Umami Podcast

Krishnendu Ray 0:48
Hi there. It's Krishnendu

Elise Ballard 0:50
Hi Krishnendu. It's Elise. How are you?

Krishnendu Ray 0:53
Hey, Elise, how are you?

Elise Ballard 0:54
I'm very well. Thank you. Thanks so much for taking the time. I hope your travels in India went smoothly, went well.

Krishnendu Ray 1:02
Yeah, like India is always a bit of an adventure, but yes.

Elise Ballard 1:07
Excellent.

Chris Pfeifle 1:49
Hi, Krishnendu. My name is Chris. I'm a co host on the podcast.

Krishnendu Ray 1:53
Hi, Chris. Good to hear you.

Chris Pfeifle 1:56
Nice to hear you too. Nice to hear you clearly as well. So you're coming through I was gonna make a joke and ask you again. How was India?

I've like spent the first half of my life in India, I go back every year. And I've taken my son every year since 2001. But I usually just visit family. I don't get to travel too much. But this time I did I did Kolkata, then I went to the south, Pondicherry, etcetera.

Chris Pfeifle 2:34
How much of a cultural difference from north to south is there in India?

Krishnendu Ray 2:40
Huge, huge. Yeah, I don't understand a word once I crossed the Euro kind of Indo European Dravidian language boundary, which is in southern India, I speak four Indian languages. But they're all from eastern India. Odia, Bengali, Hindi. And so once I cross into, say Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry, I almost do not understand a word. So it's more like Europe, with even bigger differences. So think about Cologne and think about Sicily. Sure. Yeah.

Chris Pfeifle 3:13
How many different languages are spoken?

Krishnendu Ray 3:17
So that 125 mother tongues in India and about 20,000 dialects. And my argument is wherever there is a dialect is a cuisine. So anyone who says anything about Indian food is probably you can find exceptions.

Chris Pfeifle 3:34
Sure.

Elise Ballard 3:35
So wherever there is a dialect, there is a cuisine. That's a quotable right there.

Krishnendu Ray 3:42
Yes.

Elise Ballard 3:44
And that's so interesting. So that means that there are many, many, many cuisines and we must have only brushed the surface here in this country.

Krishnendu Ray 3:55
Exactly. So it's like mostly, we get a version of northern Indian restaurant food, you know, and now we're beginning to get a bit of southern Indian, you can see like Chettinad — Chettinad comes from Tamil Nadu which is more like Chetttinar, which was a group of traders across the Bay of Bengal. And then of course, dosas, if you have had very widely distributed like what is called tiffin from southern Indian, tiffin food, often associated with in fact, temple cuisine from southern India.

Chris Pfeifle 4:33
Is there a way to discern what style and what type of cuisine based on location? When say, I go out to an Indian restaurant?

Krishnendu Ray 4:49
Good question, you know, generally, and that's like, say I'm speaking from New York. Different estimates 300 to 350 Indian restaurants, most are serving a Bangladeshi interpretation of northern Indian, like the chicken tikka masala, chicken butter chicken,

Chris Pfeifle 5:15
I'm gonna get hungry during this, by the way,

Krishnendu Ray 5:16
yeah,

Elise Ballard 5:17
Yeah

Krishnendu Ray 5:17
Well, I think I think what's gonna happen is the the, the fat is going to change in Southern India, it's going to be a lot more coconut oil. In eastern India, it's going to be a lot more mustard oil, a traditionally, Northern and West in India would be general sunflower oil, peanut oil. These are all in fact very modern oils, peanut and sunflower, the traditional oils are sesame, mustard, coconut, and coconut oil is very crucial to southern peninsula

Elise Ballard 5:50
I love that you used oils to paint an example of those variances regionally. And I think that really plays into what we want to talk about here, which is a little bit specificity in cuisine and how that gets reflected in other countries, including, including the US. So let's back up for a second here. And I want to begin by asking you about how you didn't even think about cooking until you were in college at age 20. And then there were some feminist friends or something that brought it to the fore for you, and eventually became your area of study of quote that I got from you. As you said, "the body sometimes lives in a world that the mind cannot yet think, the tongue articulate. or the fingers inscribe," tell us about that.

Krishnendu Ray 6:50
Yeah, so in fact, that's an old anthropological insight, right. Some of the most important aspects of culture is hidden in plain view. That's why it takes sometimes an outsider to go and visit a place and do some drastic work. In my case, it was the opposite. Me coming to the US to go to grad school, became what I sometimes call kind of an epistemic insight opened my eyes to a couple of things. One is the first thing you mentioned, I realized I had eaten at least three meals a day. And I've never thought about it. I've never thought about in any depth that tank people would fed me. Probably tangentially. But it never was a deeper realization that I'm living off someone else's work. And that someone else is in all probability, like in many parts of the world. And in my case, it was too, a woman, my mother. And in India, if you are part of a middle class be part of a lower middle class, my father was a sales man, my mom was a stay at home mom. And people have domestic servants, partly because labor is very cheap. And so my mother, and various domestic helps that had gone to our household, who had not directly cooked but had for instance, ground the spices, there was no mixer, we didn't have a mixer. You didn't have electric spice grinders, it was all done on a mechati like called Shinola. So the coconut would be ground, the chilis, the ginger, the garlic, the onion would be turning to a paste that will be domestic help in most middle class households. And the cooking was done by mom and I never kind of seriously thought about that. Until I left India came to the US. And then of course, I had to cook. And I had to feed myself. And then I had to feed my friends, grad school friends. And that was the kind of the that's the window that opened for me to say, Wow, I haven't thought about this. And I need to think about it. And I did think about food in everyday life. Who does the work? What is taste? What is the role of taste in social in everyday life? And that is how it slowly opened up in grad school.

