what’s in a name?

daniel parker 12.05.2022

My favorite ingredient has a racist name, and I just found out about it. A couple months back, a friend from Chicago’s bar and culinary scene—who then became a friend of backyard cookouts—sent me a kindly informative message regarding an ingredient that gets frequent use—and mention—in our kitchen and Supper Club menus: kaffir lime leaf.

Most culinary historians adhere to the idea that the term comes from the Arabic word kafir, referring to a non-believer or infidel. In South Africa and elsewhere, the term is a highly offensive racial epithet. It is also suggested, however, that the term, aside from its pejorative reference to black Africans, may have perhaps come from its reference to Asian, Indian, and Indonesian workers in whose cuisine the leaf is prominent. But despite the somewhat murky and conflicting theories as to how this fruit received its name, one thing is clear—that it is highly offensive in certain cultures, and therefore should not be proliferated. (And now knowing this, we will refer to the delectable ingredient as makrut leaf or simply lime leaf.)

Many factors go into deciding menu verbiage, whether for specificity, for style, or visual architecture. The menu description might include preparation methods or descriptors (braised = tender; charred = crisped edges; poached = suppleness; and so on). The selection of ingredients most typically also includes allergens and restrictive foods (nuts, dairy, egg, meat, and so on). But it’s also a way to stylistically present the dish, either by revealing or concealing certain methods or processes, so that the diner will be presented a dish simply in broad strokes, with as minimal flourish as possible, leaving room for creative interpretation and incorporation of ingredients so that the dish will retain a little something for the tah-dah  moment. 

I’d initially listed this ingredient as makrut leaf on a menu (that is, after all, the more common Southeast Asian term), though I suspected few would actually know what the hell a makrut was. So I opted for the more widely recognized  k– lime leaf, thinking that it still carried a sense of Southeast Asian flavor but was more recognizable to the Western palate. A kind of translation, if you will. Translation, as we know, generally tends to prioritize dominant discourses, reframing a text (or idea) within a target culture, even to the point where the original source text is completely erased. Or in this case, where the dominant discourse reinforces the violent and oppressive nature of the term. 

I started working on an essay last November around the time of our Chinese Take-Out Supper Club dinner that explores the inherent violence of translation, which I fully believe extends into menu verbiage and gastronomic lexical choices. Questions of how the naming dishes and what we eat encode assumptions about identity, class, and privilege are central to the essay. (Stay tuned for an edited, printed, published version.)

Food nomenclature and culinary jargon are replete with oppressive and racist underpinnings, at times so entrenched that disentangling them seems nearly impossible (it’s not), and other times when it’s glaringly obvious. With Thanksgiving just behind us, I can’t help but think of a phrase that’s uttered all too often while people prepare to host friends and family for the big feast. We’ve all heard it, most of us have probably said it. I’m sure I have: slaving away in the kitchen. 

It’s devastating how easy it is to diminish the brutally unjust reality of slavery with such casual flippancy. Our words have weight, and they all too often reinforce the racism entrenched in our (white) turns of phrase and poor governance of language. It would be naive to claim that language isn’t perhaps history’s most dangerous tool of oppression. 

So, to our white friends, let’s all do better and hold ourselves accountable, mmk? 

But while we’re on the topic of capitalizing on the exploitation of the (let’s be honest, mostly non-white) body, I’d like to mention that this summer I picked up a copy of Black Food. It’s an astounding collection of work that is part cookbook, part treatise, part poetry about black food and the black bodies that prepare it. Curated by author and food activist Bryant Terry, the work aims “to promote a concept of food that embraces courage, commitment, and self-discovery, and ultimately moves each and all of us to a better place.” Self-discovery comes with high stakes, as it should. How else are we to grow, after all? It’s a collection that, Terry continues, “urges us to stop and dive deeply into the politics of pleasure, of rest.” 

I am deeply enthralled with this idea: the politics of rest. It is our (this time mostly white) privilege that allows us to overwork ourselves, to flaunt a false badge of pride in wearing ourselves to thinness. What I mean is this: as a culture, we have forsaken the value of rest. We have offered it up on the altar of achievement, striving to be overworked and under rested, likely for the sake of someone else’s dollar.

In Black Food we are reminded that rest is cherished, celebrated, because rest represents the space taken as one’s own, a space taken apart from the hegemonic practices that otherwise occlude it. It reminds us that so much of one’s value is determined by what and how much we are able to produce. How much we yield.

With restaurant and hospitality work, in particular, one’s degree of productivity is not only charted by the number of hours they put in, but also by the presence and exploitation of their/our bodies. It’s an industry that praises being overworked, undernourished (ironically), and overindulging in the various coping mechanisms that unsurprisingly result in unhealthy lifestyles and, often, issues of substance abuse. I’ve seen it firsthand. So it seems contrary to the industry, this radical notion that one should be valued not by how much we are able to produce, but perhaps by how much we allow ourselves to yield, rest, and give in to the pleasure of leisure. To offer a form of resistance by taking care of ourselves and of others by permitting our bodies and our minds some form of respite from the grueling grind of relentless work schedules and expectations to always be producing something. To give in and exhale. To find reward in a centering perspective of calmness and rest, which then actually allows us to better take care of others. 

