Symposium 2005 on Authenticity
a report on proceedings

At the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery’s 24th annual meeting on 2-4 September, 2005, at Oxford Brookes University, where the topic was ‘Authenticity’, the editor-in-chief of Saveur Magazine, Colman Andrews, gave the opening address. He spoke of how every food writer essentially wanted to give his readers ‘authentic recipes’, but that the more he had gone in search of authentic recipes, the more he had encountered ‘warring factions’, ‘regional boosterism’ and ‘a lot of nonsense of all kinds’. He quoted Calvin Trilling: Anyone who doesn’t think that the best hamburger comes from his own home town is a cissy. In all his studies and travels, Andrews said, he had never come across two identical versions of a canonical dish. He noted that the concept of authenticity was ‘elusive and impossible to define’, but nonetheless felt that this shouldn’t stop us trying to be as authentic as possible. He observed that the O.E.D. does not include ‘tradition’ in its definition of authenticity, yet many people use ‘authenticity’ and ‘tradition’ interchangeably; are there inauthentic traditions, he asked?

Andrews quoted John and Matt Thorne saying that ‘authenticity resists accessibility’. But he went on to show how authenticity has been co-opted by fast-food manufacturers as a useful advertising tool – even when what is being advertised is something completely ‘inauthentic’ such as a processed meat (an American brand’s ‘cutting-edge protein’ was an example given). He also reported a supposedly ‘authentic’ tapas bar that sold foie gras lollipops among other things.

There are people who scan the text of authenticity and take away the wrong message, such as a chef in New York who opened a ‘Spanish restaurant’ after having only been to Spain once. He argued that there was something particularly bad about misinterpreting traditional food – denaturing it. If you want to cook some turkey sausage in canola oil with soybeans, fine; but don’t call it Cassoulet: ‘Don’t attack that history-laden monument of a dish’.

The talk concluded with a long example of how tricky it is to remain faithful to an idea of authenticity – the case he gave was of someone going to immense trouble to recreate an authentic dish of ‘ravioli’ in modern America. Whereas the original recipe called for obscure cuts of meat because they were readily available, the recreation of the dish now, using those same cuts of meat, would be extremely time-consuming and expensive, and would probably not taste the same anyway. The character of the dish was not really about precision and accuracy, and because the very act of making it with elusive and expensive ingredients in a cosmopolitan urban setting made it quite different from the original dish, which was based on local, available, everyday ingredients He also cautioned that since many ‘authentic’ dishes were born out of poverty and necessity, many did not taste very good – giving the example of the peasant soup of dried chestnuts cooked in milk. We should not romanticise traditional cuisines. Taken to its logical conclusions like this, the idea of recreating ‘authentic’ dishes outside their original setting is impossible, if not ridiculous. Yet the overall thrust of Andrews’ remarks was that authenticity, for all its ambiguities, was a value worth preserving in food.

Asked by the chairman to comment on Andrews’ paper, Bee Wilson began by saying that Colman had done a brilliant job of drawing out some of the many contradictions in the word ‘authentic’ – from the impossible museum-replica ravioli to the regional boosterism and the multiple meanings and the way the word got corrupted by marketing men. But she was puzzled as to why he was still happy to use the word ‘authentic’ so freely.

‘Authenticity – as Joan Alcock’s paper shows – is a category which always ends up getting consumed in circularity – the tomatoes which are a staple to one generation of Neopolitans would have been viewed as poisonous and novel by previous generations. Authenticity is also rather stifling. It is easy to attack a New Yorker for setting up a Spanish restaurant, as Colman does, but if the chef cooks well, does it matter? There are worse things to do,’ Wilson said (though she has since added a postscript – ‘I am now not sure if I agree with this.’) However, she decided not to attack authenticity either on the grounds of its stiflingness or its circularity, as ‘I had 3 other points to make:

‘1) Authenticity sets the bar too high. The real battle in food is not between the authentic and the inauthentic but between cooking and not-cooking. Authenticity is primarily an indulgence of the rich. In John Whiting’s paper he cites Jane Grigson: “There are enough masterpieces; what we need is a better standard of ordinariness”. Whiting says that the search for authenticity is an “arbitrary and empty ritual”. Christopher Kimball, editor of Cook’s Illustrated, told me that most Americans have never tasted real maple syrup. Kimball himself leads a very authentic life of Jeffersonian/Virgilian rustic simplicity in Vermont, but he can afford to, because he is a very rich man. By contrast, the recipes in his magazine do not seek to be authentic. Cook’s Illustrated is sometimes accused of propagating bland, deracinated versions of classic dishes. Yet Kimball would argue that if this gets people cooking who would otherwise be too intimidated to go near a stove, this doesn’t matter.

