Gastronomic Globalization
Leave a CommentBy Austin Shiner
BEIJING, China, 3:16 p.m. — Culinary variety indicates globalization. It makes sense: restauranteurship is a good option for immigrants adjusting to a new culture yet striving to maintain their own. American cuisine is both bolstered and battered by our melting-pot society (although melting-pot is hardly an appropriate metaphor — it suggests homogeneity, which is misleading. We’re more of a casserole, stratified into distinct layers which, working together, create something better than any single layer can offer. If this seems like an idealized culinary simplification, it is: food always irons out the creases).
China: is it globalized? The Olympics say yes, as Beijing hosts one of humanity’s greatest showings of international cooperation, starting tomorrow. Business says yes, as gleaming office buildings grow like weeds from China’s fertile entrepreneurial ground. Language says yes, as school children learn English and the expatriate population grows every day. Yet food says no.