Jonathan Gold

[tissue]

"If you are used to the gentle freshness of Hong Kong Cantonese cooking or the sweet, mellow flavors of Shanghainese cuisine, the funky directness of Taiwanese cooking may come as something of a shock. Soups and stews are overlaid with a dozen different reeks, from fermented bean curd to powdered fish, hot chiles to fish sauce to boiling vinegar. Taiwanese cooking embraces extreme saltiness, excesses of white pepper, and internal organs of odd and various sorts."

All right, here is my beef with him.

-Hong Kong /Cantonese cuisine is not GENTLE, but it is FRESH, especially if you eat the seafood from the TANKS. It has bold flavors in all it's other dishes except for the seafood. I mean, look at dim sum, I don't think dim sum is GENTLE in it's flavoring, I think it's flavors are bright and sometimes too OILY, which is why you have to wash it down with TEA. And Hong Kong cuisine does not equal Cantonese. There is a large population of Shanghainese and Chiu CHow (Teochoo) in HK that have contributed to their cuisine, especially the Chiu Chow. Shark fin is a Chiu Chow dish, not Cantonese. And so is braised goose. Maybe he is referring to Chiu Chow cuisine being gentle and fresh because traditional Cantonese contains lots of tonic soups with strong chinese herbs and bao (earthenware) dishes with different layers of flavor.

-Shanghainese cuisine is not MELLOW, it is bold yet restrained. It is cooking something in pork fat and then letting it cool to skim off the fat so it retains the flavors and the pork fat, like butter, conducts the heat evenly and tastes delicious. Not everything in Shanghainese cuisine is SWEET, unless you base Shanghai food on a dinner at GREEN VILLAGE where they brown sauce everything. Did you think the soup dumplings at Din Tai Fung were SWEET when we went to eat there?

-Taiwanese food does not embrace extreme saltiness and internal organs but it does have excesses of white pepper in its street food. Most Chinese cuisine includes some type of internal organ, it is not just the Taiwanese. If anything, the Cantonese eat more internal organs than the Taiwanese. Taiwanese cuisine is actually derived from Fukiennese cuisine that then evolved over 200 years using a lot of the seafood and local ingredients from the island with a tiny bit of Japanese influence. Basically, Gold is basing his opinion of Taiwanese cuisine on a snack shop style place that sells Taiwanese street food. Which I think misinforms the public especially if he always takes this omniscient tone of knowledge. Furthermore, I think if he tried to get away with that regarding French or Italian food, ...... well, he wouldn't.

If I were to dine at L'Orangerie, I would neither assume that is the only kind of French food, nor would I consider that the only representative of French flavor.

WTF

Edited May 17, 2004 by tissue (log)

[Pan]

Your points are well taken, though I did find most of the food I ate in Hong Kong mild by comparison with a lot of Chinese food in Malaysia, and that certainly includes dim sum. I don't think oiliness is a strong flavor the way hot pepper is. I also find that in New York, there is more strong-flavored (lots of hot pepper, very strong mustard green taste, very vinegary) food in a Taiwanese restaurant I frequent than in the Hong Kong or Cantonese-style restaurants I also frequent (though I do get the sense that Hong Kong food might possibly have become more spicy in the last 20 years or so). As for Shanghainese food, some dishes are quite spicy and others are not. Certainly, sweetness is not a constant in Shanghainese dishes!

It occurs to me that Gold may be using "strong-tasting" differently from you - and me, for that matter.

[skchai]

I'm the first to admit, I have a lot to learn.  Not being one to really delve into the history behind the food I eat, I am always impressed and amazed by people who do.  But skchai, you have to admit, this guy is not reading up on anything.  Why can't he just say, he liked this and that restaurant and be done with it?

I dunno. Who's to say what's going on inside his mind?