‘2) Authenticity might just about make sense in some contexts when applied to food but it has a nasty habit of getting transferred to people and the results, when this happens, are ether absurd or potentially quite creepy.
‘a) To take the absurd first. It is a question of context. You can go to great lengths to make an exact replica of one of Colman’s Catalan or Ligurian recipes – perhaps for an authentic romesco sauce – but how is it authentic if you are eating it in a stainless steel kitchen in Manhattan or Islington? In Ed Behr’s reminiscence of Patience Gray she said that people who made polenta by starting it in cold water were insulting all the good women who had ever made polenta the traditional way. Patience Gray is the only person who could get away with saying this.
‘b) Now the creepy or the potentially creepy. If you move from the idea of authentic cooking to the authentic cook, you can start to have some very dubious thoughts about whose honesty is the greatest and whose the least – and you can start to approach a quasi-Nietzchean or Max Stirner-ish view of the superiority of this uniqueness or that uniqueness. By contrast, the view put forward in William Rubel’s paper is much more sympathetic – that different cooks give food their own authenticity, even when what they are cooking is just a boiled egg – or even pasta with tomato ketchup.

‘3) There are better categories available to us when considering good food than authenticity.
‘a) If what you want to talk about is history, then there is the category of History. An Iraqi cookbook I recently read finds a continuity in certain stews of Baghdad which stretch all the way back to the earliest Yale Cuneiform tablets of Mesopotamia.
‘b) But if what you are using authenticity for is some notion of integrity or purity, there is the much better category of adulteration vs nonadulteration. One of the great things about adulteration is that it doesn’t get applied to people. Adultery, yes; adulteration, no. Unlike authenticity, adulteration really matters, and you don’t get into all the problems of false romanticising that Colman talks about. Does it matter if you use the wrong olive oil when you make pesto? Not desperately. Does it matter if boot polish dye gets added to chilli powder? Yes, very much. Jan Krug Jacobsen’s paper points out how fundamental it is that we should have confidence in our food; and yet how little grounds for confidence there currently is. In modern industrial societies, adulteration is a question which affects all of our food – from e-number laced children’s snacks to the very flesh of factory-farmed animals. It is about the real vs the fake. It is about not being poisoned. Conversely, combating adulteration is about shortening the chain between producer and consumer. It’s about knowing what real butter should taste like, in all its variety.
‘But it is also, as Frederick Accum saw in his Treatise on Adulterations of 1820, a moral question. It is about trust. And if that doesn’t matter, what does?’

Fuchsia Dunlop was also asked by the chairman to respond to Colman Andrews: ‘When I started researching Sichuanese food 10 years ago, I would have found it easy to give an opinion on what was “authentic” Sichuan food - the local, seasonal food most people ate most days at home in restaurants, including certain distinctive local flavours (e.g., ma la - numbing-and-hot) and dishes (e.g., ma po beancurd and Gong Bao chicken).

‘But rapid change in the last 10 years has revolutionised the local diet.

“Sichuan cuisine” is responding to new ingredients, new cultural influences and a new urban landcape by evolving and innovating at an incredible pace. So we have to ask, is this new Sichuan cuisine less “authentic”? Is globalisation “destroying” Sichuanese cuisine? Or is it just the natural and inevitable response of a dynamic and confident culinary tradition to new
influences?

‘On the one hand, change is inevitable. The “authentic” Sichuanese cuisine I knew 10 years ago was itself a hybrid born of historical patterns of travel, immigration and agricultural development (e.g., the chilli, one of the hallmarks of Sichuan cooking, being a New World crop). Ancient and modern have always coexisted. Purity is an illusion. “Authentic” is a slippery category, elusive when you try to define it. And it says more about us than about the food in question (modern, urban, cosmopolitan feelings of loss, dislocation, fear of blandness).

‘But on the other hand, the current rapid pace of change in eating habits does raise some real concerns - eg food miles, climate change, environmental degradation. Losing touch with native traditions and “authentic” local cooking has some real and worrying effects (to which things like Slow Food are a response). So perhaps we should be a bit conservative after all.

‘Finally - I made the point that writing about “authentic” culinary cultures could itself be seen as “inauthentic”. Just as people making wildlife TV documentaries have to work hard to avoid the pylons, roads, pollution etc when showing an animal in its “natural” habitat, so food-writers have to consciously avoid reality when writing lovingly and nostagically about
“authentic” cuisines. When I write about China, I am writing about the “authentic” in the sense that I write about real people, recipes and places, but I don’t write about the appalling pollution in Chinese cities, the growing industrialisation of food production etc. When we talk about “authentic” cuisines, aren't we blinding ourselves to reality in some kind of escapist fantasy - in the modern context, is the “authentic” inauthentic after all?’

-PAUL LEVY