Is this a Poe?
I feel as if it’s 1996 and we’re living the Sokal Hoax all over again.
The NY Times reports, apparently without shrieks of laughter, on a conference on – wait for it – queer food.
When Sasha DuBose uses the word “queer” to talk about food, it’s a verb, not an adjective. To Ms. DuBose, queering food is “taking how we define food and how we engage with it and twisting it, making it more fun.”
But food people already do that. It’s called coming up with new recipes.
Besides which, there is no one way that people “engage with” food. There are a vast, unmanageable number of ways people engage with food. Oddly enough, humans are very interested in food – I think it might possibly be because we need it to survive. People have been “queering” food as long as they’ve been eating it. In a famine people will eat absolutely anything, out of desperation.
To her, queer food is also okra.
“They way you slice into okra and it’s crunchy and ooshy-gushy — a lot of people think it’s weird,” said Ms. DuBose, a nonbinary transgender lesbian who will soon graduate from the food studies program at New York University. “But okra is queer.”
Ok first of all, what the fuck is a nonbinary transgender lesbian? Pick one, child. It’s just greedy to pick all of them and you’ll end up puking on your queer shoes.
But then, oh shut up. Unfamiliar foods are unfamiliar; what else is new?
Queer food can be so many things, depending who’s cooking, eating or serving. During the conference, queer food was defined as meals made by queer chefs and home cooks. But it was also far broader, almost without boundaries. It was the pie thrown in the face of the anti-gay rights activist Anita Bryant, the gastro-narratives of queer people in El Paso, Texas, and the food served at “topless lesbian gatherings,” as one panelist described it.
Oooh almost without boundaries – are you excited yet? Does it remind you of that time you and all your friends got drunk at summer camp? Wasn’t that hilarious?
“Queer food defies categorization, and that’s its beauty,” said Megan J. Elias, who organized the conference with Alex D. Ketchum, an assistant professor at the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at McGill University in Montreal.
Ms. DuBose and Ms. Elias were among the some 160 food scholars, writers, students and industry professionals who last weekend paid $45 apiece to gather online and in classrooms and a cookbook library at Boston University for the inaugural Queer Food Conference. The mostly Millennial and Gen Z attendees considered food (pie, seaweed), food culture (potlucks, cookbooks) and food spaces (a co-op, clambakes) through queer, Marxist, feminist and anti-colonialist perspectives.
Meaning what? That they talked about food for a weekend. How very novel.
The goal of the event was to reclaim histories and imagine futures, not of a cuisine — queer food has no set taste profiles or geographic origins — but of food that “challenges binaries and any kind of normativity,” said Ms. Elias…
Yes! Down with normativity! Any kind of normativity! It’s perfectly fine to put ground glass in the tajine you’re preparing for your guests!
Despite the academic language, it wasn’t all brainy abstractions.
It wasn’t brainy anything. Pretentious, yes, but brainy, no. Trend-sucking of the worst kind.
Mx. Barbosa, who’s getting a master’s degree in gastronomy from Boston University, also brought along a “sleazy wine cake,” made with Marsala and coconut, and a pecan buttercrunch — recipes from the zine that they tested and ate with a friend who was recovering from top surgery.
And that’s what makes it queer food! The fact that someone who got a double mastectomy for no medical reason ate some it makes it queer food!
This may be the stupidest thing the NY Times has ever published.
The first thing that came to mind after reading this post:
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1988/11/15
Hahahahaha
This reminds me of the single most important lesson I learned in wrapping my head around Critical Theory, its progeny, and its progenitors in Marx and Hegel: they actually mean what they say. They aren’t being hyperbolic. They aren’t being figurative. They actually mean what they say.
When the Queer Theorists say that their project challenges “any kind of normativity”, they actually mean that it challenges any kind of normativity. Every sort of norm, every rule, every tradition, every definition, every ethics. It’s all not just up to be reevaluated critically, it’s all meant to be challenged Critically. It’s all to be queered and complicated, to meet with its opposite and create a synthesis in the ongoing Dialectic. It’s a universal solvent for every facet of civilization.
They really do mean precisely what they say.
I am growing weary of the knee jerk scornful rejection of critical theory, sneering at any challenges to normativity (especially hetero-), and queering.
Well, fuck all of you. For tomorrow’s dinner this hetero cis inheritor of settler colonialism is going to grill a nice thick steak to medium-rare, and queer it with a lavernder-infused honey glaze and nasturtium blossoms. With okra on the side.
He lost me at “ooshy-gooshy”. What kind of adult talks like that?