Elise Ballard 9:22
I love how food has a fascinating ability to raise these existential questions. You talked about something like in cooking, you begin to feel and touch and see other dimensions, other things through different sets of eyes. And that sort of forces you to consider the connection.

Chris Pfeifle 9:47
You have a tactile experience to me just when you were telling us that story about your experience the going through my head was the hand grinding of everything and What you know what we may lose from using a machine or just a little, little, maybe a numbness to the experience both making and tasting once we start to automate some of those.

Krishnendu Ray 10:13
Absolutely. So it's like this, I just came back from India and every time I go to India, I realize, I carry a pair of tongs because I have gotten used to using a pair of tongs to flip a piece of protein, or even vegetable and sear it. And I realized this time, I got another pair of tongs, took it to my sister-in-law in Delhi, and offered it to her. She put it away, I opened a drawer and I saw it was filled with tongs that I had bought brought every year, and no one was using it.

Elise Ballard 10:53
First of all, what is used what's used instead?

Krishnendu Ray 10:57
it's basically laid out because every piece of protein and vegetable is cut much more small size and shapes. So it's a lot of stewed foods, soupy foods that's very close to an Indian peasant idiom. So these things are not seared and flipped. And the vessels they're cooked in is called kadhai. They are like this concave vessels that tongs are not that useful to flip large pieces of protein. I realize it was like a shocking revelation to me. I realize I have picked up you can call it a good habit to a bad habit from my chef friends at the Culinary Institute of America that I had started using tongs and now I cannot cook without tongs. And no one cooks with tongs in the Indian households have been the only thing they do is the flip. The chapati is often blistered, the last minute it's done straight on the fire. What's often done with that fingertips and some people have talked about it and written about it, how they prefer the exactly the question Chris you're asking is they feel, they like the tactile feeling, that heat on the fingertip to flip it. I don't I don't have enough skill or college to do it, which also tells you about that very tactile proximity, and almost like domestic architecture, relationship between taste and what you're making and domestic architecture and infrastructure. And you can go down that rabbit hole.

Elise Ballard 12:29
Yeah,

that's uh, I love that. I love that illustration. That's a good one. There I think this is a good segue into touching on the Ethnic Restaurateur, the book you wrote in 2016, which is our original reason for connecting with you. I want to ask for your 30-second commercial, so to speak, of of that book. But I want to start by talking about this, the stereotypes and the expectations that we come into a foreign food with; our inability to see the trees for the forest. And what that does to the way that we connect with ethnic cuisine in our culture.

Krishnendu Ray 13:27
Yeah, so the book, the Ethnic Restaurateur, came out of what was left out of my first book, which was the Migrant 's Table, which was mostly about what people do immigrants, recent immigrants to the United States, what they do at home, how their meals change, how they don't change, for instance, breakfast changes dramatically. And dinner stays the same, much more conservative role conservative role in creating retaining culture. So I had done that work on home cooking. And inevitably, it led to the question, what is the relationship between the home cooking of immigrants immigrants I had studied, which is South Asian, which is that is Indian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, etc. immigrants in the United States and how that food and that experience changes when we get into the restaurant. So the ethnic restaurant is basically the second part of my trilogy. My next work is going to be on street vending.

Chris Pfeifle 14:37
Nice

Elise Ballard 14:37
Mmm. I was gonna ask you, what's up next?

Krishnendu Ray 14:37
So in the ethnic restaurateur, I basically look at I started with experience. If you go to a restaurant, what is an ethnic restaurant? How is it different from the way we classify what we call foreign restaurant? On all what we classify what we call American, this case, native restaurants, and ethnic *****is a particular category naming mechanism that was born in 19, around 19, late 1950s, was dominant to the 60s and 70s. And it's slowly started petering out into the second decade of the 21st century. And there was a sense in which ethnic was about something between not foreign upper class foreign and not foreign, as in French. So French is never considered ethnic in this classification. And not American either, something in between. And this in between-ness was what I saw from the literature, looking at newspapers, looking at classification systems was how what is called Ethnic is basically the food of poor immigrants. And the word itself, as I said, became visible in the late 50s. into the, into the peak in the 80s. And this classification was linked to the idea of what is of the South, and what is foreign, and foreign was seen as high prestigious, Swiss, French, by the way, Italian plays a very interesting role. For the longest time, Italian was very high prestige. As long as there were no poor Italians coming to the United States, when poor Italians started coming to the United States, which is between the 1880s and the 1920s, the prestige of Italian food collapsed. And it does not climb up again, until you get into the 1970s. How do I know that? I know that from the price that Italian restaurants could charge from about the 1970s 80s. So this book is about two things. Sorry, I'm going to going on too long here.

Chris Pfeifle 16:59
No, it's great. Like a good teacher, every all of your descriptions are making you want to ask more questions.

Krishnendu Ray 17:07
Sorry for that.

Chris Pfeifle 17:09
Keep goin!

