May 24 2022, 01:03 PM, updated 4y ago
QUOTE
Stop Calling It Asian Salad
Excuse me, waiter, but there’s a race in my greens
By Perry Santanachote
May 20, 2022
I’m generally not the kind of person who puts much thought into something like a salad, and it took a long time for me to even notice Asian salad—all of my life, actually. Then a few years ago it tagged along with me to a friend’s potluck. It was my husband who, at the last minute, bought the salad from a nearby grocery store as the dish that we would contribute as a couple. “I just picked up some Asian salad,” he said. Having not seen said salad, I asked him what made it Asian. “Not mayonnaise,” he said with a shrug.
What came out of the box was a cabbage and lettuce salad with flecks of carrot, scallions, and almond slivers, underseasoned with soy sauce and sesame oil. Over the course of the party, at least three others asked the same question: What makes an Asian salad Asian? We joked about it, but the truth is, this salad hit a nerve. It felt weird being cowed by cold, soggy vegetables, but the longer I sat with it, the more pissed I became. There was something going on here. So I reached out to culinary historians, chefs, food writers, and artists to help me unpack what might be wrong with the Asian salad.
What Is Asian Salad and Where Did It Come From?
Asian salad is usually an American-style green salad (sometimes it’s a cabbage slaw) topped with fried wontons or chow mein noodles, sometimes canned mandarin oranges and chicken, too. The dressing is often a vinaigrette with some combination of sesame oil, soy sauce, and ginger or plum sauce.
Asian American dishes such as these are often inventions of Asian immigrant entrepreneurs, as an attempt to figure out what Americans like to eat, adapt, and build a bridge, says Krishnendu Ray, PhD, an associate professor of food studies at New York University and author of “The Ethnic Restaurateur” (at Amazon). And at the end of the 20th century, Americans wanted salads.
“Recipes for generalized Chinese or Asian salads were popular up until the 1930s, a few decades after the very Americanized chop suey craze,” says KC Hysmith, social media manager at the Museum of Food and Drink and a PhD candidate in food history at the University of North Carolina. “Then with the change in immigration laws in the 1960s, another wave of Asian ingredients took over American foodways.”
In the 1960s, the Chinese chicken salad caught on, likely because of Madame Wu’s Garden in Santa Monica, a trendy Chinese restaurant that added the salad to the menu per Cary Grant’s request. Over the decades, the salad—or renditions of it—popped up at various restaurants, but the salad exploded in popularity when Wolfgang Puck created a version for his fusion restaurant Chinois on Main in the ’80s.
Still, Chinese chicken salad had nothing on “Asian salad,” a term that appeared in mainstream media in the ‘80s. Mentions of it increased by about 400 percent within two decades. The Asian salad is now on the menu of countless fast-casual and fast-food restaurants, in the salad sections of grocery stores, and featured on food blogs galore. And it’s no longer enterprising Asian Americans at the helm.
When and why did the Chinese in the name get swapped out for Asian? When it comes to hybridized American food, the pattern has always been for cookbook authors, restaurant owners, and recipe writers to keep upping the stakes, says Ken Albala, PhD, a food historian and professor at the University of the Pacific in California. “I think that the needle kept having to move into new territories every time a new cuisine was so-called discovered by the West and those ingredients would get incorporated.” For example, when people started adding miso, yuzu, lemongrass, or (ugh) peanut butter to the salads, they were no longer tied to specifically Chinese flavors. And today, even the classic Chinese chicken salad is called Asian salad.
The Problem With Asian Salad
To be clear, this isn’t about the other capital A word: Authenticity. The Asian salad has never claimed to be a dish from any place in Asia. Dishes can be inspired and fused together, nothing is truly ever authentic, and I grew up eating and enjoying diasporic cooking. It’s the Asian descriptor that irks me.
“These elements from Asian cuisine are sort of pulled out of context and put into this pedestrian salad,” says Miranda Brown, PhD, professor of Chinese studies at the University of Michigan. “But the main problem here is they’re taking a racial label and adding it to the food, which just doesn’t mix well with where we are as a country right now.”
“Asian salad is my biggest pet peeve in American food media, food blogs, and restaurant menus,” says Pailin Chongchitnant, chef and creator of Hot Thai Kitchen and author of “Demystifying Thai Cuisine with Authentic Recipes to Make at Home” (at Amazon and Walmart). “To me, it represents how Asian people have been treated in North America—as a monolith, as walking stereotypes, and without respect.”
