‘There is a view that authenticity in food is to be venerated above all other things. In other words – is the dish, the way it’s produced, true to its roots? People travel the world in pursuit of the truest version of a dish, and mark themselves highly for having strived for authenticity rather than settling for what they regard as some strange facsimile, which doesn’t match up to what the real thing should be.
‘My problem with this is two-fold. Firstly, authentic is not the same as good. Anybody who has eaten Cantonese chicken feet will be in no doubt that they are a genuine part of the local culinary repertoire, but – unless they have a particular taste for long-cooked collagen – I’d be very surprised if they called them good. They are a rather unpleasant eating experience, which isn’t surprising because most of these authentic peasant dishes are born out of poverty. You only eat the chicken feet if you are so poor that you can’t afford to throw anything away.
‘The second point is this imagined view that dishes are somehow hewn from the earth and born where they’re found, where in truth almost every dish has been invented at one point or another. The classic examples are the great standards of the French peasant repertoire, the likes of coq au vin and cassoulet, which are held up as markers of how French agricultural labourers liked to eat in the 18th and 19th centuries. But the reality is that – like peasantry all over the world – they were living on a meager diet of hard grains, probably millet, and those great, sexy dishes that we hold up as cornerstones of French classicism were actually invented by a bunch of cosmopolitan chefs in Paris. And every one of these authentic dishes has a creation myth, a superhero origin story. Ramen had to be invented by someone, so did nigiri sushi. We associate sushi with the very heart of Japanese culture but it didn’t exist more than 150 years ago. So just how authentic is it?
‘Jonathan Gold, the great food critic of the Los Angeles Times, told me that you’ll fnd more old-school Korean restaurants in the Little Korea area of Los Angeles than you will in downtown Seoul. That’s because in Korea they are looking to the future, whereas in LA the expatriate community is remembering through food.