Dubious Gastronomy

Dogmeat, California roll, Chinese take-out, monosodium glutamate, mass-produced kimchi, the canned-meat product SPAMthese are examples of what Robert Ji-Song Ku calls dubious Asian foods. Each of these foods are not only strongly associated with Asian and Asian American gastronomy but are commonly understood as bad, depraved, or ersatz Asian food.Dubious Gastronomy: The Cultural Politics of Eating Asian in the USAcontends that dubious Asian food shares a spiritual fellowship with Asian people in the United States in that the Asian presence, be it culinary or corporeal, is often considered watered-down, counterfeit, or debased manifestations of the real thing. In other words, American expression of Asianness is defined as doubly inauthenticas insufficiently Asian and unreliably American when measured against a largely ideological if not entirely political standard of so-called real or authentic Asia and America. By exploring the other side of what is imaginatively understood as authentic Asian gastronomy, Ku suggests that Asian cultural expressions taking place in places such as Los Angeles, Honolulu, New York City, and even Baton Rouge, are no less critical to understanding the meaning of Asian foodand, by extension, peoplethan the culinary expressions that took place in Asia, say, Tokyo, Seoul, or Shanghai, centuries ago. In critically considering the impure, unclean, hybridized, and debased with seriousand at times whimsicalintent, Dubious Gastronomy argues that the notion of culinary authenticity is not only troubled, troubling, and troublesome, but that the apocryphal is not necessary a bad thing. Rather, as each of the culinary examples of this book illustrates, the dubious can be and is often quite delicious.