While growing up in California, Jenn de la Vega, a caterer and author of “Showdown Comfort Food, Chili & BBQ: Bold Flavors from Wild Cooking Contests” (at Amazon and Walmart), always found it strange to see bags of Asian salad mix at the grocery stores. “I remember seeing fried wontons and chow mein noodles appearing with teriyaki style dressings,” she says. “A real confusion of cultures; none of them Filipino.”
What the 'Asian' in Asian Salad Means
“I don’t think that the Asian in ‘Asian salad’ is intended to be pejorative, but rather, Asian food is kind of fetishized in a lot of ways,” says Brown. And in this case, what people mean when they say Asian in America is really that it’s Chinese. “Part of the American understanding of Asian food, what it should look like and taste like, is very much conditioned by the Chinese-American diner and takeout. Dealing with this specter makes it hard for other Asian cuisines to get a foothold into the United States.”
South Asians, for instance, still need to constantly remind people in America that they’re Asians, too, whereas in the U.K. the presumption is that Asian means Indian.
“When you’re calling something Asian, what are you really saying?” asks Preeti Mistry, chef and co-author of “Juhu Beach Club Cookbook” (at Amazon). “Calling something Asian doesn’t describe anything and it requires a lot of assumptions because most people would be surprised if they ordered an Asian salad and got something that was full of Indian spices or Filipino flavors, even though those cultures are in Asia. It’s collapsing so many diverse cultures into one word.”
These Minor Feelings: It’s a Generational Thing
In the book, “Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning” (at Amazon), the author Cathy Park Hong gets at the existential core of what being constantly gaslit by the mainstream public can do to a person. The experiences aren’t new. But speaking up about them kind of is. The number of Asian Americans born and raised in the U.S. is larger than ever but many of us grew up constantly pounded by microaggressions that we were supposed to just quietly take. But we’re all grown up now, and some of us are kind of pissed.
“Immigrant generations are generally not all that incensed with questions of misappropriation but their children tend to be quite sensitive about it,” says Ray. “Partly because they grew up here and many of them were bullied and ostracized about their weird lunches at school and now all that weird stuff has become very trendy and sexy.”
It’s true. When I asked my parents, who opened Thai restaurants in the ‘80s and ‘90s, what they thought, they told me they never thought about it; that they were too busy working and appeasing white customers to make money to send me and my sisters to college so we could disappoint them with our liberal arts degrees and earn the privilege to think such thoughts and make our own money writing about them.
Fair enough, Mom and Dad, thank you, and I love you, but also, like, a little “OK Boomer,” amirite? The demographics of this country have changed. Millennials are the largest generation in the U.S. and the most diverse group of adults this country’s seen. (Gen Z will be even more so.) Before we know it, half of this country will be majority not-white and Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial group among them. So, if restaurant groups and grocery chains are marketing and naming things for the benefit of the consumer, they’re excluding a huge chunk of people. And I’m not the only one with Asian salad under my skin.
In 2017, Bonnie Tsui wrote an op-ed in The New York Times asking the same question: “Why Is Asian Salad Still on the Menu?” the comment section of which is like gaslighting on steroids. But we’re not going to stop talking about this.
“Asian salad as a concept highlights the potentially harmful ways people can digest cultures different from their own,” says Divya Gadangi, a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist. “They’re experiencing something flattened and distorted expressly for their consumption, and a lot of the time it’s for some white dude’s gain.”
“The Asian salad aimed to appease the white gaze,” says Gadangi. “And is now being wielded by mostly non-Asians, if not exclusively non-Asians, to what? Celebrate Asian flavors? Bring underrepresented foods to the forefront? Hardly, because who is celebrating the culture? Who is at the forefront? Who gets to decide what the ingredients are? It was never meant to be representative.”
Brown says that so much of Asian American identity revolves around food and grappling with feelings around how it gets appropriated, disrespected, and misrepresented can get tricky.
Growing up in Staten Island, Gadangi says, she’d wish to see more of herself in the prominently white culture. “The shallowness and commodity-ness of what we get says to us, ‘Well, we still don’t actually like you, let’s get that straight. But we’ll eat your food.’”
Food for Thought: Renaming the Asian Salad
If you haven’t caught on by now, this article isn’t really about salad, it’s about words and how they matter.