My favorite Calvin and Hobbes food strip: https://biblioklept.org/2013/03/19/to-be-or-not-to-be-calvin-and-hobbes/
I’m queering a venison tenderloin right now with a
marqueerinade of yogurt, black raspberry, and powdered chocolate habanero from my garden. (I ran out of Queerolina Reapers, you see.) The yogurt breaks down the cellular normativities really well, even better than traditional, Eurocentric colonialist olive oil-based methods.Aaaah, Calvin and Hobbes, along with Fawlty Towers, two great observations of the La condition humaine who both burned bright and exited stage right while at the top of their game.
As a child of the 50s where the English meat and three veg were traditional, I first experienced queer food when I encountered pizza and pasta. But you cannot possibly imagine just how much queerer my food became when I married into a Lithuanian family with their non binary fusion of traditional Lithuanian cuisine with Polish, German, and a touch of Russian. What they did with potatoes was stunning and brave and their use of pork was exceptionally queer, both in aroma and flavour.
Cepelinai. Kugelis. Grybukai. The food even has a queer language, all of its own to exclude those Lietuvaphobes.
I fed my family some braised oxtail today, nothing queer about it… though are all the wubbly bits queer? Some people find them queer. They’re full of collagen and good for your joints and skin. Is that queer? Or only queer if you’re American, but not queer if you’re Asian or Hispanic, maybe? My daughter said “Why don’t they serve this at my school?” and I did not say “It’s too queer,” but I might have said something synonymous.
…
I figure “queer cuisine” probably just means sticking sausage everywhere it doesn’t belong.
Down with the cellular normativities! Up with the queer Lithuanian potatoes!
When I hear that someone is “queering food” I figure they’re making it inedible or lethal; burning it to a crisp, or leaving it raw and bloody. After all, that’s what’s being done to with else being “queered.” It’s nihilism with blue hair, facial piercings, and a pathetically desperate need to be more special than anyone.
These people do not understand frames of reference. One person’s normatively is another’s queer and exotic. Their queer and exotic is my meat and potatoes. As for a food binary, WTF? Indian, not Indian? Italian, not Italian? Breaking the binary is what… fusion cuisine? Which we’ve been doing forever.
I love all your responses.
@Rob #13: quite so. Seems we’re back to “queer” just meaning “weird”, I guess. Cool,* then.
(*obviously there are some lesbian women and gay men who have something to say about this… but they’re not weird enough to listen to? Or something.)
It’s such a shame that we end up (deservedly) mocking this conference and its performative participants, because this kind of conference could really have a lot of value and spark a lot of worthwhile research. So many interesting (to me) questions were raised just reading Ophelia’s post….
Good point that unfamiliarity is in the eye (or on the tongue) of the beholder. A friend of mine who used to be in the Foreign Service used to say that she always made sure she had ‘American breakfast’ because she couldn’t summon up the required cultural resilience first thing in the morning. And I remember when travelling with Americans in Japan nothing could strike fear into their hearts more than the phrase ‘Japanese breakfast’. And many of us have had the experience of staying in hotels or B&Bs in other countries when confronted (pleasantly or otherwise) with that country’s version of breakfast. Why might breakfast be a particularly challenging meal for individuals to welcome change?
How do we react, individually and collectively, to the introduction of new foods? Does it matter where that new food comes from? We know fish and chips was imported to England by Jews – but it was tasty, healthy and convenient, so did its provenance matter? How did Chinese food gain such rapid and (as far as I’m aware) uncritical acceptance in Britain? (Or did it? I have no idea of this history.) I like to joke that the first popular ‘immigrant food’ in Britain was spag bol, introduced by the Romans – we do know from our potted histories that the Romans brought many new foods to Britain, but how were they actually assimilated among the British? (I’m sure others know that; I personally have no idea.) How did we manage to go from olive oil only being sold in the chemists (yes an older friend told me that) to the relatively vibrant food culture we have now? Health claims, British experience of food abroad, mocking by other countries?
Individually, what are the differences in how we approach new foods, and to what extent is this affected by the food itself, the situation in which we encounter it, and our own experience and personalities? How is it different when babies, children, adolescents and adults are exposed to new foods? Is it the case, paradoxically, that adolescents (who are going through many new life experiences) are more reluctant to try new foods than adults? It seems to be, but I have no actual evidence for this. What’s the effect on new-food-trying of health claims? (I’ve certainly tried lots of new food on the basis that it’s supposed to be good for me.) Do we try new foods to appear worldly and cosmopolitan, to keep up with our peers, to have a new experience, out of genuine interest and curiosity?
