[content notes: racism, classism, ableism and discussion thereof.]
niqaeli:
torayot:
misschaos13:
hillarybuckholtz:
A japanese ice-cream vending machine! with crazy flavors such as purple sweet potato, almond jelly, pudding, lavender, and “full maturity melon.”
I kind of want to try these now x3
bet people wouldn’t be describing the ice cream flavours as ~crazy~ if they were a) named in French and b) served in a French restaurant all dainty-do and mango coulis
BECAUSE THEN IT WOULD BE ~*~*AVANT GARDE MODERN CUISINE~*~* blobviously
To be honest, some people would. It’d be a completely different thing, though, because it would be mostly completely different people who would be calling it crazy: it wouldn’t be ‘oh, those crazy Japanese, lol, isn’t this amazing’, it’d be more like ‘those crazy gourmet nuts, who the fuck eats ice cream like that?’ Which would make it’d be more of a class/artisan tension thing. And of course it would still a race thing, because the reason it would be reading as a class/artisan thing is because reframing it and renaming it as something that gets read as ‘white people food’ DOES mean people react differently.
Long story short: exoticising foods from other countries is skeezy and is a thing you are doing when you go ‘so many crazy flavors!’ at things like. Normalising food because it came from a background that is, well, white is also skeezy and is also a thing people do.
(Seriously, I’m at the point where I want to punch people over stuff like this all the time and it’s not even aggression in my direction since I’m, um, just a white chick who likes a lot of foods and is just fucking tired of hearing about how ~wacky~ some of them are.)
Not to mention there’s all the ableist aspects of referring to food one finds odd as “crazy,” “wacky,” etc — not just weird, puzzling or gross but mentally disturbed.
As a mixed race, third culture kid who grew up with a lot of foods that Westerners (esp. white ones) consider wacky/crazy/gross, and who didn’t grow up with many foods that Westerners consider perfectly normal, I get really frustrated with this mindset. Like, people will make this giant production about how bizarre or gross it is to eat durian, say, or tofu — then turn around and happily chow down on chili cheese fries or whatever. I promise, it’s just as weird if you didn’t grow up with it! (Possibly even weirder, given the possible conflicts with religious dietary restrictions and so on.)
I’m aware there are regional Western foods that are subject to a certain amount of confusion or ridicule from other Westerners as well — haggis, poutine, etc. — but I only rarely encounter the same kind of prurient vehemence in those discussions as I see in ones about non-Western foods. (And when they do there’s usually some kind of classism, nationalism or other kind of -ism at play, anyway.)
