AP English Language — Mixed Skills I — Drill 2

The following text is adapted from a modern personal essay on food writing and cultural translation. My mother made dosas on Sunday mornings in a kitchen that smelled of fermented batter and coconut oil, and when I try to describe this to people who did not grow up in a South Indian household, I find myself immediately translating — crêpe-like, savory, crispy at the edges — as if the dosa needs a passport to enter the conversation. What I have come to understand is that this translation is not neutral. Every time I reach for the familiar to explain the unfamiliar, I am doing something to the unfamiliar. I am making it smaller. The food writing that shaped me was written almost entirely by people who did not grow up eating what I grew up eating. The canon of American food writing — from M.F.K. Fisher to Ruth Reichl to the waves of farm-to-table journalism that followed — centers a particular palate: European in its lineage, anxious about authenticity, and deeply comfortable with the premise that certain foods are universal and others require explanation. When I read about 'exotic' ingredients or 'adventurous' flavor profiles, I know which direction the adventure is running in. The word authentic is the one that troubles me most in discussions of immigrant food. It is used, almost always, by people who are not from the culture in question, to describe a restaurant or dish that conforms to their expectations of what that culture should taste like. Authentic Thai food. Authentic Mexican. What these phrases often mean, on close inspection, is food that signals foreignness without being too foreign — that performs cultural identity for a comfortable outside observer. The immigrant family cooking for themselves, making substitutions because the right chile is unavailable, adjusting spice levels for aging parents, mixing cuisines because that is what their actual lives contain — this family is rarely described as authentic. What food can do — what it does, actually, constantly, without being asked — is hold memory and transmit it. The dosa is not a crêpe. It is a Sunday morning, a particular light through a particular window, a mother's hands moving with the confidence of ten thousand repetitions. When I reach for the translation, I am not being hospitable. I am being efficient. And efficiency, in the transmission of culture, is a kind of loss. I am not arguing that food writing should become inaccessible or that explanation is always a betrayal. I am arguing that the direction of translation matters — that a food culture deserves to be understood on its own terms before it is explained in someone else's. And I am arguing that the assumption of a universal palate, against which all others are measured as exotic or adventurous or authentic, is an assumption worth naming and examining, even — especially — by those of us who have spent years making our food legible to it.