Eating the Vernacular, Being Cosmopolitan

Using a mixed methodology of ethnography in Australia, Vietnam and India, auto-ethnography and textual analysis of Australian migrants' biographies, this article uses the stories of 'insiders' and 'outsiders' to explore the importance of the vernacular, and the implications of authenticity in the maintenance of homely identities and the development of cosmopolitan ones.

nation--state and the world. 3However, this position has been critiqued as 'rootless' (unable or unwilling to engage with the location in which one mostly exists, where one might hope to do the most 'cosmopolitan good'), and proponents such as Hannerz have been accused of being 'deracinated intellectuals' and elitists. 4Many of these critics maintain that although cosmopolitanism and nationalism may be antithetical because of the exclusive imaginary inherent in nationalist discourse, more local (or 'hyperlocal') attachments can work to undermine nationalist belonging by creating 'a critical space of local care across difference.' 5 Contemporary theories bridge what Clifford describes as 'discrepant' cosmopolitanisms, most maintaining that cosmopolitans may retain local, particularised and even nationalist identities and attachments. 6Some, such as Pnina Werbner, deliberately rescue the conceptual framework from elitist discourse-Werbner grounds her analysis in the phrase 'demotic cosmopolitanism'. 7Beck claims 'there is no cosmopolitanism without localism', 8 rejecting entirely the earlier elitist distinctions made by Hannerz between the cosmopolitans and the locals, where cosmopolitanism was painted as essentially the 'class consciousness of the frequent traveller' (or the domain of the white, male, middle class). 9ck has generated a significant oeuvre on cosmopolitanism, in which he argues that it is a process of 'internal globalisation' that creates what he calls 'cosmopolitanisation', the third of five stages in the social sciences' treatment of globalisation. 10 Beck argues that nationalist thinking presupposes a monologic imagination, whereas cosmopolitan thinking is dialogic.That is, the cosmopolitan perspective is 'an imagination of alternative ways of life and rationalities, which include the otherness of the other'; it is 'thinking and living in terms of inclusive opposition'.11 According to Beck, the contributions in Cosmopolitanism in Practice introduce a 'fifth phase, namely the question of what does cosmopolitanism in practice mean'.
He and other contributors to that volume attempt to move beyond merely 'prescriptive' or 'descriptive' concepts of cosmopolitanism, to 'illustrate some of the ways in which cosmopolitanism can be used as an analytical tool to explain certain identity outlooks and ethico--political practices that are discernible in a variety of social and institutional settings.' 12It is this fifth stage to which culinary cosmopolitanism belongs: identifying cultural and cosmopolitan identities and practices through everyday engagements with multicultural foodways.
To understand everyday engagements with multicultural foodways, I use the term vernacular foodways-a set of social, economic and cultural practices around the production and consumption of food that are normatively distinctive to an ethnocultural group.For example, the vernacular foodways of Vietnam include distinctive dishes such as phở, bun cha, and Bún bò Huế, a reliance on rice and noodles as staples, an abundance of fresh greens, and cooking conducted predominantly over an open flame, quite often charcoal-ovens are rare in Vietnam.
As everywhere, there are distinctive patterns of consumption, which include regular snacks of street food, typically a family meal at home each evening and, for those not living in multi--generational households, extended family meals are still common on the weekend.Further details of the implements used in procuring, preparing and consuming meals all contribute to Vietnamese vernacular foodways, just as syntax, grammar, vocabulary and accent contribute to vernacular language. 13rnacular foodways are a part of one's habitus, and deep knowledge of them is a cornerstone of 'insider' status.As Donna Gabbaccia has written, 'Eating habits both symbolize and mark the boundaries of cultures'. 14Transnational migrants, faced with a new country and quite often a dearth of familiar ingredients and tools, may go to some lengths to maintain their vernacular foodways in an attempt to mitigate the disruption to habitus.However, in order to successfully settle identities without the normal sociocultural trappings, they may also 'tactically' seize opportunities for creative substitutions. 15ose who may be 'outsiders' who seek to understand Others' vernacular foodways may insist upon replicating dishes precisely as an 'insider' has taught them, or they may take liberties, and hybridise new cuisines. 16Their 'outsider' status may shift, and they may inhabit the liminal spaces of those who are 'in--between', such as so many transnational migrants who lose a sense of themselves both as outsiders and as insiders.The core of cosmopolitanism rests in these liminal crossings, the reflexivity that comes with losing certainty of what exactly is an insider or an outsider.
