the most irrational of all nationalism, especially considering the evolution of food that I have just discussed.  I always have this image of the archetypal American redneck saying “I hate all foreigners” while gulfing down a pizza.  Food is actually the sincerest form of our liking for another culture. People often are happy to eat food from another country even if they do not welcome immigrants from that country.

 

Protecting from outside influence

Headlines reported that Neapolitans were outraged

Food nationalists also try to keep the recipe pure from outside influence.  A few weeks ago in 2023, Gino Sorbillo, the renowned Napoli pizzaiolo with a string of pizzerias world over, provocatively introduced pineapples on pizza in his Naples outlet, sparking of a debate in Italy.  Basically, he was intending to pry open the Italian mind to the idea that the recipe that they are used to is not a definitive one.  Neapolitans consider their city the birthplace of pizza and many would insist that there are only two pizzas – not types of authentic pizza, just two pizzas by definition of the word – in the world – ever.

 

I find it ironic that the Italian grandmother who insist that there is only one way to cook pasta forgets that pasta has been imported into Italy, maybe not by Marco Polo as legend would have it, but by Arab traders coming down the Silk Road.  (OK, like all things in culinary history, it is not that simple and you will have to ignore the strands of wheat archaeologists have found in Etruscan pots and ignore the debate whether those strands fall within the definition of a pasta). And again, the mandatory base of tomato in Italian sauces: tomatoes come from Central America.

 

Food adaptation

Some people resist the adaptation of recipes to local palates and turn their noses down on such bastardised food but to me this is just food experimentation.  I do not need to like the results of such experimentations but I do recognise that such experimentations will give rise to dishes that I may eventually like.  When you think about it, all foods were once fusion anyway when the food, ingredient or technique was first introduced into the culture.


The spread in a well-known Hong Kong dim sum house. None of these can be found in a traditional Chinese tea house and you can be sure to see new varieties if you visit a few years later.

Still, it is interesting to note how some cultures resist food experimentation while others welcome it.  Second generation Korean restauranteurs in America tell of their fathers warning them against changing recipes when handing over the business.  Chinese and Japanese cooks, on the other hand, are generally very keen to experiment and have no issue with new ideas as long as money is made and customers are happy.  Think fortune cookies and California rolls.  


How food make us happy

Remember that most of us cook for other people.  It makes us happy when other people enjoy our food.  Other than financial profits, that is why cooks are happy when customers enjoy their food.  I have always maintained that good cooks must like people.  It is hard to cook a good meal for somebody if you don’t like them.

 

You cannot have an enjoyable dinner out if there is bad service

Incidentally, that is why bad restaurant service puts us off so much.  Our minds probably see the kitchen and the front desk waitering staff as a unitary whole.  If the person serving me the food is nasty to me, I would feel that the whole restaurant doesn’t like me.  From a food safety point of view, would you take the chance of eating food prepared by someone who hates you? Not very likely.

 

Food as an art

Culinary is an art and all good arts puts us in touch with our feelings.  Thus, food always happen within an emotional context, probably more than any other arts because it involves more of our senses than other arts.  And the most powerful emotional context is normally supplied by our memories.  That is why different people have such wildly different reactions to a particular dish.  Food triggers off different memories and feelings in each of us.


Anton Ego transported back to the childhood ratatouille prepared by his mother

Remember that scene in the animated movie Ratatouille, when the food critic gets transported back to his childhood when he tasted the dish?  That is why we all hunger for mom’s cooking – it brings us back to a time when we were safe, care-free and happy.  And the lashings of love that mom pours into it has no equal in taste anywhere else.  Thus, food is often personal.  Food by any else’s mom will be tastier with all that love but food from our own mother will always have that edge because love and memories are always personal.

 

 



So, by all means experiments with your food and recipes; a Chinese grandmother would probably turn her nose down at your attempt at a Chinese dish that your children enjoy but she will never stop you in your own kitchen.  It is not cultural appropriation if you acknowledge where you got the recipe from.  So, cook, eat and make your family happy with food that touches on all our senses and our memories.  As long as you and your family are happy, who cares!!


Nothing is more Parisian than Viennese croissant. This was where August Zand, an Austrian army officer sold the first croissant in Paris in 1839. By 1909 when this photo was taken, his shop has expanded when the French loved his croissants. A nd we all now love French croissants, don't we?

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