In this two-part interview, Rose Facchini interviews Benjamin Wurgaft and Merry (Corky) White, authors of Ways of Eating: Exploring Food Through History and Culture (University of California Press, 2023).

Ben Wurgaft is a writer and historian. His books include Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food (University of California Press, 2020), Thinking in Public: Strauss, Levinas, Arendt (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) and, with Merry White, the recent Ways of Eating. Merry (“Corky”) White is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Boston University, with specialties in Japanese studies and food. A caterer prior to entering graduate school, she has written two cookbooks, one of which was recently reissued by Princeton University Press. Among other books and articles, she is the author of Coffee Life in Japan (University of California Press, 2012) and Perfectly Japanese: Making Families in an Era of Upheaval (University of California Press, 2002). For her work on Japanese society and culture, she received the Japanese Imperial Honor, The Order of the Rising Sun, in 2013.

Rose Facchini: Thank you both so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I’ve really been looking forward to our conversation.

Ben Wurgaft: I’m delighted to chat. I was sort of surprised and very interested that JHI took an interest. We’re about to talk about ways of eating for a while but before we do that, I’m just curious: what do you write about?

RF: So, my main interest is in foodways, but I tend to focus on Italian literature. I’m really interested in looking at Italian science fiction but through the lens of climate change and foodways and how science fiction can reflect what’s going on in society.

Merry (Corky) White: In contemporary fiction?

RF: Contemporary fiction, that’s correct.

MW: I was also interested to know whether the literature you examine reflects the amazing regionality of food in Italy. We have Italian cousins from Rome, and they actually don’t think any food is Italian food that isn’t Roman. They find it curious that people in Sardinia or Sicily eat something that they wouldn’t touch.

RF: Absolutely, I mean if you look at the concept of campanilismo with every town, never mind region, with its own very specific foods or ways of doing a recipe.

MW: Yeah, and Herbert Gans, when he wrote about immigration in America, he talked about campanilismo and the fact that you are identified by the sound of your own church bells. It’s not just literally, it’s also by your food and your accent.

BW: I remember one of these cousins of my mother’s partner saying to you, mom [Merry (Corky) White], about Japan, asking how often the Japanese eat pasta. Your response was appropriate, you said, “Do you mean ramen?” And no, in fact Giulia meant pasta as she understands it. And these are not un-cosmopolitan people, Rose, these are people who are very well-traveled, and I was simply surprised by the depths of their regionalism.

MW: The other thing about Giulia is that I took her to Japan, which is my base, and she said, “Do we have to eat Japanese food anymore on this trip?” And this is day two of a two-week trip. That’s what led to her asking how many times a week Japanese people eat pasta. They do eat Italian types of pasta, of course they do. There’s this thing in Japan called itameshi, the ita is “Italian” and meshi means “food,” and so Italian food is a whole category within the repertory of people who are Japanese. But definitely the pasta can’t mean soba.

RF: It certainly says something about the ubiquity of Italian food, where “pasta” means a very specific thing to a group of people. I think that is really fascinating.

MW: I once had a crazy grant to study the Japanese fascination with Italian food, to go to Italy with Japanese tour groups and run around with them and hear what they said. That was at the period of this peak of interest in Italy; women in Japan were taking Italian food classes and they went to Italy to take [them], especially in Tuscany, which were designed for Japanese visitors to Italy. Of course, there are food classes for other kinds of foreigners, but this was specifically for Japanese. I found them saying things like Italian food is the food of our old ways. “Our old ways” meant a focus on family, rural agriculture, seasonal and local, and so they said Italy is our furusato, which means “old home in the country.”

RF: Did the cooking classes portray a certain representation of Italian food? How did they tailor it to Japanese participants?

MW: The teacher-cook was invariably a middle-aged woman of considerable girth and ebullience who is kind of doing all that stereotypical Italian thing as if on a television show. They saw the food as a kind of soul food. Japanese-Italian restaurants in Japan would have a service method that they thought was the Italian family method, with big bowls and one person the waiter would appoint as “mamma.” That person would serve the other people at the table out of these large bowls. Very much not a Japanese style of service, this imagined family.

BW: It’s very interesting how this is simultaneously similar to and different from an American model of going to Europe and bringing back certain kinds of food traditions, which are then thought to revitalize an American foodway, this classic thing that in California Alice Waters is probably the most famous embodiment of. You go on a journey to France, you come back, or—differently—somebody goes on a journey to Italy and comes back. In those cases, I think the hero of the story was understood to have a youthful experience of European foodways that attuned them to what was broken in American food and American eating. But, mom, what you’re describing here has an interesting different twist, which is that there’s a certain performance not only of the foodway, the cooking of the dish, but of a way of eating that people are supposed to enact which I think is different in the US. There’s no expectation at a restaurant like Chez Panisse that people will all eat together in what is thought of as a European style.

