Jess Ho says our food industry is Eurocentric, but engagement with diverse foods is getting better

March 12, 2023

ABC RN
By Anna Kelsey-Sugg and Joanna Crothers for Sunday Extra

Jess Ho, food and wine writer and former chef, is sharp as a knife when it comes to expressing what they don't like about the food and hospitality industry.

One example: the restaurateur of "false confidence" who pops over to Indonesia on a cheap flight and returns to Australia to offer an expensive "elevated take on Balinese food".

"Fusion" food is another.

It comes from "a place of a lack of education and the ego of a particular person going, 'if I do this with this cuisine, and fuse it with another cuisine, I will make it better'," Ho tells ABC RN's Sunday Extra.

"For me, I think fusion is quite lazy, and a very colonialist idea."

Ho isn't the only one to call out issues surrounding some of the ways food from diverse cultures is consumed and presented in Australia.

From the lazy to blatantly racist, to respectfully sharing culture, here's how these experts say dining can get it right — and really wrong.

When food engagement is 'superficial'

University of New South Wales food and media expert Sukhmani Khorana has a long-standing academic interest in the cultural politics of food.

She says there's a risk, when dining, of superficially engaging with a culture other than your own.

"I'm not saying that engagements, [for example] with migrant communities, through food are wrong or misplaced," Dr Khorana says.

Rather, she argues that in Australia people who consume cultural cuisines other than their own can do so "unthinkingly" or "superficially".

They might assume, for example, "that they're not racist because they go to Chinatown" to eat.

Or they might seek to "demonstrate solidarity with the local, multicultural community by going to a Lebanese kebab shop".

Truly sharing with and connecting with cultures other than your own doesn't come so easily, Dr Khorana says.

"I think it just needs to be a deeper engagement."

'There are people calling it out'

Dr Khorana describes the food establishment in Australia as "Eurocentric".

For example, she recently saw a post in a popular online publication referring to a samosa as "a new party snack".

Someone from a South Asian community in Australia immediately called it out online, with the correction that the food has existed in their culture for centuries.

"Discovering something from another cuisine and saying, this is something we can incorporate — it does remain a problem, but at least there are people calling it out," she says.

At the other end of the spectrum, she says there are great examples of food experiences that are genuine in their presentation of food from different cultures.

One is the Melbourne social enterprise Tamil Feasts, where asylum seekers who are cooks from the Tamil community share their cuisine and some of their backstory with diners.

"It was only when they got really comfortable with the customers, and a whole range of customers, [that] they started sharing their stories, so it was very gradual … It was kind of an organic way of doing it," Dr Khorana says.

She also points to Sydney's Parliament On King, also a social enterprise run by asylum seekers, and Knafeh Bakery food truck, offering Jerusalem street food, which she considers "instance[s] of a deeper engagement" for food and culture.

All are wildly popular with diners and are signs of improvement in the diverse food landscape, she says.

"I think the days of just catering to the white consumers and not really trying to represent the wide variety that exists in a particular cultural cuisine [are not] completely gone.

"But I think it's not as bad as it used to be."

When restaurants get it right

Ho, who has written about their experience in hospitality in the memoir Raised By Wolves, also argues that European dining structures constrict our sense of what food should be.

French food and dining are still considered "the pinnacle", they say.

Ho recalls studying to qualify as a chef and being taught about various knives required for the preparation of different foods.

"And I'm like, hang on a second. My father and my uncle are incredible Cantonese chefs, and they only use a cleaver for everything. You know, what's to say that they're doing it incorrectly?"

Ho says racism manifests in the industry, both as subtle microaggressions and more blatantly.

It might be "a simple fetishisation of food without understanding it", or the wild popularity of a new restaurant that hasn't involved anyone from the culture represented on the menu.

It's here that Dr Khorana says the most successful restaurants distinguish themselves.

They emerge from a "dialogic process", she says; that is, after thought and discussion about the "very conceptualisation of the restaurant", the menu design, and who the chefs will be and their relationship to the cuisine.

The best restaurants ensure they aren't "dumbing things down too much", perhaps by giving a dish its traditional name on a menu, or by sharing information or history about the food on offer.

I appreciate when a restaurant is putting you in a position where you have to learn more, even if it's just about a certain dish," she says.

Dr Khorana says we shouldn't assume that only someone born into a particular culture can cook its food. It can "fix cultures or essentialise cultures" by suggesting a certain food has always and should always taste one particular way," she says.

"You can be really good at a cuisine and spend decades doing that and be really consultative about it. So that's really important. But I think you have to … acknowledge who it belongs to and not just profit from it.

"There are ways to do it delicately. There are ways to involve people from that culture. There are ways to acknowledge the origins of the cuisine that you're cooking. But it has to be done really delicately and respectfully."