But in general, if you want to talk about why there might be pressures for food columnists to resort to these kinds of grand, sweeping, and sometimes inaccurate comments, I more or less agree with merle. Restaurant reviewers are purportedly experts, after all, even when they're someone who was just pulled off the police blotter last week by some editor who heard that they "like eating". Even someone who's been on the job for years and has a genuine passion for food would still have a hard time keeping up with the bewildering array of ethnic foods that are available in any large city nowadays. So you get some reviewers who deliberately limit their scope, ignoring restaurants that they can't quite get a handle on (usually the low end ethnic). I guess the only other way of avoiding this kind of overreaching is to adopt a slightly different voice - that of an explorer (but more than a novice) rather than an expert. But I guess that's a hard voice to develop. . . I mean, are there any good examples of that kind of reviewer?

[jschyun]

I suppose I have been too hard on Jonathan Gold. After all, if I didn't want all the grand sweeping statements, I could just read the L.A. Times. And I do.

I think there are plenty of straight writers over the years that I have liked. That said, sometimes, straight reporting isn't as interesting as when someone says something like "I suppose this and that" or grand statements like "Taiwanese food is this and that". I used to be amazed that he could say something like what he said in tissue's quote. I mean, I wouldn't say a statement like that unless I had eaten my way through China, HK, for years and years. Maybe he thought he could get away with these statements that we find offensive, because he was working for an "alternative" paper, where the standards of journalism are not as high. Then again, he did write a book. And he got that job at Gourmet.

[FoodZealot]

In this week's LA Weekly, I just read this: 

"I’ve always suspected that Koreans conceive of pho as a jazzier version of sullongtang, a soothing, unseasoned broth so bone-intensive that it is practically incandescent in its whiteness. It is an aesthetic, admittedly, but not necessarily one I share."

Just for the record, I don't know any Koreans, living in Korea or in L.A. that think that pho is a jazzed up version of sulleongtang.  To me this sounds like he thinks Koreans are so stupid, they can't conceive of understanding the concept of pho without translating it into something Korean.  Yeah, I'm not a big fan of Koreatown pho, but I also know that nobody thinks it is a "jazzier version of" sullongtang, which is a totally Korean dish. 

Also, sulleongtang is not an unseasoned broth, it's a long cooked beef broth, with some shin bones thrown in to add gelatine to get that thick, unctous lusciousness.  You season it at the table, with some sea salt and chopped scallions.  Therefore, if it's unseasoned, that's your own damn fault.  I normally like JG's articles, and i'm not really that picky or interested in details, but I just couldn't let this one go.   

Here's the article.

I re-read the original article. Just to play devil's advocate, I think it could also be read as an overly ornate, and insufficiently qualified way of saying, "I hypothesize that when some Koreans make pho, their closest culinary analogy is Korean sullongtang with more stuff added in it, sullongtang being an intentionally unadorned Korean broth made from beef bones. While this appears to be the case from my experiences with pho made by Koreans, I don't agree with it." Not nearly as interesting to read.

It's a bogus way of stating a theory anyway, because he's sets up an idea which he attributes to another nationality of people, then trashes it. If he had said he noticed that pho made by Koreans seems (in his considerable experience) to be too much like sullongtang, it would be a more defensible statement.

In general, I think it's natural to and can be valid to draw analogies between things that are unknown to things that are more familiar. But if it's an easy trap to start using assumed shortcuts instead of thoughtful, well-qualified parallels.

However, I reserve my right to make poorly supported assertions based on imperfect, anecdotal, empirical data for the sake of entertainment.

~Tad

[mongo_jones]

allow me to post again the link to my long piece on gold:

http://home.comcast.net/~mongo_jones/gold.html

[jschyun]

I would guess that you'd make a pretty good lawyer. I think that's a compliment.

[shocker]

that diatribe, for better or worse, feels like Homi Bhabha 101.

[mongo_jones]

that's an insult, right? just checking.

[shocker]

no, no. i love me some Homi Bhabha. it's complicado, that why i said 'for better or for worse.'

i think your beef with mr. gold is warranted. it's just that the piece you linked, to me, had a PC, post-colonial studies, dialogue-squishing feel to it.

and don't get me wrong, i love me some post-colonial studies too, but it makes for a sticky situation. i don't think mr. gold is the great Homogenizer when it comes to 'ethnic' foods. but if he fubs or over-generalizes and in turn disseminates inaccurate information, then, sure, he should be taken to task, which you did with aplomb.

i just fear your invective was, in some sense, as much of an over-generalization as the ones you accuse him of scribing.

