With about 13 minutes to go in his Netflix special “Mohammed in Texas,” Mo Amer does a bit about hummus in which he rails against the proliferation of low-quality, prepackaged hummus. I love Amer. I love his comedy. I love his show. I love his ethos. He boils hummus down to the essential four ingredients and allows for an optional fifth. You probably hear a “but” coming because that’s how this trope works: “I really like X’s take on Y, but [insert justification for your own opinion].” I’m going to try not to do that. Or maybe you think I’m going to continue raving about hummus and offer my own take on hummus or even a recipe. I’m going to try not to do that, either. The truth is, there’s no justification for me talking authoritatively about hummus recipes or culture. I will say this: I only like the classic hummus with five ingredients, but this was not always the case.
I don’t really know what to say about most things,1 but I do know that comedy is really good at finding the cracks in the facades of symbolic systems. Stand-up can point out hypocrisies and ironies and points of tension really well because the performance apparatus is loose and flexible. It’s usually a person talking into a microphone. The audience can be big or small. It can be both scripted and/or spontaneous. Because of the form and the solo nature of it, stand-ups can amplify tensions by not picking a team or by switching teams in the middle of a bit. Amer is clearly on team hummus, but he amplifies the tension around hummus in America by pointing out that Americans love “hummus,” but the hummus we love often isn’t hummus. People are borrowing the word “hummus” to hawk their own thing. Sometimes, it’s a twist-on-a-classic thing. Other times it’s a chocolate dip.
I am guilty of this. Back in the late 90s, I worked at a fusion restaurant and I made “pink hummus,” (not my recipe) which was made with red beans and had both tahini and miso and cumin in it. But red bean hummus, as Amer points out, isn’t technically hummus. Calling it hummus is cultural appropriation. I have been guilty of cultural appropriation more times than I care to admit, often in ways far worse than the pink hummus example. I am sorry for this. I get why people want to borrow other cultures’ famous dishes and twist and spin them, but I’m often kind of appalled now, especially when I have been complicit in the act. But I wasn’t appalled back then.
The restaurant I worked at was a “one-world” fusion concept. The idea was cultural exchange. It felt interesting and exciting and, for a young cook, it was an introduction to many new flavors. It was there that I tasted–for the first time–truffles, fish sauce, calf’s liver, squid steaks, foie gras, and jerk chicken, to name a few ingredients. (Yes, the jerk chicken was an ingredient on a pizza.) It wasn’t my menu. They weren’t my recipes. I am compelled to say that because, today, the restaurant would probably not work in the same way. The chef was a white male. Many of the cooks were white men, although there were several Hispanic male cooks. One of the sous chefs was a really rad woman and the other was an Hispanic man. There were good female cooks. So it wasn’t devoid of diversity. I only met the owners in passing once. They could have been diverse in ways that I didn’t realize. That said, the place had the same issues that many fusion restaurants of the era had: it pulled from so many cultures that it couldn’t possibly belong to any of them, other than the America of the late ’90s. That America, however, wasn’t a place. It was a moment. To this day, any time I smell truffle oil, it smells like the ’90s in all its artificiality. It’s not a smell I chase.
That specific moment in the late ’90s and early ’00s, very much shaped the young adult I was becoming. Working at a fusion restaurant allowed me to continue down a path that I could have veered off of. I could have been, like Amer, looking for the flavor profiles that came from my own life and traditions. Instead, I was looking for exotic ingredients the way a tourist looks for souvenirs to bring home. This, unfortunately, is part of my own cultural experience. My dad worked for the airlines. His dad worked for the airlines. His second wife worked (for a time) for the airlines. His sister (very briefly) worked for the airlines. Our whole family spent much of my childhood waiting around airports, non-revving it. I had been to Saudi Arabia, where my grandfather lived and worked, before I was five. I don’t know if I tried hummus, but I do remember eating some really awesome friend chicken made by another Mohammad. A fusion restaurant seemed logical given my upbringing.
Before I learned to cook in a fusion restaurant, I learned from my grandmother on my Dad’s side, whose recipe collection and cookbooks I inherited as an adult. Her collection is full of books and recipes from around the world, and I remember the recipes and the adaptations she made to suit the tastes of her grandchildren. Chicken Satay became Peanut Butter Chicken. Pita bread became pizza crusts. Madeleines were dipped in chocolate and served with milk, not decorated with jam and served with tea. Shrimp toasts were made with mayo. Fajitas might be chicken or shrimp, instead of the more traditional faja, the belt of beef skirt steak. Despite being the poor daughter of a West Virginia coal miner, she was ultimately able to travel and see the world and share her travels with us through food. She did not, however, celebrate the food of her upbringing. It wasn’t until I met my wife, whose people also come from West Virginia, that I tried a Pepperoni Roll. There are lots of ways to relate to the food of your culture, and lots of reasons why you might choose one path or the other.
So tourism is part of my culture. I love the hospitality and tourism industries, but being a third-generation beneficiary of those industries–and being a white, middle-aged, middle-class man–puts me in a particular kind of situation when it comes to talking about food (or anything for that matter). I have to tread carefully. I’m fine with that. I have to admit that much of the food I love to cook and eat is from another culture and that I can’t claim expertise on it. I’m fine with that, too. I also have to do the cultural work of finding my own thing and offering it up in exchange for all cuisines I’ve been taught about, exposed to, nourished and excited by. The only cultural touchstones like hummus that I can point to and say, authoritatively, “these are the foods of my people,” are casserole and white bread. It’s hard to say anything definitive about either of those, but I’ll bet I can find some words.
Notes
1 I only have 10,000 hours in a few things, and cooking at home and churning out words are two of them. This does not mean I’m an expert on either. I don’t buy Malcolm Gladwell’s narrative of Anders Ericsson’s research on mastery. I don’t believe in mastery. Like many folks these days, I don’t even like the word “mastery.” I just use this cultural touchstone to suggest that I’ve spent a lot of time writing and cooking and, presumably, that time spent should amount to something. But there’s also the sunk-cost fallacy to consider. Just because I’ve spent the time doing those things, it doesn’t follow that I should continue doing those things in any aspirational way. I have experience with food. Or at least I have a current food handler’s card, just in case. I’ve cooked in restaurants and commercial kitchens, albeit decades ago. I’ve volunteered at food-related non-profits, but they probably helped me more than I helped them. I’ve written about food, but, again, it was a while ago and it hasn’t, like, made me money or anything. I did a food-related podcast for a minute, but it was basically project to learn audio recording technologies. I wrote a dissertation on rhetoric and food, but it was too undisciplined for the field of rhetoric and composition, too rhet/comp for American studies, and too niche for general food media. But even after all that, I’m still interested in food and the way that it moves and the way that communication moves with it. Why write about food publicly, then? I don’t know. Why do people run for fun and exercise in public? The public part is an experiment, I guess.