white people judging whether a Chinese restaurant is “authentic”

Victoria and I were eating at a Chinese restaurant yesterday, and I overheard 3 white people having a conversation the table behind me; one person asked “is this an authentic Chinese restaurant?” and another replied “yeah this is pretty authentic.”

I was about to engage them to tell them that they don’t get to decide what is or isn’t authentic, even if they spent a few days in Asia or are “food critics,” and give a brief history of white supremacy in food, but Victoria was hungry and told me “just mind your own business” and decided to let it go.

If you study the history of food, white folks with institutional power have consistently been like “hey make stuff that isn’t so ‘foreign’ and appeals to our limited palettes or else…” Given this history, seeing 3 white folks surmise on “authenticity” is insulting, no matter their knowledge level of food history. There’s violence and murder of Chinese-Americans involved in this history too, so how cuisines of different ethnicities originated and evolved in the US is fraught with stories of survival and adaptation in a sea of white supremacist racism and xenophobia. I don’t think anyone, including Asians from Asia or Asian-Americans, should be criticizing any ethnically Chinese owned Chinese restaurant for being “inauthentic,” (see my discussion of Marcus in Always Be My Maybe, especially the discussion in #3 where I elaborated on how “authenticity” often means “cheap” and “unoriginal”) but it makes it significantly worse when white…