Anyway – I’m finding this subject/set of topics fascinating and will go think about them more. But the word ‘queer’ won’t come into it.
Oh and what about those ’70s recipes in the glossy magazines, that we now look at in horror? Why were they hip and cool and interesting then and weird and disgusting now? How is it that even within a specific culture (leaving aside eating insects or chicken feet or whatever) some foods are yummy and others are gross, to different subcultures and at different historical periods (and not particularly widely separated ones)?
I do wonder what the overlap is between the people who wibble on about challenging any kind of normativity, and the people who wibble on about cultural appropriation. My gut tells me it’s significant. This is somewhat ironic. My gut also tells me that the people who occupy that overlap have little to no sense of that irony.
I’ve not yet been to Japan, but some of the nice hotels in Rio serve Japanese breakfast. It’s queer, but I quite like it. Miso soup, rice, and a bit of fish, if I recall. Is that what it is in Japan? Suitable breakfast, with both protein and savory flavors.
Considering that Brazilian breakfast is basically fruit and cake, it was better for me to have the Japanese. I’d choose that over Continental breakfast (pastries and milky coffee), German breakfast (poor-quality ham and cheese with some stale bread)… hey, maybe it means I’m queer.
And how does one get to be a non-binary Ms.? They really don’t think these things through, do they? Also, I noticed they haven’t mentioned trans-fats: a tad too self-mocking for a lot of the men-who-identify, perhaps?
Personally, I engage food with a full frontal assault with my main force, whilst my cutlery sneaks up and performs a flanking attack. Thusly encircled, the food is forced into the Event Horizon – what I call my wide open gob – where each portion of food suffers defeat in detail.
…
In other words, ‘queering’ food has no meaning. Any word that whose meaning has no limits has no meaning.
Like so many things stolen by the TQ, okra is black. Not “queer.” Not “exotic:” Black, as in actually African. It’s an important ingredient in several Southern African-American cuisines. To pick it up and diddle with it in the name of “Oooh look what I found!” is not only silly, it’s racist.
Fusion food has had a long, varied, and deliciously wonderful history (some examples that come to mind are pasta and tomatoes in Italy, and potatoes in Eastern Europe). It has been recently deprecated as “cultural appropriation”, so now I wonder if it’s ok to culturally appropriate if it’s done under the auspices of “queering”.
@guest #15 – Last I read fish&chips predates the Sephardic Jews in Britain: https://forward.com/forverts-in-english/551553/no-british-fish-and-chips-is-not-a-jewish-invention/
Laurel, I was wondering how okra came to be ‘queer’. To me it’s just food, since it was a staple in our house growing up. It’s one of the few things my mother could cook properly, and only then when she left the stewed tomatoes in the can and let the okra stand in its own, naked glory.
It’s sort of racist, classist, etc, isn’t it, to assume that one culture’s food, or even all other culture’s food, is ‘queer’?
Sorry I came late to this party, but isn’t the call to challenge all sorts of normativity, itself normative?
One may need a side dish of Zen philosophy to go with this meal.
First thing I thought of was Lady Gaga’s infamous Meat Dress, which she wore more than a dozen years ago. What prescience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_dress_of_Lady_Gaga
I’d rather wear Carmen Miranda’s headdress.
Anyone else remember that series Heston Blumenthal did recreating food from times past in the UK? I recall an episode where he recreated elements from a Tudor (?) banquet from known recipes. This was the height of food fit for a king, and yet to modern pallets was practically inedible, certainly so strange as to be distasteful. Turns out the Tudor monarchy and nobility were all queer!
They sort of take this on by envisioning themselves as taking part in something like an eternal revolution. [crazy]Or at least eternal until society is perfected by the never ending Dialectic spiral, the end of which is the End of History. Effectively, the process itself constitutes a form of ongoing challenge, as they expect to create a new synthesis from every meeting of thesis and antithesis.[/crazy]
That’s one version. Another might be [crazy]to conceive of normativities as being intrinsically linked to power, such that only the dominant can be normative. That which is marginalized by hegemonic systems can never truly be normative. Therefore, the Queer imperative qua normativity cannot be challenged until it supplants the white cisheteronormative regime.[/crazy]
This entire post is worth it for that single line.
The topic of the conference immediately brought this to mind; I imagine it qualifies. Warning provided for the the more tender of stomach. I recall reading a blog post from him years ago where he said he didn’t warn guests in his home about what he was serving up.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/5830947
What? All queer food is okra? Where do these people learn to write?
I cannot help but think that given a common name for okra is ‘ladies’ fingers’, its selection as the example was somewhat symbolic – or am I crediting them with a depth of thought they don’t possess?