Hmmm,..?
After finishing the last chapter of Narayan’s book called “eating cultures�, I am now more in tune to the many complexities at work in the co-modification of cultural cuisine. What used to seem to me like an easy appetite concern is now a vastly more complicated decision with problems centered on the US and “the doctrine of exceptionalism� it employs when it comes to issues surrounding colonialism/imperialism. For England to take a spice like curry and turn it into something it’s not (powder), only to pretend it is in fact the original and that they created it is imperialistic, no doubt. I however don’t think that today eating at an ethnic restaurant could be considered a legitimate form of culinary imperialism, simply because the root of the issue is so far in the past and the issue isn’t relevant to the everyday American looking to grab a bite. It is a fair claim if the US was exploiting culinary immigrant workers or passing ethnic cuisine off as our own, but that isn’t so much the case. To get a tad abstract: perhaps if the argument were on the large scale and the question was pertaining to the entire industry of ethnic foods and the many surrounding politics involved, maybe then I could understand the situation to be imperialistic.