Food for Thought

But with globalization, you see cheap American brands transplanted all over the world.
That's our culinary hegemony, which is undeniable. And it goes both ways. If you notice, there's really no foreign food chain here in the U.S. We even go to great efforts to make our food seem foreign, like the Olive Garden to seem Italian or Outback Steakhouse, straight from Australia [laughs].

Can America's strained relationships with the Axis of Evil—Iran, Iraq and, until recently, North Korea—be explained by what we eat?
Some of the tensions we have with those countries, I'm thinking of North Korea or Burma, can be linked back to food. The people in those countries are starving. The governments basically appropriate all the resources to feed the inner circle of political elites that rule the co­untry. In some sense, their internal food politics is symptomatic of their larger discomfiture with the international community. Look at Burma and the Junta's efforts after the cyclone [that struck in May]. The Iraqi food for oil problem was also illustrative of how a population can be held hostage by the regimes. In some sense, their domestic food issues indicate how a country will interact with the international community.

Let's talk about Iran—can you explain its strained relationship with the U.S. on a culinary level?
It sounds funny, but Iran is our natural ally. When you're talking about food, they love their meat and they love their carbs, just like us. [Laughs] If it weren't for the crazy leadership, Iranians actually share, oddly enough, many of our values. They're very democratically inclined.

The French seem to be the biggest foodies. What does that say about them?
France is a country that invests so much of its capital into food definitions: what is a French baguette? They have all these protocols that brand it. Same thing with appellation of specific grapes. If you call just a regular sparkling wine 'Champagne,' they go nuts. It's a very difficult country to work with because of the way it views itself and in its role in Europe and elsewhere. But the fact that it protests something as silly as the definition of French bread gives an indication of other things they'll defend with equal silliness.

At our root, we're all people. Is there something edible we all have in common? Like, say, vanilla ice cream?
It's a big lie that food brings us together. It divides us. It's funny you mention ice cream. I dated a guy once who would eat soy only ice cream. I decided right then I wasn't going to go out with him again. Almost every culture has defined what is edible, whether an animal can be eaten and how it can be prepared. Judaism and Islam are the obvious examples. Americans are particularly bad about this. We are just so resistant to eating critters that we aren't socialized to.

Can food attitudes in different countries be an indicator of future conflicts or resolution of current ones?
Saying food is predictive might be a bit contrived, but food is one of the symbols that nations employ. When we look at countries and how they think about their food, it tells us what they think is important. It tells us a bit about their history and in some sense, about their future.

© 2008