Posted by Adam Kuban, July 17, 2007 at 5:00 PM
With the priority that the Chinese place on food in their culture, it's a shame that the recent food scares have been tinged with a hint of racism, says Jeff Yang in the Washington Post:
That's troubling, because it reinforces the notion that befouled food is the consequence of a foul culture. Chef and gustatory adventurer Anthony Bourdain may have said it best in a 2006 Salon interview in which he noted that there's "something kind of racist" about culinary xenophobia: "Fear of dirt is often indistinguishable from the fear of unnamed dirty people."
Posted by Lia Bulaong, May 9, 2007 at 12:30 PM
I heard Anthony Bourdain talking about race in the restaurant industry last year, and he said something about standing on the stage at the James Beard Awards and staring into a sea of white faces. I didn't realize how much that wasn't hyperbole until I saw Noah Kalina's crowd photos from the 2007 awards over at Eater; I couldn't find a single non-white face among the attendees in the first crowd close-up. Take a good long look:
See how many people of color you can find, and let's compare notes after the jump.
Continue reading »
Posted by Lia Bulaong, April 5, 2007 at 9:02 AM
Maureen Jenkins of the Chicago Sun-Times wants to know, where are all the black chefs? "In an age where chefs are celebrities and a regular TV gig turns the classically trained and mere personalities alike into culinary rock stars, the shortage of chefs of African descent is noteworthy if only by their striking absence."
Posted by Lia Bulaong, March 20, 2007 at 4:36 PM
Steven Reinberg of the Washington Post reports that two new studies in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine say Americans are eating far less fruits and vegetables than they should. According to a John Hopkins study, 62 percent of participants didn't eat any fruit daily. 25 percent didn't eat any vegetables, and "only 11 percent of U.S. adults meet the guidelines for both fruits and vegetables." Perhaps more troubling, a second study from Queens College compared intakes of vegetables, potassium and calcium from 1971 to 1974 and 1999 to 2002, and found that the diets of blacks has not improved compared to those of whites, numbers "not explained by race differentials in income and education." As one of the researchers said, a serious public health concern because "a diet rich in fruits and vegetables is associated with a lower risk of obesity and certain chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and some cancers."