MW: Right, there would be individual orders placed rather than a table order. I think that’s really interesting because Japanese also have this idea that Italy and America are less status conscious, which is of course a fallacy. It’s the idea that mangiamo and tabemashouare invoking this kind of “we’re all in this together, there is no status hierarchy, the women do not have to wait until the end of the meal to eat” (which of course never happens now in Japan, it’s very obsolete).

Ben is talking about Alice Waters bringing back the zest of Europe—finding the freshest best ingredients, the first of the season, and this has a kind of origin myth. Actually, Julia Child had this one moment of realization that food was “it” in France, when she had this one truite au bleu, a trout. These moments then become transported to America, or in the Japanese case from Italy to Japan, to represent a new philosophy, a new way of life. It’s bigger than that piece of pasta. I think origin myth has a reference to something else and in this case Europe, for Americans and for Japanese.

BW: One of the things that I think is quite interesting about the research project that you did on Japanese food tourism to Tuscany has to do with its moment in time. Do you remember the years you were doing that in particular?

MW: I think it was probably twenty years ago.

BW: The reason I ask is that these things move in waves and that there are fads in Japan, Italy, the US. One of the things that is really interesting to me—and Rose, I am riffing a little bit on the kinds of curiosity that I think is in Ways of Eating—I’m curious about the way in which food illustrates the principle of constant change, and yet when people think about foodways, there’s a tendency to naturalize or eternalize them in many cases. Very famously, Italian foodways taken as traditional are post Columbian Exchange, right? The global cabinet of ingredients that makes these dishes possible is not that eternal.

RF: For sure, absolutely not!

BW: Hundreds and not thousands of years old. You say that the possibility of producing that pasta all rests on the industrialization of flour production. It all rests on having regular bags of flour each like the last one, so that you know how your ingredients are going to react to a certain amount of water, so that you can shape them in particular ways. I think it has to do with the sphere of human individual experience; we take our own experience and we tend to eternalize it. Modernists are always going on about how we live in times of extraordinarily rapid change and yet the way we relate to food, unless we’re futuristi, we are in fact quite the opposite. We tend to traditionalize or even eternalize the way we do things in the kitchen. But this raises a question: how long does it actually take to establish that sense of permanence or tradition for a given group of eaters?

RF: I’m so happy that you brought that up, I would love to touch upon that some more.

MW: I think the same thing happens in Japan where a lot of foods that are absolutely identified as Japanese by Japanese themselves like tempura. Tempura came from the Portuguese in the 1500s. Or ramen from the Asian mainland or in fact sushi from Southeast Asia. What is allowed to become Japanese and how rapidly that is changing. There’s a different syllabary, a different writing system used for foreign borrowed foods then for what is considered indigenous, which is, as Ben suggests, always on the move.

RF: Katakana.

MW: Right! Another question is how important is it for a food to be labeled “ours.” I’m doing a little study right now of the whisky industry in Japan. Japanese whiskies are a very global and important industry and it has risen very quickly to win all the prizes from Scotland or anywhere and it is originally, and originally means only twenty years ago, considered yōshu which means foreign beverage and it’s becoming washu which is Japanese beverage—just to see that actually moving in the moment.

RF: This is one of the questions I really wanted to ask both of you because I’m particularly interested in the concepts of authenticity and national cuisine, these terms that are floating around. I completely agree with you when you write that you know a lot of these things that seem to be traditional “permanent features of our lives with food” (Wurgaft and White 178) are very recent arrivals. Foodways is in constant flux, as you point out, and they take on these “permanent states of affairs” (178). I would like you to expand on this some more if you could.

BW: I think that food is a wonderful subject for reminding us that there aren’t by and large global rules that explain these phenomena, but rather individual cases that we can learn from so one could look at the domestication of sushi for American eaters in the 1980s —

MW: Something called sushi!

BW: Something called sushi. But someone could also look at the development of sushi in Japan from things like funazushi, the fermented fish that is often taken as one of the prototypical forms of what eventually becomes sushi. Mom, you were once interviewed eating funazushi by the lake where it is often made.

MW: And there was much discussion about where it had originally come from, even in this 16th generation family funazushi maker. It is basically lake fish fermented for three and half years in wooden vats, layered with rice for another six months or so, then finally eaten. And that’s something I had to do on camera, a seven-course meal, all courses.