“In the grand scheme of things, what we call an Asian salad doesn’t rise to the level of serious concern like anti-Asian hate crime in the era of Covid, but it’s a mainstream insensitivity that we could do away with,” says Brown.
“When I first saw packages of Asian salad mix, I thought of returning them to the manufacturer with red ink like a teacher,” says de la Vega. “Nice try, guys. Redo this."
And no, Asian-inspired isn’t any better. That’s just lazy. We can do better.
Like maybe just using straightforward language:
“If I could change the culture, I would prefer to name it by the ingredients,” says Linda Shiue, MD, a chef and author of “Spicebox Kitchen: Eat Well and Be Healthy with Globally Inspired, Vegetable-Forward Recipes” (at Amazon). “Let’s say, a napa cabbage salad with mandarin oranges and a sesame-soy dressing. It tells you what you’re getting and it actually sounds more appetizing. Your palate starts to get excited about those flavors.”
Or come up with your own name without leaning on tired tropes like “Emperor’s salad” or “Enlightened salad.”
“When we first opened Tao Yuan in Maine 10 years ago, I put Asian slaw on my menu,” says Cara Stadler, chef and co-owner of Bao Bao Dumpling House, Tao Yuan, and Zao Ze Cafe and Market in Portland, Maine. “I thought it would appeal to the community. There are too many cultures smashed together in our slaw for me to say it’s Chinese but calling it Asian was so nonspecific and didn’t really add any value. Eventually we had to ask ourselves, ’Why do we still have this on our menu?’” Stadler says she and her mom, who’s also her business partner, changed it to the Eighty Ate Slaw, based on the name of their restaurant group. There was no uproar, no confusion about what the slaw was, she says, and the dish remained widely popular.
But you don’t need to be a restaurant owner or recipe writer or food executive to push for these changes. The claim is that this is what consumers want. Kindly tell them that you’re smarter than that.
In the Eater article, “Why Do Fast-Casual Restaurants Get a Pass on Appropriation?” the author Jenny Dorsey, chef and founder of nonprofit think tank Studio ATAO, implores readers to “scrutinize these brands, whose reach permeates our lives on the daily, whose executives (inaccurately) treat America as though they are as white as they are, whose menus and messaging influence the next wave of restaurateurs and food entrepreneurs.”
Excuse me, waiter, but there’s a race in my greens
By Perry Santanachote
May 20, 2022
I’m generally not the kind of person who puts much thought into something like a salad, and it took a long time for me to even notice Asian salad—all of my life, actually. Then a few years ago it tagged along with me to a friend’s potluck. It was my husband who, at the last minute, bought the salad from a nearby grocery store as the dish that we would contribute as a couple. “I just picked up some Asian salad,” he said. Having not seen said salad, I asked him what made it Asian. “Not mayonnaise,” he said with a shrug.
What came out of the box was a cabbage and lettuce salad with flecks of carrot, scallions, and almond slivers, underseasoned with soy sauce and sesame oil. Over the course of the party, at least three others asked the same question: What makes an Asian salad Asian? We joked about it, but the truth is, this salad hit a nerve. It felt weird being cowed by cold, soggy vegetables, but the longer I sat with it, the more pissed I became. There was something going on here. So I reached out to culinary historians, chefs, food writers, and artists to help me unpack what might be wrong with the Asian salad.
What Is Asian Salad and Where Did It Come From?
Asian salad is usually an American-style green salad (sometimes it’s a cabbage slaw) topped with fried wontons or chow mein noodles, sometimes canned mandarin oranges and chicken, too. The dressing is often a vinaigrette with some combination of sesame oil, soy sauce, and ginger or plum sauce.
Asian American dishes such as these are often inventions of Asian immigrant entrepreneurs, as an attempt to figure out what Americans like to eat, adapt, and build a bridge, says Krishnendu Ray, PhD, an associate professor of food studies at New York University and author of “The Ethnic Restaurateur” (at Amazon). And at the end of the 20th century, Americans wanted salads.
“Recipes for generalized Chinese or Asian salads were popular up until the 1930s, a few decades after the very Americanized chop suey craze,” says KC Hysmith, social media manager at the Museum of Food and Drink and a PhD candidate in food history at the University of North Carolina. “Then with the change in immigration laws in the 1960s, another wave of Asian ingredients took over American foodways.”