Krishnendu Ray 17:09
Okay, let me try. Let me try to focus in which is, which is we know from data, which is birthplace, and occupation data, we have in the US Census, from the 1850 onwards, we know that bakers, butchers, tavern keepers, saloon keepers. Remember that there were no restaurants until you get much later in history, were all run by what are called foreign born in the census, okay, they tended to be Koreans and Germans, some Eastern European Jews, and those of you know that some of your listeners may know, their grandparents, for instance, often were part of this feeding occupations. And that, of course, changes as that migration slowly peters out, and new migrants come in, which is post 1965, who are mostly Asians and Latin Americans. And so I looked around me in the kitchens in restaurants, and almost everyone was Asian or Latin American. So my first question was, Is this pattern a recent one? Is this an old one? And the answer to that question, it's an ancient pattern in American history. And we have evidence going back at least into the 1850s. And then the second set of questions was what is different between what's happening now and what was happening in the 1850s? And there are big differences. In the 1850s. It was mostly Germans, German speaking. And then in the 1880s, there will be the Mediterranean. That is sort of Italian that the Greek, and Eastern European Jews. And today in my time when I was looking at mostly Asians, Chinese, and Latin Americans, Mexican, El Salvadoran, and Nicaraguan. So this became this book about this transition in labor. And in transition in taste, what is the relationship between the two?

Elise Ballard 19:14
So it's full of facts and figures about this; you broke it down in several different quantifiable ways. What were some of those ways?

Krishnendu Ray 19:25
Maybe there are too many facts and figures, I realized, like I'm over-cautious, I do an overabundance of evidence. To write a book, if I got to write the book again, if I do the next edition, I'll take out some of the facts and figures. It's too much. I realize, too much. I'm just being careful and cautious. So one of the bigger patterns was the emergence of the American restaurant, which is a very kind of a 20th century phenomenon it was there in the 19th century becomes more important at the end of the 19th century, early 20th century, and two things change: the people who work in them change the languages they speak. And the cooking they do at home and in the restaurant. And our taste changes the taste of the consumer changes. So my attempt in the book was to trace as much as I could, the relationship between these two transformations, one in taste and demand by the consumer, and one, the producer in the kitchen. So these are largely think about it, how paradoxical it is, it is poor people from other countries who have always fed Americans, their own food.

That is very interesting, you know?

Elise Ballard 20:39
Poor people from other countries, feeding Americans their own food,

Chris Pfeifle 20:44
and in some in some way must also influence the flavors in the in the, the evolving tastes of Americans.

Krishnendu Ray 20:53
Exactly. I mean, like, so when we think about all the lettuces we eat, or the green broccoli rabes, broccoli, we eat the strongly influenced by Italians the last phase. Now the avocados we are eating, and the cilantro and the chili,

Elise Ballard 21:07
yeah,

Krishnendu Ray 21:07
are all strongly influenced by a strong Mexican imprint.

Elise Ballard 21:12
So many examples of that.

Krishnendu Ray 21:14
You know? and so especially vegetables, especially produce and fruits seem to be the thing. The foreign born immigrant teaches the American how to eat.

Elise Ballard 21:27
Mm. So that is related to a concept you bring up in your book, which is the transaction in taste or the transaction of taste.

Elise Ballard 21:44
So, so just tell us a little bit more about the transaction of taste and sort of why that's a core concept here.

Krishnendu Ray 21:53
Yes, and so first I'll give you an example. And this links to my earlier example, if you look at any large region in the world, like Europe, there's going to be a difference in the fats used, right? So if you Southern Europe, you can make a broad generalization closer to the Mediterranean, it's going to be closer to olive oil. And there's a line running right through the middle of Europe, which is olive oil and butter, okay? Or, in fact, animal fats, chicken, fat, Eastern Europe, etc. So you can almost see a division of it. So of course, as these people come in, not only do they introduce us to the various vegetables, canned and pickled stuff, that that we eventually get fond of, but also the various kinds of oil and the discussion of olive oil, which we of course, think no end of today is very good for us, it's great, it's tasty, you should think that you should listen to Americans talking about olive oil, and greasy oily if you have ever touched olive oil, very greasy and oily. And that it has a pungent taste. And all these Italians, even all this garlic. Garlic was always a signifier of difference. So it was both a difference, and yet also a transaction. And Americans learn to eat all those salad greens, all those greens, olive oil, olives. And along with it, of course, also good wine. That was a totally foreign object for the largely Anglo Saxon settler population coming from Northern Europe, which was not much used to wine. And so most of our culinary culture, after a generation or two becomes, in fact, the food of the relatively recent immigrants who have moved who have moved into the country and slowly moved up the social ladder, their food becomes what we call American food, just like pasta is the American food or pizza is American food.

Elise Ballard 23:57
Foods become fashionable. Tell us a little bit about that.

Krishnendu Ray 24:03
Yeah, so there is the relationship with fashion is intriguing, I mean for human beings are very fashion conscious, because we associate so my, my understanding of fashion is that fashion is a function. Not that we are silly and superficial, chasing fashions, but we are fashionable because in fact, we are social. So we wear clothes like each other. Like all my students in the classroom today, they think they are very distinctively at times they each one of them making a statement. And you take a picture and come back to that picture. 10 or 20 years from now you say oh my god, that is so 2023, ok? That's because there is a kind of a social convergence of the particular types and of attire. So also with fruit, and of course, we experiment with new foods that come in, and new foods in the American context has always been bought and brought in by immigrants partly because that has been the source of American labor. And from the very beginning, remember all of the Americas and specifically the United States, Canada, North America, specifically the United States, there was a lot of land, there was relatively less people, partly because of the decimation of the Native American population, partly because it was less dense, which made it attractive. So it always attracted labor, and labor came from Northern Europe, or the United Kingdom today, then it shifted to Southern Europe, and it shifted to Eastern Europe, today it has shifted to Asia and Latin America. That means what? Geography changes, changing geography means the ecology changes what grows in these places changes. And these are the things people bring in. And people bring in the memory of an introduce Americans to it as foreign food. I remember distinctly when I ate my first avocado. I disliked it quite a bit as it's a it's a big, fat, fatty, bland, fruit. Totally uninteresting. I had to eat at least 10-12 times before I was totally converted, and today, I can eat it every day, ok? And that's, that's exactly, that's a function of fashion. The same reason I started eating sushi, I disliked it. If you're not used to if you're not that part, that's not part of your palate. You quite I like dislike to I come from rice and fish culture. But we never ate anything raw. Okay, in tropics, you don't for a very good reason. And when I first ate sushi, I ate it because everyone at the Culinary Institute was talking about it. We were, we were watching Iron Chef Japan. And I had two stepchildren, then they wanted to try sushi, because it was becoming a cool thing, which was just then escalating into a fashionable place. And, again, I disliked it. And it took me a dozen times to develop a palette for it, to develop an understanding how I should even make a criteria of judgment. So once I did, now, I can eat sushi, not every day, but often enough, okay? And so that's, it's how new things enter. And they enter because in fact, we are curious, partly because of waves of fashion. Usually the young, introduce it to us like my stepchildren in some ways, put put pressure, and then the rest of us have gonna have to get used to it and develop a palate for it and a capacity to make judgment about it.