BW: I think it’s a little bit of the “testing the foreigner” kind of thing. I do think that there are cases in which we can clearly say that authenticity is being generated by a particular social formation, that is to say a North American eater seeking a certain kind of experience from a certain kind of food. Say it’s Thai, southern or northern Thai, southern or northern Thai food of a certain style cooked at a certain spice level. The people that go into that restaurant might be hoping to have something that has a quality of reality because they’re trying to experience something that for them is not “normal” and the authenticity, as it were, of that dish is a function of their personal quest for a certain kind of authentic Thai food. This has become one of the popular ways for food writers to talk about the way in which authenticity is traded upon in conversations in which usually putatively white middle class or richer eaters are eating putatively non-white foods.

MW: I have a thought on that, which really ties to something very specific in Boston in the North End. I take students in the food class there and there are a couple of restaurants which talk about authenticity as a marketing term in which it says, “Here you can have authentic Italian food,” which is at least four removals from something deep analysis might consider. So first of all, we talk about what Italian food is (when as I mentioned regionality and identity, which is such a dominant force) and then you talk about who’s making it (Salvadorians, of course, or Dominicans). And that’s not a problem. I eat sushi made by Salvadorians and there’s no issue, but sometimes people’s reason for wanting authenticity along with their definitions of what that would mean get in the way of just having a nice Italian-American or just a nice North End meal. As you know, North Enders hate their area being called Little Italy, they don’t like that at all, they say that’s New York, we are North End. And they don’t even want to be called Italian-Americans, they want to be called North Enders. That particular question of authenticity has so many levels of problematization. My students will say something to me like, “Where can I get authentic Japanese food in Boston?” I want to know, first of all, what’s important about that, but that takes them off their feet because they are not interested in why they’re interested in that, they’re interested in saying I’ve had authentic Japanese food.

RF: A badge of honor in some way.

BW: Yeah, exactly.

MW: If you’re interested in authenticity, you have to question the questioner and you have to think about why that would make it something better or something different.

BW: Part of the project of writing this kind of a book is the hope that you’ll get readers who are interested in food history or food anthropology because they think that it’s going to give them something they have an appetite for, like the story of the origin of something or the authentic experience of eating something, but therein the writing will move them into a curiosity about why they want that. Like that student’s question about where I can get authentic Chinese food, where can I get authentic soup dumplings.

MW: It’s a political question, of course, what makes it authentic.

BW: Yeah, very much so.

MW: And a racial question, too. A friend of ours is a sushi chef and he is a gaijin, he’s a Caucasian American. When his sushi shop was open, he would be at the counter with a couple of other—maybe three other—sushi chefs, and you would sit in front of them. He said that other foreigners like him didn’t want to sit in front of him, because they felt he was not going to make real sushi. But where they sat was maybe in front of a Salvadorian. It was in front of somebody who was “other.” That was often more important than that person actually being Japanese.

RF: Could you expand on the political and racially charged aspects of this? It is a fascinating subset of authenticity and what’s considered traditional or national cuisine.

MW: Well, I think there’s a kind of chauvinism in it, which would lead us to political concerns. Something is “better” than something else, and the simplest racialism is associating a face and a language with a particular kind of food.

RF: The issues surrounding fusion cuisines and globalization are very interesting. It seems that’s where the trends are at the moment.

BW: Yeah, in fact there are wonderful examples both of fusion cooking generating this kind of dissonance for eaters, and also maybe even more interestingly of people realizing that the cooking is being done by somebody they wouldn’t have expected, and yet the cooking is still of the type that it’s thought to be. That’s abstract. To give you a concrete example: We’re having lunch at a very nice Italian restaurant in Siena, and the food is Italian food, but it’s plated in a particularly elegant way. A way that leads you, mom, to ask a question about the kitchen, right? And the question is, is there in fact a Japanese chef?

MW: And the waitress jubilantly, happily, said yes, we have two, and that there were two Japanese in this kitchen was a source of pride for the Italian restaurant. And, actually, all over Italy there are Japanese doing stages [internships] in different restaurants.

BW: I mean in this kind of cosmopolitanism an openness to having different people cook “their food” strikes me as laudable in contrast to the various forms of racism and nationalism and narrowness that we often see particularly, but not exclusively, in North America. Who can cook whose food? Or even the idea that cuisines belong to people who seem genetically appropriate, which strikes me as just disappointing in this day and age. That said, there are cases—getting back to the politics issue—in which people feel appropriated, people feel that something has been taken from them, and I think that—and this is me being Marxist in a way, that is, at least materialist—to say that money is the important thing. The question of who is getting if not rich then at least running the restaurant successfully on the basis of what food can generate, in some contexts, legitimate concerns about appropriation.