In the 1960s, the Chinese chicken salad caught on, likely because of Madame Wu’s Garden in Santa Monica, a trendy Chinese restaurant that added the salad to the menu per Cary Grant’s request. Over the decades, the salad—or renditions of it—popped up at various restaurants, but the salad exploded in popularity when Wolfgang Puck created a version for his fusion restaurant Chinois on Main in the ’80s.
Still, Chinese chicken salad had nothing on “Asian salad,” a term that appeared in mainstream media in the ‘80s. Mentions of it increased by about 400 percent within two decades. The Asian salad is now on the menu of countless fast-casual and fast-food restaurants, in the salad sections of grocery stores, and featured on food blogs galore. And it’s no longer enterprising Asian Americans at the helm.
When and why did the Chinese in the name get swapped out for Asian? When it comes to hybridized American food, the pattern has always been for cookbook authors, restaurant owners, and recipe writers to keep upping the stakes, says Ken Albala, PhD, a food historian and professor at the University of the Pacific in California. “I think that the needle kept having to move into new territories every time a new cuisine was so-called discovered by the West and those ingredients would get incorporated.” For example, when people started adding miso, yuzu, lemongrass, or (ugh) peanut butter to the salads, they were no longer tied to specifically Chinese flavors. And today, even the classic Chinese chicken salad is called Asian salad.
The Problem With Asian Salad
To be clear, this isn’t about the other capital A word: Authenticity. The Asian salad has never claimed to be a dish from any place in Asia. Dishes can be inspired and fused together, nothing is truly ever authentic, and I grew up eating and enjoying diasporic cooking. It’s the Asian descriptor that irks me.
“These elements from Asian cuisine are sort of pulled out of context and put into this pedestrian salad,” says Miranda Brown, PhD, professor of Chinese studies at the University of Michigan. “But the main problem here is they’re taking a racial label and adding it to the food, which just doesn’t mix well with where we are as a country right now.”
“Asian salad is my biggest pet peeve in American food media, food blogs, and restaurant menus,” says Pailin Chongchitnant, chef and creator of Hot Thai Kitchen and author of “Demystifying Thai Cuisine with Authentic Recipes to Make at Home” (at Amazon and Walmart). “To me, it represents how Asian people have been treated in North America—as a monolith, as walking stereotypes, and without respect.”
While growing up in California, Jenn de la Vega, a caterer and author of “Showdown Comfort Food, Chili & BBQ: Bold Flavors from Wild Cooking Contests” (at Amazon and Walmart), always found it strange to see bags of Asian salad mix at the grocery stores. “I remember seeing fried wontons and chow mein noodles appearing with teriyaki style dressings,” she says. “A real confusion of cultures; none of them Filipino.”
What the 'Asian' in Asian Salad Means
“I don’t think that the Asian in ‘Asian salad’ is intended to be pejorative, but rather, Asian food is kind of fetishized in a lot of ways,” says Brown. And in this case, what people mean when they say Asian in America is really that it’s Chinese. “Part of the American understanding of Asian food, what it should look like and taste like, is very much conditioned by the Chinese-American diner and takeout. Dealing with this specter makes it hard for other Asian cuisines to get a foothold into the United States.”
South Asians, for instance, still need to constantly remind people in America that they’re Asians, too, whereas in the U.K. the presumption is that Asian means Indian.
“When you’re calling something Asian, what are you really saying?” asks Preeti Mistry, chef and co-author of “Juhu Beach Club Cookbook” (at Amazon). “Calling something Asian doesn’t describe anything and it requires a lot of assumptions because most people would be surprised if they ordered an Asian salad and got something that was full of Indian spices or Filipino flavors, even though those cultures are in Asia. It’s collapsing so many diverse cultures into one word.”
These Minor Feelings: It’s a Generational Thing
In the book, “Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning” (at Amazon), the author Cathy Park Hong gets at the existential core of what being constantly gaslit by the mainstream public can do to a person. The experiences aren’t new. But speaking up about them kind of is. The number of Asian Americans born and raised in the U.S. is larger than ever but many of us grew up constantly pounded by microaggressions that we were supposed to just quietly take. But we’re all grown up now, and some of us are kind of pissed.
“Immigrant generations are generally not all that incensed with questions of misappropriation but their children tend to be quite sensitive about it,” says Ray. “Partly because they grew up here and many of them were bullied and ostracized about their weird lunches at school and now all that weird stuff has become very trendy and sexy.”