In my own experience as a transnational migrant (acknowledging that I have been part of the majority ethnic group in both countries) I have felt strong attachments to both the place I left and that in which I settled ('America' to 'Australia', or more specifically, the west coast of north America to Melbourne, and yet after nineteen years neither country claims me fully.I am forever an 'outsider' in both countries now, although I feel passionately that I am in fact a reflexive insider to both).Hybridity is perhaps at the heart of the cosmopolitan ideal, to be open to and willing to engage with the Other, and importantly, to know one's own Otherness keenly. 17thenticity is mobilised in the establishment of insider/outsider status, yet what is 'authentic' to an insider may very well taste different to the outsider, and what is at stake will surely differ.Conceptions of 'authenticity' will always be site-specific, contextual and contingent.It is worth quoting Appadurai at length on culinary authenticity: Authenticity measures the degree to which something is more or less what it ought to be.It is thus a norm of some sort.But is it an immanent norm, emerging somehow from the cuisine itself?Or is it an external norm, reflecting some imposed gastronomic standard?If it is an immanent norm, who is its authoritative voice: The professional cook?The average consumer?The gourmand?The housewife?If it is an imposed norm, who is its privileged voice: the connoisseur of exotic food?The tourist?The ordinary participants in a neighboring cuisine?The cultivated eater from a distant one? 18guing about whether there is any such thing as authenticity isn't central to this project.Rather, understanding what it means to those seeking or producing 'it' is my motivation for interrogating the concept in relation to food.In my experience, it is common for Melburnians to express pride in living in a cosmopolitan city, a melding of cultures where people from all over the globe are living 'togetherness--in-difference', particularly in the food scene. 19Yet there is an obvious tension between the (potential) symbolic violence of insisting on the performance of authentic identity and the associated very real desire to be challenged and stimulated with a multiplicity of ideas, flavours and ways that is at the heart of cosmopolitanism.As I have written elsewhere, at the heart of this is a desire for fluency in many vernaculars and to know the world's many ways of 'being--in--the--world', which also has the consequence of distinguishing one as possessing a great deal of cultural capital within most fields. 20ing a mixed methodology of ethnography and auto--ethnography in Australia, Vietnam and India, and textual analysis of Australian migrants' autobiographies, this article explores the stories of 'insiders' and 'outsiders' to show the importance of vernacular foodways and culinary cosmopolitanism-and the implications of authenticity-in the maintenance of vernacular identities and the development of cosmopolitan ones.While auto--ethnography is a significant part of my methodology, this research relies heavily on ethnographic work with Vietnamese and Italian Australians and autobiographical accounts of non--Anglo Australians to decentre what is too often an Anglocentric analysis of cosmopolitanism in Australia.

-INSIDERS OUTSIDE
My first job as a recently arrived Anglo--American migrant to Australia in 1992 was as a waitress in a bistro in Geelong, a provincial city an hour from Melbourne.On the menu, I was delighted to note, were burritos, a food Americans claim as our own.While having my tour of the kitchen, I asked the chef how she made her burritos, to which she replied, 'I use large roti bread, fill it with pieces of chicken I've fried with some onion, roll it up, and pour béarnaise sauce over the top.Then I serve it with salad on the side.'My response, withheld until I had consumed said 'burritos' at the end of my shift, was that 'this tastes quite nice, but it's definitely not a burrito'.
Appadurai argues: 'quality is typically the insider's concern, authenticity that of the culinary tourist.We often admit that there is food that, though inauthentic, is good.' 21However, Appadurai acknowledges that authenticity becomes the concern of insiders 'when they (and the food) are far from home'.He goes on: 'The concern with authenticity indicates some sort of doubt, and this sort of doubt is rarely part of the discourse of an undisturbed culinary tradition.' 22ere were (and are) many versions of burritos in America, but my core notions of authenticity (which, as per Appadurai's point, only surfaced after migration) involved the basics of meat, beans, cheese, salads, guacamole and sour cream wrapped in flour tortillas and eaten with your hands.My early days in Australia included a constant search for this 'real' burrito, something which evades me to this day.In my narrative, it is the story of the migrant who unreflexively believes there is an 'authentic' essence to a dish from one's original culture (even if it's a transplant in the first place).