MW: I think you’re absolutely right. The fact that in the Boston area, and I suspect any city in America, that people in the kitchen who are not visible are not of the ethnicity that is being touted by the restaurant itself and are not of the ethnicities of the clientele either. So, this is an issue because they’re not paid very well—I mean that’s the basic thing—and they are hidden in the back because maybe the restaurant owners themselves don’t want people to feel any cognitive dissonance about about who’s making the food that’s supposed to be “this” but they look “that.”

BW: I mean one of the things that was so interesting about the Los Angeles [Times] report by the great food writer Jonathan Gold—who sadly passed in 2018—what made me so fascinated about that version of Los Angeles, where I lived for a few years, was the fact that there were communities of cooking and eating that were relatively homogeneous cooking for themselves, and that they did mix in various kinds of border regions within the city, but that there were people cooking for pallets that they were intimately familiar with because they were living within a relatively homogeneous cultural and ethnic and linguistic milieu. That’s not better, to be clear. I’m not going to contradict what I said earlier and say that this is somehow better.

RF: But it’s a phenomenon to acknowledge.

BW: Yeah, exactly.

MW: Los Angeles may be unique or rare in its enclaved-ness.

BW: I guess what I was building towards is that if you go to places, many places in Japan are like this, and if you go to Mexico City, you see people really lining up at food trucks or stalls who really have some understanding of what’s going on in the food and probably in the lives of the people who cook it. That is less touched by the dynamics of anxiety about appropriation or the dynamics of exoticization that you might see in a more multicultural environment like say Los Angeles, Vancouver, or Chicago.

MW: Chicago is another good example; Ukrainian food over here and Polish food over there. I’ve lived through some different eras of eating in America and one of the things I remember growing up in the Midwest, which of course is kind of automatically seen as fly-over country where nothing interesting might happen (but that wasn’t true of course), is realizing afterwards, after moving east and after living through the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, etcetera, that we now eat other people’s food. We did not eat other people’s food when I was young. We had no idea. Even in Chicago (I was raised both in Minnesota and Chicago), even in a big cosmopolitan city like Chicago, we never did. First of all, people didn’t eat out as much as they do now even if they had the wherewithal.

Moving east, I realized I had never seen a bagel. I had no idea—and we’re Jewish—I never had a bagel and never knew what one was. Now of course bagels are strewn across the landscape, and they’ve even lost I think much of their ethnic identity, whatever it was. When we started crossing lines and eating something that our parents hadn’t eaten or perhaps maybe our grandparents hadn’t eaten. The world absolutely changed.

I remember going to the Minnesota State Fair in the late ’40s, and I was allowed to go and spend the whole day there on my own with a pocket full of change, and I went to a booth where a guy was making stuffed grape leaves, and he was Greek. I thought “Wow, what is this? It looks awful.” And he said “No, no, no, you have to try it.” So, I did try it and I thought the world had just expanded. I bought his cookbook which I still have—it’s falling apart—of very simple Greek recipes. I mean we’ve all had our moments of awakening with food, but that other people’s food really is a historical change as well as a regional one.

BW: And this is one of the generational differences that we talked about as we were writing the book. The book has nine historical chapters, nine ethnographic and personal vignettes, and I would say that slightly more of the vignettes are just my mother’s, slightly more of the historical chapters are primarily mine, but one of the things that we would always talk about is the fact that generational difference naturally shifts the way we see some of these issues. I wanted to talk, Rose, because I think it mattered for the production of this book that the way in which our different generational positions affect the way we see writing about food, and scholarly writing about food, was a huge kind of talking point, it was generative. We didn’t have many disagreements in the course of writing the book, but it did produce some of the interesting questions.

MW: Conversations, conversations!

BW: But this really matters. I was in my early 20s and working different kinds of restaurant jobs when I did my first food writing. This was the early 21st century, and I was doing this in an environment in which I grew up with the reading of cookbooks and reading food writing being kind of normal, and figures like M.F.K. Fisher and Calvin Trillin just being on my parents’ shelves. Academic writers like Sidney Mintz had been publishing work related to food and commodities for decades at that point. Food Studies didn’t exist as a field when I was in college, but writing about food did. And the idea of there being something called Food Studies started to crystallize when I was a graduate student. For me, this was kind of normalized, and the opposite was true for my mother.