Chris Pfeifle 27:50
With that, do you also find that the introduction to new foods are going to affect your biology differently? And so it takes you know, one to 12 times or so to eat it for maybe your stomach and chemistry going on in there to accept the new food?

Krishnendu Ray 28:08
Yeah, I think I think it's a mix of a kind of neophobia, and you're familiar with both psychologist and physiologist call it partly because in some ways food is the thing that you become, right? So there's always, I think a conserving tendency or not as an omnivore that's the so called Omnivore's Dilemma, am I going to eat this new thing? And am I going to make it in some ways incorporated into my body? So it's about my palate. It's my physiology. It's my psychology. And it's my taste. And increasingly we of course, know, it's my gut, which is linked also to my mental health.

Chris Pfeifle 28:48
Absolutely. And there I mean, there's arguments to be made about, are, you know, are we raising wheat, as an example? Because we're able to, you know, make a bunch of, make a bunch of, a bunch of profitable crops and blah, blah, blah? Or is wheat cultivating us by getting dependent upon what it's turning our, you know, our gut chemistry into?

Krishnendu Ray 29:14
Absolutely. wheat or corn, right? That's exactly, it's a mutual, increasingly, we used to think we are the masters of the world. And increasingly, we realize it's mutual, kind of a development of foods like multi species sensibility, we are partly what our gut microbiome is. And the relationship between us and the gut microbiome is a much more dynamic one. And we have to be much more attuned to it. And so this is kind of this dynamic relationship between the old and the new. So there is a biology to it. There's a kind of a psychology to it. And there's a sociology to it. My most of my work is on the social aspect of it, the sociological aspect.

Chris Pfeifle 29:58
Sure. Yeah. I mean, this more than we think the stomach is kind of driving the ship. And in probably the kindest way, food is the the most palatable cultural exchange. I think it, it allows the different cultures to experience just - I'm going to just keep hitting the puns - a little flavor. And it seems like the most gentle way to introduce a new culture. I don't necessarily have a question there.

Krishnendu Ray 30:31
No, no, it is. And also, I also also, in some ways more and more work is showing that human beings, of course, have moved have always moved, we in fact, have became human beings, by moving through Africa, moving out of Africa, going to all the places in the world. And in so it is a dynamic relationship between settling and moving. Yet, I think, historically, we have overstated this idea about roots and stability. That's one dimension of it, human beings have always moved. And that's the nature of it, of course, the rate of movement, the volume of movement, and the velocity of movement has changed, because of modes of transportation, and increasingly modes of communication. And I think those are very interesting transformations that we are living through our ancestors lived through as mobile hunter gatherers, we did not just move in one shot from hunting and gathering, to agriculture, that was over 1000s of years, slow back and forth. And then, of course, the great migrations of what the United States was remade to was the great migrations of the 18th and especially in the 19th century, which was largely European migration through these various regions, with different palates, with different crops, with different tastes. And we leave some things behind, we bring some things new. And of course, African Americans brought as slaves were part of this kind of waves of the remaking of American agriculture. In this in the case of African Americans, for instance, rice growing, and also in terms of our palette.

Chris Pfeifle 32:18
How do you how do you wrestle with the fine line between heavy anthropology and heavy, you know, topics on food, food preparation, food, restaurateurs and stuff? Because you're, I don't know if you're purposely studying the anthropology, or you just have a general appreciation of it. But it seems that one, you can't have one without the other.

Krishnendu Ray 32:42
Yeah, no, good question. I mean, it's a good way to kind of get into the minutiae of disciplines, right? I'm coming from I'm in a department called Nutrition and Food Studies. It was born out of this very idea we were talking about, that nutrition is not only about nutrients, it is not nutritionism, but it's also about cultures of eating, modes of eating, sociality related to it. So that was Marion Nestle's kind of the great invention of this department that we're not just going to be nutritional scientists, we're also going to be historians, we'll also want to hire anthropologists, and that's the context in which they're hired me as a sociologist, and this - the discipline of the field. It's not a discipline, so the field is called Food Studies. And Food Studies is basically born to an anthropology of food and sociology of taste, and a little bit of continental philosophy. If you combine the two together, you get what we call food studies today, it's, it's a very, it's a baby, interdisciplinary field born in the mid 1990s. There are a couple of places in the world, there are a lot more places in the world that do Anthropology of food. And to answer your question directly, the people in the academy who have taken food seriously for the longest time are anthropologists. So in some ways to be a Food Studies scholar, you have to master a bit of anthropology.