Writing about migrant tendencies to self--essentialise, Tariq Modood observes, 'when non--Chinese speak of Chinese civilization, their starting point is often that it has coherence, sameness over centuries and a reified quality', and further argues that sometimes 'insiders' speak of their own cultures this way. 23In my initial searches for an 'authentic' burrito, I didn't clearly articulate for myself or others what that item might really be like if I found it, but I knew that I would know it when I did.In twenty years in Australia I have never found 'it', but still enjoy 'homely' burritos on every return trip to the United States.And in Australia, I no longer pine for taquerías, Ranch dressing, or the flavour of American milk; I have accepted beetroot, prefer Australian bacon and adore Vegemite and lamb.
It is a well--rehearsed lament of the new migrant that they are unable to find key dishes or ingredients like those from 'home'.Often there are unsatisfactory encounters with the dishes in question, and one will seek out restaurants run by 'real Mexicans/Vietnamese/Italians/[insert migrant group]' in hopes that they have been 'true' to the cuisine and can offer cultural succour and fulfil nostalgic desires by matching taste to memory. 24When this fails, if one is resourceful, one may attempt to cook the foods at home, even if they were foods that traditionally were only eaten 'out' back home, such as Vietnamese phở, or for which key ingredients were always purchased ready made, such as the ubiquitous locally made tortillas in California.
In Green Papaya, Lien Yeomans' recipe--filled autobiography of how she 'seduced Australia with food', she tells of arriving in Australia on a Colombo Scholarship in 1962, before there were established Vietnamese communities in Australia.Her story begins aghast at the Anglo--Australian diet of the time: I sat red--eyed looking at a lifeless bowl of corn flakes and pieces of cold toast, thinking of crowded warm Saigon with its bowls of piping hot noodle soup and the Vietnamese sounds and aromas.Tears fell into my corn flakes. 25ter her initial shock and profound homesickness, Yeomans begins to make sense of the foods available in Australia at the time.Initially, she writes that she couldn't bear any more rice pudding offered by her elderly landlady, and desperately opted to buy meat pies instead. 26Soon, however, she begins cooking for her landlady, and transforms the vegetables 'invariably overcooked in boiling salted water' and served with 'meat, fish or poultry' into 'green--bean stir--fry, fried rice with peas, plain omelette and stir--fried chips'. 27As she grows more confident with the English language and the Australian tradition of barbecues with her classmates, she claims she even comes 'to appreciate burnt chops and sausages with tomato sauce and cold beer'. 28Yeomans' recipe for stir--fried chips is prefaced with this explanation: 'Our Friday night treat was fish and chips, and if there were any leftover chips, I would cook this simple stir--fry the next day.' 29 In her hybridisation of a classic Anglo Australian meal, Yeomans displays her comfort with her own increasing cosmopolitanism, much like the Shun Wah family as interpreted by Jean Duruz: the Shun Wahs (presumably with pleasure, and without guilt) appropriate Saunders' chips for their own invested cosmopolitanism and sense of being Australian.The 'toong Chips!' becomes a family joke, a disruptive 'eating back' into the culinary imagination of the dominant culture, as well as a refusal to ingest romanticised inscriptions of identity. 30omans' descriptions continue of a young woman who eagerly absorbs as much as possible of a new world, yet who steadily finds ways to introduce Vietnamese dishes to her teachers and other students.Her story manifests de Certeau's 'tactics', where a tactic lacks spatial control, and rather 'depends on time': it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized 'on the wing'.Whatever it wins, it does not keep.It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into 'opportunities'.' 31ter discovering Chinatown, where she was able to find some familiar dried foods, and substituting 'ordinary mint' for the abundance of fresh herbs she would have used in Saigon, Yeomans sets out to make phở, the dish 'which every expatriate Vietnamese craves', though Yeomans acknowledges that in Vietnam it is rarely made in the home. 32Like my attempts to make tortillas, the need to create the most homely of tastes overcomes issues of prior cooking experience or access to all the 'right' ingredients in the new country.Luce Giard extends the point about tactics of creating opportunities in the second volume of The Practice of Everyday Life, when she claims that 'entering into the vocation of cooking and manipulating ordinary things make one use intelligence, a subtle intelligence full of nuances and strokes of genius, a light and lively intelligence that can be perceived without exhibiting itself, in short, a very ordinary intelligence. 