[mongo_jones]

sorry to drag this back to the top of the forum--i've been away from regular net-access for 24 days now and am slowly catching up on conversations in which i've been involved and which continued in my absence.

on may 24 shocker said with reference to my piece on jonathan gold:

no, no. i love me some Homi Bhabha. it's complicado, that why i said 'for better or for worse.'

i'm really quite bemused by the homi bhabha comparison but whatever. i suppose you may just be using his name as short-hand for "postcolonial"--my point of view in the article on gold is quite far from the kind of thing bhabha is interested in; and while my writing in that piece may not be clear on its own terms, compared to the average bhabha essay it is as clear as a shot of vodka (if not as intoxicating).

i think your beef with mr. gold is warranted. it's just that the piece you linked, to me, had a PC, post-colonial studies, dialogue-squishing feel to it.

a PC, post-colonial studies, dialogue-squishing feel? while my involvement with postcolonial studies is doubtless palpable from the piece i'm surprised to hear it called PC (unless you mean "part calcuttan"). why is it pc? i know this isn't terribly dialogue-squishing of me but i'd really like to know in what way you feel that piece is informed by a spirit of political-correctness? or does any point of view that challenges first-world takes on third-world culture (particularly when voiced by a person of third-world origin) automatically become politically correct?

generally i've found that there's little that's more liable to squish dialogue than for one participant in a conversation to call the other pc. in this context: not too long ago i asked on another egullet forum why in the forum listings the caribbean--a collection of independent sovereign states--could not be listed geographically along with latin america (a region most caribbean states actually physically neighbour much more closely than they do the u.s) rather than nationally as part of the u.s.a (another sovereign state). the englightening, if not edifying, response to that also involved a oblique reference to alleged political correctness. now that was political correctness but in a literal, geographical sense--but that wasn't the sense in which it was invoked. i'd be interested to hear how you're using it here to characterize my piece on gold.

i don't think mr. gold is the great Homogenizer when it comes to 'ethnic' foods. but if he fubs or over-generalizes and in turn disseminates inaccurate information, then, sure, he should be taken to task, which you did with aplomb.

i just fear your invective was, in some sense, as much of an over-generalization as the ones you accuse him of scribing.

i don't believe i've referred to him, in that piece or in other posts on this forum, as a "great homogenizer". i do feel, however, that his "fubs" and over-generalizations are a)in fact the rule and not the exception when it comes to his writings on asian cuisines, b) that they are not random or arbitrary but in fact quite explainable via a larger cultural analysis and c)that this analysis is worth doing if for no other reason then because it is sometimes good to have the object of knowledge talk back to the subject. now i may not have performed this cultural analysis as well as i might have--it will help me revise the piece if you'll tell me which parts you think are most marred by over-generalizations of my own. see, now there's an honest invitation to a dialogue.

[shocker]

i'm not so familiar with the mechanics of eGulet's formatting, so forgive my lack of quotes from previous posts.

though your article may not have the explicit concerns that bhabha works with throughout his work, there's a parallel undercurrent in both. from bhabha: "An important feature of colonial discourse is its dependence on the concept of 'fixity' in the ideological construction of otherness." and from your piece: "but since no one is asking these people to be the subjects of their own food stories the other continues to be fixed, identified and made knowable in familiar ways." the concerns/buzzwords of the post-colonial movement pop up all over the place. but then you drew attention to that yourself.

it's an oft-repeated joke in the post-colonial studies world that you can debunk anyone and everyone's viewpoint by saying it's reductionist and/or essentialist. which is true. but also easy. and to what end? it makes for a fun game, but from whence comes the knowledge then, the understanding?

your prime quote about the fruit from gold's backyard purportedly contains everything troubling about his writing. but how and why? there's nothing essentialist about his musing. he spins a little analogy and it drives you mad? i don't get it.