Elise Ballard 34:14
That's really good. I am glad that that clarification came up, because I think that's important. It's it's important context on baseline for this argument. I want to go back a little bit to talk about the integration of cultures through food in various ways and via various experimentations, and talk about how also that integration can lead to naive stereotypes and expectations that contribute to perhaps the loss of subtlety or multi dimensionality or regionality in the way that a cuisine is presented to us. And I guess that's very specific to the United States in my thinking, but what are your thoughts there?

Krishnendu Ray 35:06
Yeah, so I think there are two aspects. One is there, there is this relationship to new and different, and in American culture that largely exhibits itself through immigrant cultures. And the transatlantic slave trade, and then immigrant cultures, from indentured servants, from the Irish, to the German, to the Italian, to the Greeks, etc, etc. And in this relationship, there is both a difference and a curiosity. And here's the second part, which in my book, The Ethnic Restauranteur is about, there is a certain kind of a what what academics called symbolic violence, there's a kind of a disdain and disgust, that poor people's food is not paying attention to only rich people's food, elite food is what is, is refined and beautiful and good to taste. And one of my main arguments through my whole work has been basically to draw attention to our Eurocentric assumptions. In American taste, the fact that we think about wine as very refined and sophisticated, the way you think about wine, that there should be certain kinds of grape varietals grown in particular regions. And there are white grapes, white wines, and red wines and sparkling wines and still wines. These classifications, by the way, are very modern, very French, Greeks historically, have always mixed saltwater with their wine. Germans drink their wine with salt often. That's why you see all these pretzels, etc. So people have always had things like wine, and complex local idioms about it like a dialect, like a language. What we do often is from a distance, I think Americans have done that. The idea that only some food cultures are worth paying close attention to the French sauces, the French or the grape varietals from the terroir and the region. So we have learned to do that with wine. We have learned to do that subsequently, with Italian wines. We are doing that now with Greek wines, cheeses, and processed meats. And, but in a sense, there's a lot more in the world, every cuisine in the world, you take, say China, or India, which from afar looks like one place is really hundreds of thousands of cuisines, just like Italian, just like French in some ways. So one of the aspects of my work has been to kind of remind people, just as we are careful to pay attention to French cuisine, French wine, French meats, French cheeses, and Italian wines and cheeses, we should be doing the same thing to other cuisines in the world. We have been very good at doing it, which points to Japanese food. And my argument is that is linked to the rise of Japan as a major economic and cultural power. We are right now doing it to Korean food. If you look at Michelin data, if we get a chance to talk about it. Michelin when it came to New York City and Michelin today, there's been a fourfold increase in the coverage of Korean restaurants in the Michelin guides, there's been a three fold increase in Japanese restaurants. So we're doing well about paying attention, this capacity to be attentive and make finer distinctions. It is okay to start looking at a food, tasting your food from far for the first time, we cannot make finer distinctions. But as as just like the avocado, just like the dals, okay, it's not one kind. There are probably a hundred thousand kinds of dals in India, which is legume soups, right? And so to be attentive to these differences in culture, is that often poor people's culture because we meet them as immigrants in this country. They're worth paying as much attention to as haute cuisine in very fine dining restaurants, in a nice glass of wine, nothing wrong with those things. Those are terrific things. We should be paying as much attention to these other cuisines and maybe even learning how to make finer distinctions.

Chris Pfeifle 39:55
And you know, it - history shows us to something that was considered a poor person's food has, you know, called lobster has risen to now what is fine cuisine and it seems like those strata have a fluid nature to it because of style and maybe even you know what's available for a region or what can be shipped and brought to a region. But that it seems a malleable metric with what is considered the the elegant, the fine food and what the poor food is.

Krishnendu Ray 40:28
Exactly. And lobster is a terrific example. A part of it is because a lot of New York rich people had homes in Maine, and in fact ate what and saw what the local people were eating. And this was partly a way to gesture towards their summer homes in the Northeast. And so it's partly fashion, partly what I call class hierarchy. And, and, and different kinds of food. Enter, like, the example of Olive Oil. Olive Oil was considered poor people's food. Wretched, okay? and and too pungent, and now it has totally flipped at the other end of it. It's very clearly happening to Italian food, in front of our eyes, and a lot of my data in the book, in fact, based on Zagat, and then the National Restaurant Association's data, and then I eventually did work on Yelp, and Michelin, it shows this dramatic transformation of Italian from the 1970s to a very high end, by the 21st century for sure: happened with Japanese, happening with Korean, happening, by the way with Greek food along with wine, along with the taste for resinous wine, you remember how we used to react to resin in those Greek wines? Now it's fashionable, all those organic biodynamic wine is basically end of the old regime, about what wine, good wine ought to be, which is a very quite late century French prescription, we're finally moving away from it. And new tastes are coming in including new wines, new cheeses, new ways of drinking the wines, cheeses, and of course, produce and vegetables, including avocados, cilantro, etc.

Elise Ballard 42:18
I want to follow on that, that comment to ask about food marketing, and its role, especially in the US.