33is idea of the 'ordinary intelligence' mobilised in everyday situations, but embodied in particular ways while 'doing--cooking' offers a compelling frame for migrant stories of homemaking. 34In conducting her research for Eating Between the Lines: Food and Equality in Australia, Rebecca Huntley found many examples of gender inequality in and around the kitchen, as well as home cooks' anxieties about feeding families healthy and affordable meals. 35However, she also found a great deal of agency in women's 'doing--cooking', such as among the women present at a migrant and refugee lunch in the Melbourne suburb of Preston.The lunch brought together women from Sierra Leone, Iraq, Liberia, Turkey, Macedonia, Greece and the Sudan as well as Australia, and the chosen cuisine for this third of nine such lunches was West African.Throughout the book, Huntley expresses resistance to the nostalgic lens that can elide the drudgery of quotidian kitchen work, but she leaves the lunch with this conclusion: It was a tiring experience, but a ... satisfying one.It had sparked a small but significant conversation between the different women around the table.
Food was a conduit, a means of establishing real and potentially transformative relationships between women who had the capacity to share more than just recipes. 36gathering such as the migrant and refugee lunch, with its focus on sharing food, has obvious homely intimations, but is also still a public performance between strangers.Judith Butler's theory of gender identity as performative-that is, that identities are constructed through performance rather than an expression of an 'authentic' core-offers a useful lens for this and other such feasts. 37In performing their vernacular identities for themselves and each other as well as for an Anglo Australian audience, the participants are able to maintain their sense of ethnic identity in a newly adopted country.Yet their very presence in Melbourne engaging in quotidian cross--cultural exchanges signifies their positions as cosmopolitan subjects as well.Each of the women at the gathering with Huntley is able to be educated in an aspect of distinctive cultural foodways, thus accruing more cosmopolitan knowledge while also performing their identities as cosmopolitan subjects.The interactions over the course of the afternoon, the sharing of foods and 'doing--cooking' together, create the kinds of 'cultural permeability and vulnerability which, in [Duruz'] view, is a necessary condition for living together--in--difference': 38 the everyday work in kitchens remains a way of unifying matter and memory, life and tenderness, the present moment and the abolished past, invention and necessity, imagination and tradition-tastes, smells, colours, flavors, shapes, consistencies, actions, gestures, movements, people and things, heat, savourings, spices, and condiments.Good cooks are never sad or idle-they work at fashioning the world... 39 Migrants like me, Yeomans and other competent cooks are examples of relatively successful migrants-those who have 'settled' (hybrid) identities and who have escaped the lingering melancholy, or the moment when nostalgia turns into a sort of pathological homesickness. 40Through everyday creative and resourceful substitutions in 'doing--cooking', we attempt to maintain our old vernaculars while carving niches for ourselves in new ones, and develop new culinary creoles.And it is such everyday engagements with vernacular foodways which are maintained by migrant communities that enables what Beck calls 'cosmopolitanisation'. 41ch of the examples outlined here offers insight into the ways that migrants 're--enact ethnicity and culture' in the preparation and consumption of 'traditional' foods. 42As Krishnendu Ray says in The Migrant's Table : Meals and Memories in Bengali-American Households: 'Cooking is never just about nutrition.Bengalis have loaded the process of cooking and eating with meanings about "meals", kinship, family, and communion.' 43Ghassan Hage has made similar points about what he calls 'home--building': in order to 'be at home' in old or new homelands, one needs the 'affective building blocks' of 'security', 'familiarity', 'community' and a 'sense of possibility'. 44He argues that nostalgia is a 'settlement strategy' that is part of 'a mode of feeling at home where one is in the present' or attempting to 'promote the feeling of being there here'. 45Maintaining vernacular foodways, then, is just one of many such affective building blocks of home--building.