you said you don't think of him as the great homogenizer. but you focus on the ways in which he does not, to you, comprehend things in a non-homogenous fashion: "the world is nothing if not heterogeneous" i'd be curious to see the specific reductionist evidence about his overgeneralization about south indian cuisine that you mention in passing. for i think it's the only quantifiable evidence, and it's barely accounted for. i'm not saying he hasn't been wrong before. i'm simply observing that your piece hinges on that fact, and there's little evidence supplied to support your argument.

if he's so awful at what he does, how then would you recommend people to write about cuisines which they were not born into or are unfamiliar with?

i completely agree with your statements about "the truth of course is that culture is always hybrid and at some level untranslatable." does that mean then that writers should not bother at all because they can't possibly honor the infinitesimal variety and fluidity of culture?

this conversation started off a little sassy on my part, so i wanted to say thanks for engaging in this dialogue, mongo jones. i think it's a tricky subject worth butting heads over, and i admire your passion about it.

[mongo_jones]

(edited: couldn't get quotes to work for some reason so have italicized quotes instead and put quotes within quotes in bold)

shocker,

thanks for the continued engagement. my comments/responses below:

though your article may not have the explicit concerns that bhabha works with throughout his work, there's a parallel undercurrent in both. from bhabha: "An important feature of colonial discourse is its dependence on the concept of 'fixity' in the ideological construction of otherness." and from your piece: "but since no one is asking these people to be the subjects of their own food stories the other continues to be fixed, identified and made knowable in familiar ways." the concerns/buzzwords of the post-colonial movement pop up all over the place. but then you drew attention to that yourself.

as i've said i'm not attempting to hide my involvement in postcolonial studies--but even within my areas of interest bhabha is but one of many people. just because he refers to "fixity" and i used the word "fixed" in similar ways in particular aspects of our arguments doesn't mean that my argument is particularly indebted to bhabha's thought; to tell the truth i don't find him very useful. but all of this is a minor part of our own debate so on to more substantive points:

it's an oft-repeated joke in the post-colonial studies world that you can debunk anyone and everyone's viewpoint by saying it's reductionist and/or essentialist. which is true. but also easy. and to what end? it makes for a fun game, but from whence comes the knowledge then, the understanding?

your prime quote about the fruit from gold's backyard purportedly contains everything troubling about his writing. but how and why? there's nothing essentialist about his musing. he spins a little analogy and it drives you mad? i don't get it.

i've gone back and re-read my piece and i don't believe i call gold reductionist or essentialist anywhere in it--or even indirectly imply it. and the part about the fruit tree was cited largely as a facetious aside to point out gold's love for his own voice (a flaw i indicated i have as well). allow me to quote the relevant passage from the piece:

you don’t have to be in love with your own voice as much as i am to recognize that gold is in love with his own voice and likes saying nice sounding things with it. take, for instance, this excerpt from feb 2002:

“our tree may not produce the tastiest grapefruit — in fact the juice from the grapefruit that has not overwintered is entirely too bitter to drink — but there is a tang, an antique pungency to the lumpy second-year fruit that I have experienced nowhere else in the world, the horticultural equivalent of a browning souvenir post card from the 1914 rose parade.”

i humbly rest this part of my case. in fact i think i should be able to rest my entire case based just on that excerpt but allow me to continue with this unhealthily obsessed diatribe.

i say that one of the minor things that annoys me about gold is his preciousness and then move on. the substantive analysis (such as it is) comes after this. so i'm not sure why you're citing this as an example of my using what you say are postcolonialist strategies of debunking via the shorthand of dubbing someone essentialist or reductionist.

you said you don't think of him as the great homogenizer. but you focus on the ways in which he does not, to you, comprehend things in a non-homogenous fashion: "the world is nothing if not heterogeneous" i'd be curious to see the specific reductionist evidence about his overgeneralization about south indian cuisine that you mention in passing. for i think it's the only quantifiable evidence, and it's barely accounted for. i'm not saying he hasn't been wrong before. i'm simply observing that your piece hinges on that fact, and there's little evidence supplied to support your argument.

