Racial stereotyping of food

Food is quite on the front burner of one’s mind these days after golfer Sergio Garcia’s racial slur of inviting Tiger Woods over for dinner where hot on the menu for his eyes and palate only would be fried chicken.

Fried chicken is such a universal delicacy especially since Colonel Sanders burnt his KFC brand on to it that it came as a surprise that behind the statement, behind Garcia’s invitation there was a derogatory connotation attached to it from a racial stereotyping standpoint.

Before the rearing of chicken became a corporate venture of multi-national dimension most people ate chicken festively once a week on a Sunday. Sunday lunch was a microcosmic preview of the culinary extravaganza provided on Christmas and New Year’s Day.

In rural communities, that chicken you ate, you savoured, was most likely a home-grown product. Because it passed through one’s hand in the way of personally rearing it, eating it took on something of a quasi-cannibalistic ritual; it took some guts to do so.

I remember being in Guyana in the nineties when KFC opened its first outlet in Georgetown and it still remains in my mind as a gladiatorial spectacle the rush of the natives there trying to get in for their first taste of the Colonel’s finger licking hand. At any given time, the rush hour line was way out the building and down the streets for several blocks.

And so one knows this and screeches to a halt until it is communicated that fried chicken was associated with black plantation life in America and one further suspects with black slavery.

John T Edge a white Georgia-born food writer and the Director of the Southern Foodway’s Alliance at Ole Miss, wrote a whole book about fried chicken called Fried Chicken: An American Story. Edge explains how fried chicken went from plantation to KFC and the rest of the world. He further explains that you could get in America, Korean, Italian and Latin-American fried chicken. Tiger Woods is seemingly taking it in good strides – he being not a novice to controversy and with his name itself being a subject of some hilarity. For instance, asked what he thought of Tiger Woods in the young golfer’s earliest days, the great Colin Montgomery, not having ever heard of Woods, said he had no idea; he never played there.

But back to a place we know and might remember as also having been guilty of racial stereotyping of food. All Indians of the less enlightened past would remember how it was a disgrace for them to be caught eating roti by non-Indians; how lunch-time in school for example was not a happy hour, but a time to dread; a time to find a hole to go into, a rock to hide under to hurriedly swallow it down before some bread and butter “elitist” caught them and started the chant: Coolie, Coolie come for roti...

I use that six-letter C-word under the authority of poetic licence. I use it because we keep saying where racial matters are concerned we would be wrong to sweep its reality under the carpet. I use it publicly because sometimes in private I say it – when, for instance, a brethren or sistren goes to the US Embassy, gets a three-months visa and comes back that very day with an Obama-esque accent. The need to describe such a one as one is irrepressible.

Dal, that porridge that provides the sauce for rice in Indian meals was once used by non-Indians to describe their physical frailty in the most derogatory way. When an Indian was small-bodied and sport-challenged he was accused of having too much dal water.

When the chutney singer boasted he was a dal-belly Indian, not only did he make it reversible in a proud way, as Indians today are saying that they are indeed recalcitrant, but he was acknowledging how dal today is a most accepted item in our national menu.

A chicken roti and two doubles and a Solo have become the chorus lines at Indian food outlets throughout the country. One remembers reading Ian Chappell admitting that whenever he hears he is to visit Trinidad, he relishes the thought of visiting a popular PoS roti shop where he could order his all-time favourite food: a Trini chicken/roti.

Indian food now ranks right alongside our great successes in our national pride.

lsiddh@yahoo.com