by Lorraine Chuen

Some of us will remember when Bon Appetit Magazine caused an uproar last September for publishing an article and video featuring Tyler Akin, a white chef, titled “PSA: This is How You Should Be Eating Pho”. The backlash, in my opinion, was justified: that a white chef should be considered an authority on how food from other cultures is consumed is both absurd and worthy of outrage. But the reality is, Akin is far from being the first chef to tell racialized folks how to eat their food.

For instance, simply take a glance at a few critically acclaimed chefs/food writers and their online biographies, and you’ll learn that Fuchsia Dunlop, Nina Simonds, and Carolyn Phillips (among many others) have all made a career out of specializing in Chinese cuisine, despite their whiteness. You don’t need to read closely to quickly learn that they love calling themselves authorities on the food of others. According to her website, Nina Simonds is ‘one of the country’s top authorities on Asian cooking.’ Fuschia Dunlop tops Nina - her website includes a quote saying that she is ‘a world authority on Chinese cooking’.

It’s not just Chinese food. Most foodies have likely heard of Rick Bayless. After spending four years travelling through Mexico to study their culinary traditions and ‘test recipes’, Bayless returned to America to build a culinary empire. Bayless has since published several cookbooks, owns many critically acclaimed restaurants, and is on the eleventh season of his own television show (“Mexico: One Plate at a Time”), all focusing on traditional Mexican cuisine.

I do not doubt that these people are talented chefs. But what irks me is that many will argue that they deserve the title of ‘authority’, and that despite their whiteness, they are hardly foreigners. After all, many of these chefs have years of classical training (or personal study) in the countries they specialize in. They’ve learned the language! They know the people! They’ve immersed themselves in the culture! They’ve studied the craft! How positively adventurous! How very admirable! But here’s the thing: my parents—and every other immigrant—moved to a new country and learned the language, got to know the people, adopted their way of life, simply because they were forced to, and not because it was fun or exotic or interesting or something that they were curious or passionate about. How come we don’t see swaths of immigrants being publicly lauded for culturally assimilating?

It’s only special when White people do it, I guess.

I also want to draw attention to the entrepreneurial food world, where we encounter Lee’s Ghee, the ghee business launched by former model Lee Dares. Ghee has always been used in Indian cooking, but when the white Dares packages it up in a jar and dresses it up in ‘used saris’, it becomes artisanal, something for foodies to enjoy, perhaps the next big thing to spread on bread, like avocado-toast. In one article, Dares briefly attributes her success to the wisdom and tutelage of ‘elderly Indian women’ whom she met on a seven week internship in India, but of course, they aren’t the stars or the ones profiting from her business. The ‘elderly Indian ladies’ are just name-dropped to make the product seem more ‘authentic’ (but not really name-dropped, even, since of course, they’re never given names).

At this point, it may seem like I am cherry-picking, merely basing my observations off a few anecdotes. Anticipating this, I wondered if it would be possible to quantify the extent to which white chefs consider themselves authority figures on the cuisines of other cultures. To do so, I scraped recipes from the New York Times Cooking online recipes collection, which is a searchable database containing over 17,000 recipes with an enormously wide reach - the NYTFood Twitter account has over 1.25 million followers. Each recipe from the database is given a number of tags to make it searchable; and many of these recipes have tags that flag the ‘ethnicity’ of the cuisine. If you filter your search results to Chinese cuisine, for example, you’ll get a compilation of over 260 recipes.

I wanted to know: just how many of these Chinese recipes were authored by Chinese chefs or food writers? Indian recipes by Indian chefs? Caribbean recipes by Caribbean food writers? Who is getting paid to write these recipes, and who is given a platform to share them? Ultimately, who is given the opportunity to write about how these dishes should be cooked?

If we have learned anything from Lee Dares, Fuschia Dunlop, and Rick Bayless, the answer is somehow both outlandish and wildly predictable: overwhelmingly, white people.

(Update: To clarify, note that the variable for "author" here was taken as the author listed under the by-line. Sometimes the recipe is taken from a different source - i.e. not originally by the by-line author, who is writing about the dish more generally. See the methodological notes section for more details**)

Of the 263 entries under the “Chinese” recipe filter, almost 90% have White people listed as author in the byline. For instance, ‘Vegetarian Mapo Tofu’ is by David Tanis, a professional chef who doesn’t appear to specialize in any ethnic cuisine but authors several of the recipes in this category. Only 10% of the recipes are authored by Chinese writers (and these recipes are authored by the same 5 Chinese people: Gish Jen, Ken Hom, Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, Elaine Louie, and Joyce Howe).