Krishnendu Ray 42:30
So I mean, food marketing is kind of a complex thing. There's one ubiquity which is lot of things are available and visible in the marketplace. But only some of the things are kind of sold and sometimes upscaled and pushed. It is often that is often done to processed food. And of course, remember, wine is one of the most processed foods, which is why there's so much value added, there's so much money in it. That's why there's so much money put into marketing, it is not less likely that a vegetable or a fruit in itself, will become will get caught up in the marketing hype. But there's kind of some examples, avocado itself,

Elise Ballard 43:17
Oh gosh, yeah

Krishnendu Ray 43:18
you know, it's like everyone, everywhere - I took students to Sydney, and everyone was eating avocado, in Sydney and everywhere else. So it happens to certain things, quinoa, amongst grains, and there's a trend like now I the other day, I saw fresh turmeric. Now that's, that's recent, we are moving from the ground, processed turmeric to fresh turmeric, turmeric. So there is always some degree of fashion subcultures

Chris Pfeifle 43:45
Celebrities

Krishnendu Ray 43:46
which are often new to taste and something some claims about health, which are often - and I think a good example of that, Elise, is the so-called superfoods, because as I tell people, there are a lot of very good foods in the world, there is no superfood in the world. It is a marketing gimmick.

Chris Pfeifle 44:11
Oh, I thought parsley - ?

Krishnendu Ray 44:11
Certainly a marketing gimmick.

Elise Ballard 44:11
That actually brings up a really important point about globalization, something that you and I talked about in our earlier conversation about. There are lots of negatives about globalization, but maybe some positives too. What are your thoughts about that?

Krishnendu Ray 44:30
Yep. For me, I see globalization as a very long process. It's not recent. Many people, too many people think about it as relatively recent. And just the examples I'm giving here: all these Irish workers and German workers who were coming to the United States in the 19th century was part of a globalization process. So globalization goes a lot further back than we think what globalization some people assigned the 1980s to today on, maybe 1970s to today, that's what all it means is the source of people and produce and food has changed. But the process in fact, the rate of number of people who were coming into the United States in the 19th century, was kind of almost at about the same rate as today, it's about 13% of the population at a peak time, they were just coming from different parts of the world. So globalization is an old process, it is as old as capitalism, which is very popular for Americans. So it's partly a process of moving of people and as I have said before, in fact, it - human movement and movement of produce, I just came back from India. Plateau - Malwa Plateau in India, there is a cluster of baobab trees that grows there that has obviously come from Madagascar, in East Africa, we don't know who, when - thousands of years ago, because some of these trees can last thousands of years. And the fruit of the baobab is used as a kind of a sour ingredient that's very high in vitamin C. There we go again, another superfood which is used - is often called Maniki Inlu. Our corresponding imli literally means the tamarind of Mundi, Mundi is the region. So that is - probably those trees come from a stream that is thousands of years old: get coconut, the way it spread, rice, the way it spread between southern China and Eastern India for instance, and and the Gangetic Valley. So all these crops, the way they have moved, that is ancient, okay? People's movement is ancient. So partly, I kind of want to kind of be less melodramatic about this thing called globalization. Yes, the number of people, the velocity, and the distance people are moving has changed because of transportation, etc. But this is an old process. And that's why my understanding of food culture is always about roots and, and routes of mobility. All food cultures involved a certain kind of stability, rootedness - but also circulation.

Elise Ballard 47:31
Mm. That's well -

Krishnendu Ray 47:32
Sorry, did I go on too much here?

Elise Ballard 47:33
No, you - I think that was a that was a point well made.

Chris Pfeifle 47:36
And I love the idea and something I've been chewing on for a bit are the echoes of ancient art or agriculture.

Krishnendu Ray 47:44
Exactly.

Chris Pfeifle 47:44
You know, though, those waves that they put through different cultures where you think, you know, we've always had this insect that was actually introduced into this area.

Krishnendu Ray 47:53
Exactly!

Chris Pfeifle 47:56
Go ahead.

Krishnendu Ray 47:56
Yeah, like take a British like, say fish and chips, right? Fish and chips comes out of Jewish migrants, you know? It was like, what yesterday's was new and global and globalizing is today's traditional food.

Chris Pfeifle 48:09
Right. Right. Wow.

Elise Ballard 48:11
Yeah. It's fascinating to think of all of the examples. Rice itself. Corn? Especially the staples. There's -

Chris Pfeifle 48:19
The story of Marco Polo, you know, creating spaghetti.

Krishnendu Ray 48:23
Exactly. Potatoes. I come from eastern India. Bengalis, we think we're the only people in the world who define potatoes as a vegetable, who see rice and vegetables, beans, rice and potatoes. And it's, it's a Peruvian, kind of a Peruvian root. And it spreads and spread like wildfire. Chilies - most Southeast Asian, Chinese and Indians think it's chilies, they've always had it. Obviously, it came after 1600. Right? We have totally naturalized it. Now we define Indian cuisine by chilies, something that is just about 400 years old.

Chris Pfeifle 48:59
Right.

Elise Ballard 49:00
So I think the intercontinentality of food is, IS food. And that IS what it is. And that's why it is so important for us to have this discussion with you about ethnicity about what that is and how it manifests in the choices that we make as consumers. And that brings me to what I think might might help us begin to wrap up here and that is, I want to ask some really specific calls to action. At the individual level, at the media level, at the restaurateur level, just some examples of what we can think of and maybe we start with with eaters in general, people who are eating, people are making restaurant selection choices. What should they do? You know what, how can this inform the decisions that get made in that way every day.