-OUTSIDERS INSIDE
What about the case of the outsider who seeks insider/expert knowledge and/or demands authenticity of the Other's cuisine?The 'culinary traveller' as Lisa Heldke calls them (or us)-is someone 'who moves into a cultural location other than one's own, either temporarily or more long term'. 46She includes travellers overseas, domestically, or even just to 'ethnic' restaurants in one's own town.Jennie Germann Molz, writing about culinary tourism in local Thai restaurants, argues that: by participating in a food system, the culinary tourist is expressing and reinforcing his or her own identity while exploring the identity of the other that is represented by that food system ... As Lucy Long suggests, while culinary tourism is 'the intentional, exploratory participation in the foodways of an Other', it often results in 'teaching[ing] us more about ourselves than about the Other'. 47ldke and Molz speak almost exclusively of white culinary travellers, common to many in the global north writing on culinary tourism. 48This article seeks a greater inclusivity and Melbourne offers a rich and diverse field for the inquiry, though that was not always the case.
In Australia, many years of the White Australia policy were followed by explicit policy development embracing multiculturalism, 49 which led to the now common discourse of celebrating and protecting diversity in our cities. 50It seems difficult to imagine that as recently as the 1950s: An official of the Department of Immigration became quite officially indignant at the suggestion that New Australians might be introducing their food habits into Australia: 'That's not the idea at all,' he said.'What we want is for these migrants to become absorbed into the Australian community, not to bring their own habits with them.' 51 Now, however, Australia has not only broadly accepted its multiculturalism, which is protected and promoted in explicit government policy, it publicly celebrates it, and nowhere more than in the culinary realm.The current Lonely Planet entry for Melbourne informs travellers: 'Sophisticated and slick, edgy and rough, Melbourne's physical and cultural landscape is shaped by a dynamic population, ever--ravenous for a bite of global culture.The result is Australia's most accessible multiculturalism.' 52 But what exactly are we accessing, and who are 'we'?Food Safari is a program aired on the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), 'Australia's multicultural and multilingual broadcaster', a hybrid--funded public station. 53The program offers a fascinating 'insider' glimpse into Australia's diverse culinary cultures, showcasing 'authentic' migrants in the quotidian practices of shopping, cooking and eating.There are occasional accounts that reflect migrants' unsatisfactory early experiences with Australian foodways, such as the French chef who exclaims that until he came to Australia, he had never seen 'square bread', and how happy he is now that he can buy 'real' French bread. 54 we voyeuristically tour Australia's diverse culinary cultures, host Maeve O'Meara repeatedly reminds us how 'lucky' Australia is to have such foods, and how 'we' have adopted many of them as 'our own.'In the Malaysian episode, the audience is told that 'if there's one dish Australians love, it's laksa'.Regarding phở, O'Meara says that this 'beautiful soup' is found 'across Vietnam and now "mercifully" in Australia'.'Spaghetti bolognese is almost our national dish' and 'there's a real noodle culture in Japan that's luckily spreading to Australia.' 55 Much of the show seems to evince what Hage calls 'cosmo--multiculturalism', which he claims 'has more to do with the market of foreign flavours than with the market of "foreigners"'. 56While such a criticism may be overly harsh, and the intentions of the show are clearly 'pro-multiculturalism', O'Meara's repetition of 'how lucky we are' discursively positions Anglo--Australian culture in the centre (mainstream) and in need of 'spicing up' by 'them'.It's pro--multiculturalism, but is it cosmopolitanism?Moving away from television--mediated voyeurism to material interactions, how does the 'outsider seeking insider knowledge', or what Duruz has called 'identity grazing' manifest? 57While attending a conference in Kolkata in the Indian state of Bengal in 2006, I spent time with a diverse group of Indian academics.Many of them told me independently about Kolkata's fantastic Chinese food, and how there is 'more authentic Hakka food' in Kolkata than you will find in China today.The conference dinner was held at an upscale Chinese restaurant and the Kolkatan hosts expressly pointed out the markers they read of its authenticity, from the dishes and chopsticks to the bok choy in a thickened sauce with garlic.It seemed important to the group that we eat an authentic representation of Hakka food, and equally important that one could discourse on it at some length. 