again, my saying that "the world is nothing if not heterogeneous" is not a direct critique of gold. at this point in the piece i've moved away from specific analysis of gold to talking about the larger mainstream cultural narrative that i see his alleged alt writing participating in. if you'll again allow me to quote my piece in context:

first

what i find disturbing about all of this is the cultural attitudes that drive it. the third world is of course big business in the u.s—whether it be in the form of cheap labor on banana republic shirts or in marked up exotica at pier 1 imports or cost-plus—but the attitudes to its food in some ways make visible the literal consumption of the third world by the first. gold’s journalism participates in a cultural logic in whose conclusion the first world expert becomes the true keeper of third world “authenticity”.

and then

the truth of course is that culture is always hybrid and at some level untranslatable—the driving impulse in the cosmopolitan consumerism that jonathan gold’s columns embody is to deny this, to claim, through benign, banal interest, mastery over the foreign. a translator, be she a critic, a translator of poems, or a u.n interpreter, knows that they exist not at a point of knowing entirely both languages with which they deal but at a point of incommensurability. a good translator i think is one who doesn’t just enable conversation between different cultures but who in so doing maintains this sense of incommensurability, who resists the totalizing urge to create transparency where none exists. the alternative is a global banal. one in which the bourgeois consumer constantly posits “authentic” culture on the fringes against a homogeneous mainstream but remains blind to the fact that the cultural forces of globalism that run through the drive to identify and “know” alternative/other cultures are the very same ones that drive the homogeneous mainstream.

it is only after this in my concluding paragraph that i say:

the world is nothing if not heterogeneous—to try to render it knowable through food is of course a lot better than rendering it knowable through military conquest, and people who like to eat food from different parts of the world are probably healthier, more tolerant people than those who don’t but let’s not make the mistake of substituting some sort of hip cook’s tour of the international food court for a true acceptance and celebration of difference.

i'm not saying that gold explicitly comes out anywhere and says that indian or chinese or salvadorean cuisine is homogeneous. i'm saying this is the impulse that drives the market as a whole--it is easier to sell shirts and curries this way. these may seem like minor distinctions i'm making here but they're important ones.

and moving on to your final questions:

if he's so awful at what he does, how then would you recommend people to write about cuisines which they were not born into or are unfamiliar with?

i completely agree with your statements about "the truth of course is that culture is always hybrid and at some level untranslatable." does that mean then that writers should not bother at all because they can't possibly honor the infinitesimal variety and fluidity of culture?

these are very tough questions and i don't know that i necessarily have the answers to them.

to take the first one first: i'm not saying he's completely awful. he is a very good writer, knows l.a well and has a genuine interest in promoting ethnic cuisines. these are all good things and i note them at the start of my piece. i probably should make this clearer. however, despite prose quality and good intentions i think he unwittingly propogates the "keeper of the world" mentality i decry. i do know that i don't like gold's approach of presenting himself as an expert on every cuisine he writes about--since as a number of us here can very easily demonstrate he is not. i think what he and others in his position should do is adopt a more humble stance. and i hope i haven't given the impression that i think only people originally from a particular culture should be able to write about it--there's plenty of evidence to the contrary on egullet (including many in my own stomping-ground, the india forum).

as for the question of translation: no, i don't think we should stop attempting to translate just because the world is finally untranslatable. but it is the parts that don't translate that are finally "culture". everything else is susceptible to the mcdonaldsization of the world. i do think we should not cover this important untranslatability up by pretending that everythingis completely translatable and intelligible. people like gold, and i'm sure in other contexts, i as well, give in to this temptation (where we recognize it) because it becomes the source of our authority. after all if our guide can't speak authoritatively why are we following him around? this is an unsettling idea for both guides and their clients.

and if i may come at this question of translation a little differently/obliquely: the late indian poet and translator a.k ramanujan once said in the foreword to one of his major translations (of the kannada novel samskara by u.r anantamurthy) that a good translation is one that does not seek to translate the text into the reader's language but one that translates the reader into the original language. of course there's different things involved in translating literature and in translating food from one culture to another but insofar as his advice applies to food it would apply not just to food-writers like gold but also chefs and even people like me, who at a much lower level, may find themselves being set up or tempted to set themselves up as translators of a different kind.