This idea became intrinsic to our theme of YIELD for our November Supper Club. The concept initially came from thinking about the abundance of the fall harvest, generally, and particularly with the dinner falling just on the heels of Thanksgiving, so the idea of ‘leftovers’ was also something we wanted to explore. We wanted to re/use product and byproduct in a way that felt both like good stewardship as well as creative rethinking of dishes and ingredients. But more so to consider what it means to yield, not in terms of what we’re able to produce, but by how we allow ourselves to give into. To hand over and let go of. 

The idea seemed especially apt for TXA TXA and how so many ideas from our two stubborn minds are sometimes at odds, and how only in yielding to another’s idea, or perhaps an idea somewhere in the far off middle, are we able to accomplish something greater than our individual aims. And then there are those who lend their time and their spaces to allow this experience to happen, and those of you who resign your expectations to our creative whims. Only in yielding to the possibilities that lie within acts of trust and collaboration are we able to make this dream a reality. To us, that is true hospitality, when host and guest make this exchange of trust and desire and expectation, allowing for the possibility of some greater collective good. (And then also, there’s the snacks.) So thank you for trusting in us. And so I leave you with this:

Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge…I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust and flowering into a commitment to friendship. —Ivan Illich

∎ □ ∎ □ ∎ □ ∎ □

go with grace

daniel parker 02.04.2022

The year we decided to learn Spanish and anyone we knew was recognizable only by a third of their face, I started working in a Vietnamese kitchen under the guidance and instruction set forth by Jesus. 

Take the fat. Move faster. Cut at bottom. 

The world was slowly coming back to life after a global pandemic shutdown and, between the masks and winter hats, everyone, including the people we knew, looked like strangers. Hugs and indoor dining had been excavated from our vocabularies. In every language, for that matter.

Every night I’d get home late from work and have a dinner of peanut butter and ice cream, ritz crackers and reheated coffee left over from early that morning. Liz would already be sleeping under the light she left on for me. 

Jesus was chubby and wore a backwards Kangol flat cap and sat hunched over  Japanese animé books on his lunch break. Every morning I’d come into work and Jesus would be listening to historias de terror on a YouTube channel on his smartphone. I could recognize words like spirito and los muertos, words that were rich in meaning, even when the world wasn’t seething with a crippling and devastating virus. 

I asked Jesus if he liked scary stories. Si, he told me, but not after 10:30 en la noche. Non se puede dormir, he said, and grabbed both his elbows and pretended to shiver. The voice coming from the speaker was a soft and steady canon with a kind of forlorn acquiescence, delivering a story that felt centuries old and ready to reawaken at any moment. This, combined with the hard chop of carrots—the knife forcefully plunging through the resistant root and landing on the hard acrylic of the cutting board—added to the chilling ambience of the morning ritualistic tale before service began. 

Whether I was skimming the boules of collagen from the surface of the phò, ladling nuoc cham into two-ounce plastic ramekin containers, or slicing the roasted chicken breasts–upside down, like Jesus taught me–Jesus had a gentle demeanor when guiding me on how to hone my kitchen skills. 

Earlier that month we’d decided to try and learn Spanish. We wanted to visit Mexico that winter, partly to escape the Chicago cold, and partly to take a crash course in authentic Mexican cuisine. But with travel restrictions still in place due to the virus, the trip kept getting pushed back. 

One night I came home from work and she’d labeled everything in the kitchen with pink masking tape. Even in the refrigerator. La manteca. El zumo de naranja. El estante de los vinagres. El bloque de cuchillos. La escalera de tijera.

Then one day at work, the clock did not. (Work, I mean.) When it was 12:57, it wasn’t. The second hand was moving at a caterpillar’s pace. No, a snail’s. Maybe they’d replaced the real clock with an, I don’t know, a mood clock. What the heck, I thought. It would be like an eclipse, I said. When the real time passes through the clock time. In that minute, our lives would be totally changed. I reached into my pocket to check the real time on my phone. It’s happening right now! I yelled, in utter disbelief, but somehow not really. I asked Jesus if he felt different. He just shrugged and washed his hands.

The first time I felt a closeness with Jesus was when he asked me to help him schedule an eye appointment. He was uncertain about the additional payment for the contacts part of the exam. He’d gone for years not being able to see clearly the faces 6 feet in front of him. But his mother was dying, and he wanted to see her living, even if her body was quiet and still, eyes closed, swaddled in the back room of his abuela’s home, rather than just living by the shapes. 

 It’s like coloring by numbers, I thought.

Everything in his life was composed of abstract forms. Swaths of color, diminished depths except by stark contrasts of light. He was living by a feeling of things.