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India's Favourite Foods Through The White Lens by Saiesha Suri
To my Naani’s (grandmother) surprise in 2015, lay the ‘chai-tea’ latte on the Starbucks menu board in central London in all its glory. With orders calling out for iced chai-tea lattes with oat milk and dairy-free whipped cream, my Naani let out a chuckle; she ordered an americano, I ordered a frappuccino, they mispronounced our names at collection, and we left Starbucks—nothing I hadn’t seen before.
In 2020, the popular American food magazine ‘Bon Appétit’ publicly apologized for their ‘cultural appropriation, Eurocentric viewpoints and tokenization of BIPOC staff.’ Announcing an ‘editorial mission’ to amplify BIPOC narratives and authentify recipes, the brand’s apology came only after discriminatory posts about non-white food surfaced with serious calls for accountability. Hannah Beech’s description of a rambutan in Thailand in a New York Times article is reminiscent of ‘coronavirus’, while durian ‘stinks of death’ and dragon fruit is ‘bland mush’. It is no secret that Asian foods, amongst others incongruent to the Eurocentric status quo are exoticized, repulsed and horrified. Why then, does the West continue to document ‘weird’ food experiences when travelling to India, Thailand and China?