i hope i'm doing a better job of explaining my problems with gold (and the larger cultural narrative i see behind him) in this conversation than i evidently did in the longer piece. forgive me for going on rather a lot. i don't know how interesting this is to the forum at large--if you like we can continue this backchannel.

this conversation started off a little sassy on my part, so i wanted to say thanks for engaging in this dialogue, mongo jones. i think it's a tricky subject worth butting heads over, and i admire your passion about it.

ah, don't worry about the sass. i'm the last person on egullet you should worry about offending. and as for the passion it comes from a realization that i too am implicated in these kinds of narratives (the piece was originally written 2 years ago--i haven't revised it since but my thinking hasn't remained static). i have egullet to thank in large part for helping me think this stuff, and my own investments in it, through a little better. though i'm not sure that everyone who's encountered me here in debates on these issues is quite so appreciative.

i look forward to hearing more from you on this or on other topics.

regards,

mongo

Edited June 12, 2004 by mongo_jones (log)

[hollywood]

Hope you keep writing.

[russ parsons]

amen. without presuming to address the specific question of jonathan gold, this thread touches on something that has long bothered me about people writing about other people's food. i'm not sure where it comes from--the french with their passion for intellectual organization? escoffier specifically? perhaps an innate human desire to render things in black and white? -- but one of the central fallacies of "ethnic" cuisine reporting is the urge to say "here is what they do." "Here is how they make this." gradually, as we become more familiar with an area, well, by gosh, we discover that things break down. There is no Italy, there is tuscany, sicily, piedmont, et al. there is no france, but a series of french subsets.

no matter how often this happens or how predictable it may be, this is always treated as something of a revelation. spend enough time with a cuisine, of course, and you find that those subsets each have their own subsets, increasing geometrically until you arrive at the truth that we all know from our own experience--everyone does things differently. we can make some generalizations about how a dish is prepared, but in the end, your mom didn't prepare the same dish the same way as her mom, or her neighbor. the more we learn about the cooking of another country, the less we are able to make intellectual distinctions of rightness or wrongness (to say nothing of "authenticity").

in the end, probably the only thing we're left with as writers is to approach a plate with an awareness of the culinary culture it comes from but also with an open mind.

[mongo_jones]

russ,

it was with a lot of trepidation that i re-opened this thread seeing you'd responded to it: i have a lot of respect for your writing and it means a lot to me that you don't think i'm full of it here. one of the things i've always liked about the l.a times food section is that it allows people room to come in and write about things that the regular writers don't know as much about (i remember a long article on indian pickles that egullet's own suvir saran co-wrote some years ago). quite apart from all the things you noted in your response another aspect of the larger "ethnic" cuisine reporting scene as currently set up is that it doesn't always give much space to actual "ethnic" writers themselves.

mongo

[russ parsons]

quite apart from all the things you noted in your response another aspect of the larger "ethnic" cuisine reporting scene as currently set up is that it doesn't always give much space to actual "ethnic" writers themselves.

that is one of my pet peeves. to me, too many stories are written about what "those people" do (never that explicitly of course) rather than "here's what we did in my family."

there are a couple of reasons why that happens. first is the traditional journalistic news model that you send a reporter out to write a story and that reporter can report on anything accurately and well. to an extent this is true, but i do think it's rare that a reporter can capture all the nuance that someone from inside the culture might. which brings us to the second reason, and the much stickier one: it's really hard to find people who can write well about food and it's doubly hard when you start restricting yourself only to people from within the culture. when i was editing, that was a constant frustration. i had some notable successes but i also had a lot of flops (hopefully none of them made the paper in that state).

it's a matter of how you choose to allocate resources, both money and energy. you can send out a reporter you know you can count on to get 90% of the story with a really easy edit. or you can take a chance on someone you don't know, work a week on a piece that gives you an extra 5% and then stay awake at night waiting for calls from other people in that culture telling you what an idiot you were for hiring someone who plainly didn't know what they were talking about.

i have a hard time finding fault with editors who choose to go the other way.