Krishnendu Ray 50:03
A complicated question. Like I'm a sociologist, so I tend to think about structural things, which are very difficult to change because they're often not visible to our consciousness. Okay. So I would say the first thing is, in some ways brings this an obvious thing into consciousness, which is, there are all kinds of good and interesting foods and cuisines in the world. Most of us don't know most of it, okay? And bring a curious, a generous attitude towards it, and learn about it just as we were, are we are willing to learn about wine and cheese and, and processed meats from Europe. So in some ways, this becomes naturalized. And what I mean by naturalized is this, I'll give you an example. The way in which a French accent may sound sexy, or maybe an Italian accent sounds sexy today, Italian accents were not considered sexy by the way, until relatively recently. In order for the Turkish accent, Indian accent is not - this is a kind of an aesthetic decision that is deeply embedded in us, we have to outgrow this idea that only some kinds of languages, some kinds of languages about some kinds of foods are cool and sexy and open up our mind towards it. And in this comes with a kind of bringing it into consciousness and be curious about it, I would say, that's probably the first thing. The second thing is not do what is historically, historically considered ethnic. Ethnic, comes from the Greek word ethnos, which means people, you can represent it by language, you can represent it by the way people look, physiognomy, by the dialect, the speech, the religion they have, etc. So that may or may not be a useful category to think about ethnos of people and their foods and their palates is and maybe the second lesson is not to assume the only thing other people contribute - non-european people contribute to our tastes, is spiciness and heat. That is the most idiotic reduction in the world. I eat a lot of Indian food. I rarely eat very spicy Indian food that becomes a peculiarly mutual caricature. Outsiders expect it to be spicy. So producers make it very spicy. And I honestly find most a lot of that kind of Indian food too spicy. I have - My parents cook, my sister in law cooks, my sister in law likes very spicy food, because she has a palette that is from Kerala Malayali talent that is, she loves dried red chilies. She eats dried red chilies to settle her stomach. That is anathema to my mother, from the same household. It's like, begin to make distinctions that are finer than saying well Indian food means spicy, or Vietnamese food, or make it really spicy, which means that is really authentic. That's a ridiculous reduction of - as I said, India has more than 20,000 dialects, 125 mother tongues. So wherever there is a language is a cuisine and if some of them are very spicy, some of them are moderately spicy, a lot of them are not spicy at all. So open up your mind to these other criteria of judgment making in other cuisines, I would say these two things. And maybe the third thing: texture, because we also tend to naturalize texture. And this has happened post I think nouvelle cuisine, and especially kind of the Italian iteration of it, that everything has to be al dente - vegetable, pasta, that's one way of good taste. That's not God given law. A lot of people in the world don't eat things that's al dente. In fact, the Chinese complaint about Western food is the food is too hard. It's not soft enough, okay? So there are a lot of ways of thinking about good taste, and even texture. So from the, from the consumers' point of view to your question, is open up your mind to these possibilities and see how these things are combined in a cuisine, which is not just flavor, but also technique and ingredient and ways of thinking about good taste, and listening and reading and listening to people. What are they talking about? And I think it was Sidney Mintz, the anthropologist, who said he used to classify restaurant food as institutional food. And he said, That's not how people eat and talk about food, okay? He says Americans are not going to have a culinary culture unless they eat and talk about food that is not just restaurant food. That's also food of different kinds of restaurants, different kinds of institutions, different kinds of locations, locations, and social kind of relationships with people - go and visit people, chat with people, eat with them. So I would say these are some of the ways in which the consumer, make it a little more conscious, we have to do it initially, then it becomes habit like avocado became a habit for me but I had to open up my mind first, like wine became a habit for me. But initially, I had to open up my mind and do the classification that was necessary. Learn from people who knew more about it, so that I could enjoy it better.

Elise Ballard 55:39
That's great. How can we convey or extend the understanding of the true cost of food as relates to this conversation?

Krishnendu Ray 55:54
I think it's the two things that we have not talked so far that are absolutely crucial. And that has become very visible in the wake of Black Lives Matter, and the Me Too movement, and also the pandemic, which is the labor that goes into food, the cost of food. If you have just listened to the discussion on the closing of Noma, almost everyone has reacted to the labor question more than almost anything else, which is a good thing, meaning that you have to pay attention to sustainability in that double sense. So the other question is the ecological system, that we just cannot eat these huge hunks of protein, like we used to within kind of - a good conscience, animals, and gotta eat anim - will not stop eating meat or fish, or animal proteins, but smaller portions. And I think in that you have to learn a lot more. Non Euro American people, we're always eating a lot more vegetables, a lot more beans, I personally think even today, at high end restaurants, globally, traveled through France, traveled to Italy, very difficult to get good cooked vegetables, okay? And we should be - we have to be eating. So sustainability in the double sense of labor, in the institution, restaurant, and the produce that's coming in, what kind of food we can afford to eat in the context of climate change, you know? So in that makes a deeper case, in fact, for learning from others, the good tastes of fruits, vegetables, beans, that we are relatively under equipped in the Euro American world.

Elise Ballard 57:48
Yes, that that brings to mind kind of the point of this whole show, The Umami Podcast, which is the study, the exploration of good, clean and fair food to borrow the Slow Food phrase. And I love how you brought around, you know, the conversation about how an exploration of new cuisines is also an opportunity to explore different ways of relating to protein or relating to those more, you know, energy, cost, you know, foods and so, I love I love that concept. And I wonder if you have more to say about how that exploration takes place specifically within a cuisine you don't know well, you know, specifically in something that would be referred to as an ethnic cuisine.

Krishnendu Ray 58:46
Yeah, look at the look at the smart use of protein. Proteins - most animal proteins are used in most cuisines as a flavor, not as a huge hunk on the middle of the plate. And that's what I love when I travel. I find it absurd that airlines don't do more soups and stews, because then it's so easy to keep, so easy to serve, you know

Chris Pfeifle 59:13
It's a great point. You have a great point

Krishnendu Ray 59:13
And they taste better. I don't know why they are trying to make these huge pieces of protein that are overcooked and overheated and sitting there. Instead of borrowing from - everywhere in the world, people know how to use small amounts of protein as a as a really good flavoring agent, and lots of fruits and vegetables and etc. That's Sorry,

Chris Pfeifle 59:37
I was just thinking I think maybe they don't because when you hit turbulence, it's tough to get a nice tomato bisque out of 230 seats. It needs to be become soups.

