My Ancestors Knew That a Revolution Must Be Fed

For many Asian Americans, food is at once a site of deep joy and connection and an object that articulates a particular kind of un-belonging, a deviance of flavor, smell, and sight under Western standards of “normal” or “good.” This so-called deviance has been crafted for us by colonial and imperial storytelling that renders our food, and by extension, us, as Other.

Imperialists and colonizers alike have storied Asian food as strange, revolting, and/or impure, limiting narratives that have persisted through generations of settler colonialism, extractivism, and Western military domination.

As Soleil Ho argues in her evergreen article “Craving the Other,” many of us have internalized these stories—especially when the cultural rejection of our foodways is folded into our experiences of racialization—and are also actively refusing them, given the second and third generations’ desire to form new attachments to tastes, traditions, and stories that have been forgotten on our behalf.

For me, food has been my strongest anchor in recuperating ancestral relationships in diaspora. A mixed white and South Asian Sikh who is regularly consumed as white, I am the product of my mother’s lineage of white settlers on the Dakota lands and waters of Mni Sota Makoce (called Minnesota) and a Punjabi Sikh settler who moved to the same unceded lands.