58ll and Valentine argue that cosmopolitanism 'involves the cultivating of "globalised cultural capital" as a form of lifestyle shopping which, crucially, involves possessing considerable knowledge about the "exotic", "the authentic"… [It is] often referred to as a colonialism … of popular culture'. 59I, as an equally self--conscious cosmopolitan subject, was rather predictably seeking Bengali cuisine in my short time there, and found this foray into Chinese to be an unwelcome distraction from my own culinary tourism-and the food to be very similar to that I could easily access in Melbourne. 60However, the Indians present were adamant that Bengali food was 'dull', and that we were much better to select from the cosmopolitan offerings in Kolkata.I recount this event primarily to contest the common claim that only 'white' people find their own culture in need of spice.As bell hooks has famously argued, 'within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream culture'. 61ving from commercial dining rooms to homely kitchens, one sees that to become 'expert' in cooking the vernacular cuisines of Others, the home cook must learn a new language, become fluent in the Others' vernacular foodways and, in doing so, contribute to the many instances of ethnic boundary crossing that make up a cosmopolitan society.While the maintenance of ethnic identity performed by insiders who import, grow and cook foods from their countries of origin maintains a vernacular, those who experiment and deepen their knowledge of cuisines outside their own heritage, ergo fostering the exchanges that are so crucial to a cosmopolitanism, are essential to the cosmopolitan imperative to openness and willingness to engage with the Other.A critical point here is that it requires both the sometimes intense parochialism of the insider maintaining their vernacular foodways (while also performing a 'banal' cosmopolitan subjectivity simply by virtue of their status as a transnational migrant) and the cosmopolitan 'identity grazing' of the various outsiders.
In these crossings, the outsiders who are 'imagining how to eat into the borders of ethnicity' will inevitably also hybridise, or creolise, the foods at their disposal in 'doing--cooking'. 62And while there is the potential to read hybridity as the new homogeneity that results from the increased flows of global capital, we could alternatively write this as a cosmopolitan narrative, whereby fluency in many vernaculars and the flexibility to use the most appropriate ingredients in both predictable and innovative ways helps break down fears of difference.This is the reflexivity which can result from a disrupted habitus in a multicultural society.culinary traditions, just as accruing knowledge in any area can provide a great sense of agency.Knowing to ask Peruvians and Chilenos about which of them really invented pisco sour, or Australians and New Zealanders about the origins of pavlova, is one form of demonstrating cultural capital, usually more readily available to those with the economic capital to have travelled to the countries in question. 66e deepest level of knowledge requires close engagement with the ingredients, cooking and serving methods, and appropriate utensils, as well as social customs around eating the dish.Quite often, to be able to speak to these questions, one must have spent a great deal of time in the region in question, or at least within the associated migrant community.Here it gets even more problematic than knowing the dishes, of course.Not only are dishes not fixed in time, most are by their very nature flexible and adaptable to local ingredients, climate, and the region's primary flavours.Insiders will typically be more flexible about this in their hometown or when at home in a new country.But try to give them the dish away from either of these homely environments and they can be the most scathing critics of the 'authenticity' of the dish, as discussed previously.Alyssa, a second--generation Vietnamese Australian, described how on the rare occasion her family went to Vietnamese restaurants growing up in Wollongong, New South Wales, they would spend most of their time criticising everything from spring rolls ('they're obviously Chinese if they serve them with sweet chilli sauce rather than nuoc mam') to soups ('the seasoning is just wrong'). 67etnamese scholar Hữu Ngọc's articles about his search for 'authentic' phở while travelling overseas offer some insight into the competing discourses of cosmopolitanism and self--essentialism.He writes: Alas, in San Francisco, Frankfurt, Paris, Tokyo … patrons of phở serving stalls and restaurants are only tasting imitations.The real phở can only be eaten in Vietnam, more precisely north Vietnam (phở Bac: phở in the North), more precisely still, in Hanoi.The food is rightly called Hanoi soup. 68 his insistence that there is a 'real' phở, Huu Ngoc is asserting a parochial allegiance in defiance of the homogenising tendencies of global modernity, and in other articles he writes at length about the effects, both positive and negative, of what he considers the interchangeable terms of Westernisation or modernisation.