Krishnendu Ray 59:50
Stews! Let's go to stews.

Chris Pfeifle 59:50
I'll go to stews.

Krishnendu Ray 59:50
Denser stews.

Elise Ballard 59:53
Yes. So let me ask you a couple of just final questions, which is, first of all, what are you reading lately?

Krishnendu Ray 1:00:07
What am I reading? I'm reading too much because I'm teaching a lot. So I'm teaching a class called Theory, which is mostly in fact, a lot of it is anthropological theory. Annemarie Mol, she's anthropologist, from Amsterdam. She wrote a book called Eating in Theory, which is kind of an interesting and a fun read, like most academic reads, it's also kind of can be convoluted, but a lot of fun. So I'm just reading that. I just finished teaching that and then just re-reading. And people should try to read this book by Anna Tsing, T-S-I-N-G, The Mushroom at the End of the World, I'm going to use it to teach next class. So The Mushroom at the End of the World, it's about matsutake, and its global modes of production, and distribution, and how it ends up in Japan, and how it is both a commodity and foraged and also a part of a gift economy. It's absolutely fascinating. And should I keep giving you the list?

Elise Ballard 1:01:25
Yes!

Chris Pfeifle 1:01:27
Outline your curriculum for next semester, please!

Krishnendu Ray 1:01:30
and the Manchester sociologist, Alan Warde, who wrote a book called Practice of Eating, which is about basically this whole question of, and I gestured towards it a little bit, that most of what we do in terms of cooking and eating on an everyday basis, as part of a habituated world, rather than a decision making world. It's not like it is - It's not always available to consciousness. And a lot of neuroscience is also showing that Behavioral Economics and Psychology show in that. So this book brings together the social and the individual, the neuropsychological aspects of cooking, feeding, called The Practice of Eating. I think you're all ready for your audience. That's a good startup list.

Chris Pfeifle 1:02:22
Great start.

Elise Ballard 1:02:23
Sounds great, yeah.

Chris Pfeifle 1:02:23
I have a question. A quick question for you.

Krishnendu Ray 1:02:27
Yeah.

Chris Pfeifle 1:02:27
Has the publishing process - and you're getting used to that - with with your publications has that informed what audience you're trying to target? Or

Krishnendu Ray 1:02:39
Oh, brilliant question.

Chris Pfeifle 1:02:40
I'll stop there, continue

Krishnendu Ray 1:02:43
I would rewrite that whole book. I realized that whole book, if I knew there was a wider audience, it has a much wider - it had a much wider impact. People like [INDISTINCT] and and others have cited it. Tim Carman, he changed the name of his column in the Washington Post, after reading my book, I wish I realized that other people read the book other than other sociologists, and anthropologists. So yes, I'm trying to be a better writer, trying to write for a wider audience, a smart audience that is not necessarily narrowly academic. And I'm hoping more of my writing and is going to look towards an audience that is wider. And partly that is linked to the fact is, this book of mine, which is a very turgid academic read, was so well received in a wider audience that I was shocked by it. I will change a lot of it, if I want to rewrite it.

Chris Pfeifle 1:03:48
Fantastic.

Elise Ballard 1:03:50
Wonderful. Well, I think we will wrap up at by just asking you, where's the best place to find and follow you?

Krishnendu Ray 1:04:00
Ah, depends on the day. Twitter - I'm Raykris1, one of my grad students started it off. And once in a while I post and on Instagram and Facebook, both are closed, because those are the places I think try to think a little more quietly. I don't want to. So I use those places as a way to collect my thoughts about things. Twitter is my most public mediums. I would say that's probably the place to follow me.

Elise Ballard 1:04:32
Thank you. I like asking that question too, because people have philosophies about social media, and I like to hear what those are.

Krishnendu Ray 1:04:39
Yeah, so my kind of my philosophy about social media is you should use it the way you want it to be. So not just snark. Not just self promotion, self promote a lot of other people's workm smart - Other people's thinking. And I agree with you. Social media doesn't have to be snark and and self promotion only. My Twitter is more like that. And that's why I also keep my Facebook and Instagram closed. I want to think about it a little.

Elise Ballard 1:05:12
Mm-hmm. Yes. Makes sense. Okay, Krishnendu, well, I think we've come to a close here. Any parting thoughts?

Krishnendu Ray 1:05:23
No, that's it. Kind of - Thanks for having me. And thanks for giving me an opportunity to talk about it - I had all these notes and we didn't cover anything.

Elise Ballard 1:05:36
Oh, we're gonna have to have another conversation.

Chris Pfeifle 1:05:38
There's a few left on our pages as well.

Krishnendu Ray 1:05:42
Like the new Yelp data and the new Michelin data, but that's good. I can read about it.

Chris Pfeifle 1:05:47
Sure. And also, what's your favorite Deli in New York?

Krishnendu Ray 1:05:52
It's like, I would say in some ways, it is still the Russ & Daughters.

Elise Ballard 1:05:58
Mmm! Oh, mine too. Love it.

Chris Pfeifle 1:06:01
Okay, now we've calibrated. We know you have good taste.

Krishnendu Ray 1:06:04
Yes, yes. Take care

Chris Pfeifle 1:06:07
You take care as well. Thank you

Elise Ballard 1:06:08
Bye

Krishnendu Ray 1:06:08
Buh-bye.