MW: Can I jump in to pick at that piece of history? As Ben suggests, there was no Food Studies, certainly, when I was coming into an academic career and though I had already been a cookbook writer and already had a career as a caterer and cooking for very large groups of mostly academic people but who would not have inserted food into their writing unless it was a political or economic concern that demanded attention to rice growing or something. But I had written these cookbooks, I entered an academic career, and wanted very much to use food, but it wasn’t done. So I tried very hard, I created a food anthropology course for the University of Hawai’i because in the summers I taught there through their summer school and they were wide open to thinking about food. My university and most universities of that era were not. I finally got to teach about food and having written cookbooks, thought recipes were something of interest to analyze. You could do a really critical analysis of a recipe, even to the mode in which it is written, and the kinds of instructions given, has a great deal of intellectual interest. But that wasn’t to be. When I finally taught the food course at Boston University, I had a weekly recipe for the students to analyze and that met with some kind of you know glances askance.

RF: What was the reception from your students?

MW: They’re undergraduates, they think it’s fun, as if it were comic relief in a sense. They weren’t looking at it as they might some kind of social science formula or model or something like that.

BW: Or they weren’t asking questions about what technologies are used to make this recipe, what do the ingredients mean. There are lots of things you can learn by looking at a recipe.

MW: And even authenticity enters into that question. The book in front of us is the product of several layers of endeavor, because at the beginning when I was asked by a press—not the one we ended up publishing with—to do a world history of food in 167 pages, I brought Ben in as a historian and a person interested in food—I’m not a historian—and we struggled to do that. We did produce something like a world history of all peoples, all places, all times, but we ended up pulling it away from the first press and wanting to do something much more satisfactory to us, at which point I thought well maybe it would be good to include recipes in a scholarly book about food. And I want to hasten to say that the distinction between academic scholarly on one side and popular on the other is really sensitive in the case of food. As my high school teachers said, “Food is below the neck, let’s not talk about it.”

BW: There’s so much to say on this point, mom, and you and I continue to have interesting disagreements about this.

MW: About the recipe inclusion?

BW: So, Rose, for context: we actively disagreed about the recipes. That was the thing we fought about. We disagreed about the recipes, and I was taking it away an old-fashioned position on the issue. I was basically saying these considerations of practice distract from the things that we’re trying to establish about food.

MW: And that would have been the argument of scholars who didn’t want to touch the practical. And there were several reasons that people didn’t. Some people said it refers too much to women’s domestic skills or to women’s domestic role. That didn’t hold water, in fact.

BW: The gendering of this is really obvious, even in the work I referred to earlier, Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power, right? That is primarily a study of agricultural practices and the relationship to political formations and their relationship to social practice at the level of appetite for sugar in Britain. It’s about power. Sweetness and power, not the experience of eating sugar, not the experience of our life with food.

MW: But it is about the effect of eating a lot of sugar and the bad teeth of English people after the war.

BW: But one of the things that in writing this book I really wanted to do—and I think that we agreed about this—was to restore to food history and food anthropology the personal experience, the personal perspective, of the investigator in a way that follows for writers, food writers like M.F.K. Fisher and Calvin Trillin, who are interested in the experience of eating. And mom, so you’ve had an agenda in your life as a food scholar, which is that you want in a way to talk back to the denigration of food in past generations.

MW: Well, not just past generations.

BW: And still living generations, yeah.

MW: Absolutely. I thought the inclusion of recipes in a scholarly book would put paid to that denigration and would be a kind of revenge or something. The fact that when I was in graduate school after having been a caterer, after having written cookbooks that were really well received, those didn’t count as publications. My graduate advisor said to me, you have to take all that food writing and restaurant reviews off your resume or you’ll never get a serious academic job. And I did, because he was right, for then. It wasn’t that he was putting me down, it was he was telling me how I would be seen, which is of course now what I’m trying to correct.

This concludes Part 1. Read Part 2 here.

Rose Facchini is a Lecturer in Italian at Tufts University and the Editor and Italian Translator Editor for the International Poetry Review. She explores the intersection between Italian Studies and Environmental Humanities with a focus on climate change and foodways, particularly through the lens of speculative fiction. Her translations have appeared in several journals, most notably Asymptote and West Branch, and her non-fiction work appears in Military Medicine.

Edited by Rajosmita Roy

Featured image: Cover of Ways of Eating, by Benjamin A. Wurgaft and Merry I. White, University of California Press, 2023. Cover design by Kevin Barrett Kane.