However, he is also more simply exhibiting a strong sense of belonging to place, specifically Hanoi, the widely--recognised distinctive 'home' of phở, after the disorienting effects of international travel.
In a chapter on Turkish identities in Europe, Kevin Robins writes at length about cultural reactions to Westernisation, 'involving the reassertion of origins and traditions': There was a reversion to the language of 'authenticity', which, like other forms of essentialism, postulates a cultural identity that is 'self--identical, essentially in continuity over time, and positing itself in essential distinction from other historical subjects'.Adonis describes it in terms of regression towards a 'foetal relationship' to the traditional past. 69bins goes on to argue that the 'dualist logic' whereby the only choices are the impossible retreat to origins or the 'assimilation of an alien modernity' must be dismantled, and creative alternatives found.The cosmopolitan project offers some possibilities that need be neither essentialist nor Western/modern assimilationist, yet there is always a danger in cosmopolitanism of precisely these two trajectories.
Outsiders who are not seeking a taste of home, but rather a taste of the imagined exotic or a memory of some travel or residence away from home, require authenticity for different reasons.Does the quest for authenticity essentialise the Other-is it merely a manifestation of the conquering spirit of modernity?It is undeniably essentialist to hold a fixed notion of what is authentic about another culture or dish.As Modood asserts, 'a culture is made through change; it is not defined by an essence which exists apart from change, a noumenon hidden behind the altering configurations of phenomena.' 70Appadurai advocates a complete disavowal of applying the word 'authenticity' to cuisine, calling it 'spurious'. 71hn Dewey's experiential learning theory is fundamental in understandings of learning as socially constructed, and prior experiences as shaping the way events or objects are subsequently experienced. 72Lisa Heldke argues that Dewey's experiential model affords us an opportunity to reflect upon the 'conversation' between the 'dish itself (via its creator) … [and] the contributions of the experiences of the experiencer (the eater)'. 73'The culinary traveller will taste the dish differently from the diner who has grown up eating it.'Heldke uses this notion of authenticity in which the transaction between dish and eater is understood to be contextual and contingent.Reading authenticity in this way seems a sensitive and sympathetic way to understand the ideological work which often underpins demands for authenticity, be it parochial, celebratory, colonising or something else. -CONCLUSION In a focus group with four Vietnamese women in Saigon, aged twenty--three to thirty--eight years, I closed with two questions, the first being: 'When is a dish required to follow certain rules to be authentic?'All agreed that the traditional dishes such as phở, banh xeo or bun bo hue had to use traditional ingredients.
(Which, of course, are contested in different regions of Vietnam, but the region of origin is usually allowed to trump the others.)It makes sense that dishes that achieved distinction should be required to maintain it by use of much the same ingredients, otherwise I suppose these dishes must become something else, which may be tasty but not what they profess to be.
My second question of the two in the Saigon focus group who had travelled overseas was: 'How do you judge if something is "not authentic Vietnamese" when overseas?' Their answers varied from the 'broth being wrong' or 'missing vital ingredients' such as the correct vegetables or herbs, to a final judgement which I think most succinctly highlights the instability of authenticity as a category, when one of them said, 'maybe [if it has] no MSG.'So the important question is not whether it's possible to determine whether something is authentic, but what does the search for authenticity mean to different people: insiders, outsiders and those in--between?And what one finds upon probing is that it is indeed a useful concept by which people assert and maintain ethnic identities that allow them to settle their homely identities in new lands.It is a means to achieve social distinction and a way to engage with Otherness as a cosmopolitan principle.It is a way for migrants to strategically mobilise their own ethnic identities in order to accrue economic capital from the outsiders who seek it, and an essentialist assertion that can exclude those perceived to be 'authentic' from the project of modernity.Ultimately, however, discourses of authenticity will always be disrupted by individual 'tactics' at settling both vernacular and cosmopolitan identities, as well as by 'conversations' between dishes and diners, feeders and eaters.