THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 79

I was watching a short documentary called “Taste of The Tenement” about the Tenement Museum in NYC & specifically the recipes that are part of that project. There is so much attention given to the food culture of minority groups it was very difficult to figure out what my cultural food, what the real food culture of nativised Americans is. There are a few distinctly European & British isles recipes that were handed down through the generations that we ate but the real thing that defines my cuisine is Bay Area Hippie food culture in the 70s. I credit this as the origin of the low rebirth of American food that has been happening since before I was born. You have Alice Waters & her Chez Pannise as ground zero & things have exploded outward from there. Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, California, in 1971. With an emphasis on high quality ingredients that lead to a network of growers & sellers of organic food & eventually food education programs in thousands of schools. There was also an emphasis on thinking about your food or being present in food production in the work of Edward Espé Brown who combined Zen Buddhism with the growing food culture & started the vegetarian Restaurant Greens in San Francisco (also make sure to check out his Tassajara Bread Book, 1970). So my culinary story is really heavily defined by the 70s & the food culture that grew out of the Hippie adjacent world. This grounding is distinctly multicultural, part of the reason I find the idea of cultural ownership as being such a problem. Everything I was raised around emphasized that it’s good to pick & choose & mix things. If pressed the food “I own” is maybe peanut butter sandwiches, bologna sandwiches, burgers, fried chicken. If you pay attention to what makes up the food of different people they all have variations on the same themes just with the different ingredients available in their region. Everyone has a sausage, a meatball, a dumpling, a flatbread, etc. It is fine & good to be proud of having made it through the isolation & hard work of being an immigrant, but the end product is to be absorbed into the mass, that’s the way this country works.