It’s true. When I asked my parents, who opened Thai restaurants in the ‘80s and ‘90s, what they thought, they told me they never thought about it; that they were too busy working and appeasing white customers to make money to send me and my sisters to college so we could disappoint them with our liberal arts degrees and earn the privilege to think such thoughts and make our own money writing about them.
Fair enough, Mom and Dad, thank you, and I love you, but also, like, a little “OK Boomer,” amirite? The demographics of this country have changed. Millennials are the largest generation in the U.S. and the most diverse group of adults this country’s seen. (Gen Z will be even more so.) Before we know it, half of this country will be majority not-white and Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial group among them. So, if restaurant groups and grocery chains are marketing and naming things for the benefit of the consumer, they’re excluding a huge chunk of people. And I’m not the only one with Asian salad under my skin.
In 2017, Bonnie Tsui wrote an op-ed in The New York Times asking the same question: “Why Is Asian Salad Still on the Menu?” the comment section of which is like gaslighting on steroids. But we’re not going to stop talking about this.
“Asian salad as a concept highlights the potentially harmful ways people can digest cultures different from their own,” says Divya Gadangi, a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist. “They’re experiencing something flattened and distorted expressly for their consumption, and a lot of the time it’s for some white dude’s gain.”
“The Asian salad aimed to appease the white gaze,” says Gadangi. “And is now being wielded by mostly non-Asians, if not exclusively non-Asians, to what? Celebrate Asian flavors? Bring underrepresented foods to the forefront? Hardly, because who is celebrating the culture? Who is at the forefront? Who gets to decide what the ingredients are? It was never meant to be representative.”
Brown says that so much of Asian American identity revolves around food and grappling with feelings around how it gets appropriated, disrespected, and misrepresented can get tricky.
Growing up in Staten Island, Gadangi says, she’d wish to see more of herself in the prominently white culture. “The shallowness and commodity-ness of what we get says to us, ‘Well, we still don’t actually like you, let’s get that straight. But we’ll eat your food.’”
Food for Thought: Renaming the Asian Salad
If you haven’t caught on by now, this article isn’t really about salad, it’s about words and how they matter.
“In the grand scheme of things, what we call an Asian salad doesn’t rise to the level of serious concern like anti-Asian hate crime in the era of Covid, but it’s a mainstream insensitivity that we could do away with,” says Brown.
“When I first saw packages of Asian salad mix, I thought of returning them to the manufacturer with red ink like a teacher,” says de la Vega. “Nice try, guys. Redo this."
And no, Asian-inspired isn’t any better. That’s just lazy. We can do better.
Like maybe just using straightforward language:
“If I could change the culture, I would prefer to name it by the ingredients,” says Linda Shiue, MD, a chef and author of “Spicebox Kitchen: Eat Well and Be Healthy with Globally Inspired, Vegetable-Forward Recipes” (at Amazon). “Let’s say, a napa cabbage salad with mandarin oranges and a sesame-soy dressing. It tells you what you’re getting and it actually sounds more appetizing. Your palate starts to get excited about those flavors.”
Or come up with your own name without leaning on tired tropes like “Emperor’s salad” or “Enlightened salad.”
“When we first opened Tao Yuan in Maine 10 years ago, I put Asian slaw on my menu,” says Cara Stadler, chef and co-owner of Bao Bao Dumpling House, Tao Yuan, and Zao Ze Cafe and Market in Portland, Maine. “I thought it would appeal to the community. There are too many cultures smashed together in our slaw for me to say it’s Chinese but calling it Asian was so nonspecific and didn’t really add any value. Eventually we had to ask ourselves, ’Why do we still have this on our menu?’” Stadler says she and her mom, who’s also her business partner, changed it to the Eighty Ate Slaw, based on the name of their restaurant group. There was no uproar, no confusion about what the slaw was, she says, and the dish remained widely popular.
But you don’t need to be a restaurant owner or recipe writer or food executive to push for these changes. The claim is that this is what consumers want. Kindly tell them that you’re smarter than that.
In the Eater article, “Why Do Fast-Casual Restaurants Get a Pass on Appropriation?” the author Jenny Dorsey, chef and founder of nonprofit think tank Studio ATAO, implores readers to “scrutinize these brands, whose reach permeates our lives on the daily, whose executives (inaccurately) treat America as though they are as white as they are, whose menus and messaging influence the next wave of restaurateurs and food entrepreneurs.”
https://www.consumerreports.org/food/stop-c...ad-a3082309856/
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