Asia certainly offers the world fantastic cuisine of all kinds. Consider first some of their serious food for thought.
Asia's intellectual chefs stir minds with heady geopolitical thinking. One of the region's four-star intellectuals is Singapore's Kishore Mahbubani. He is what might be called a master fusion chef of saucy political ideas. 'Asia will demonstrate that the Western domination of world history over the last 200 years has been an aberration,' he writes in Foreign Policy.
Asia is rising, insists this public intellectual, and the West has to learn how to share power, not hog it - just like diners sharing a food-laden lazy Susan. Unilaterally shoving course after course into one's mouth with nary a look right or left at others will just not cut it in the new fusion order.
Let me try an analogy of another kind: Asian cuisines are generally fabulous, and they are usually very healthy. But, as a new study of eating habits and nutrition points out, America's food fusion movement is Americanising Asian food in an unhealthy way. The bestselling book - The End Of Overeating: Taking Control Of The Insatiable American Appetite - stumps for a new world eating order in which more and more Americans go Asian with their appetites.
This is the view of former commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration, Dr David Kessler. In lean prose, he singles out for applause the basic Japanese food grouping - fish, soya, miso, rice and veggies - but has no kudos for mass-produced American foods. Indeed, in the severe tone of a family doctor, Dr Kessler rails at America for its nutritional imperialism. It steals Asian cuisines, brings them over with fanfare, and then absolutely destroys them with harmful additions or additives.
His dishonour roll is led by the Americanised teriyaki sauce, which has been transformed into a sickly sweet, body-marinating mayhem of soya sauce and rice wine - 'far sweeter than anything in Japan', Dr Kessler writes, and decidedly unhealthy.
He trashes the American penchant for large quantities of mayonnaise-topped tempura shrimp, wrapped in rice as a faux sushi roll. The good doctor says Americans imperialise so many world cuisines that they should be ashamed of themselves.
'American Chinese food is not Chinese,' he complains. The classic Chinese dish General Tso's Chicken, for example, after mass-Americanisation, has been poisoned with sugar. 'Hunan cuisine is not sweet,' he rails.
His take on fast-Asian-food chains such as Panda Express, is that their menus corrupt otherwise healthy Asian dishes with piles of sugar and fat. And all across America, trendy 'pan-Asian' restaurants systematically slaughter every cuisine they touch.
It's like watching General Patton enter every national kitchen in Asia with his tank.
You see the point. Fusion cuisine, like fusion geopolitics, can be good for our health, but only depending on how carefully it is all put together. The trick is to take the best of the East and combine it with the best of the West. Go the other way around - the best of one with the worst of another - and you have major mishmash and nutritional meltdown.
Sure, not all American makeovers of Asian things are bad. Some American mothers are trying to lure their kids into accepting Japanese-style Bento boxes as their school lunch. They are cleverly disguising the otherwise rather minimalist but extremely healthy fare - rice, pickled veggies, and a small portion of meat or fish - with Madison Avenue presentations. The boiled egg gets painted like a bunny with a carrot sticking out. Veggies are hammered into delectable little stars with a cookie cutter. The Japanese lunch box itself is decorated with cartoon characters.
Good old imaginative American packaging trying to save the child!
This informal mothers' movement is a response to the challenge of raising children nutritionally in America. It shows mums battling the fast-food chains and pushing back on the bulbous norms of the American diet. A recent New York Times article suggested that the effort might become a helpful national trend.
The metaphor of the jazzed-up bento box also serves as a useful reminder that East-West fusion can prove a marvel of globalisation, when it is not a train wreck of colliding cuisines. According to Professor Mahbubani, Asia is rising in part because 'the calibre of Asia's geopolitical thinkers is today superior to that of their Western counterparts'.
That may well be, but obviously he hasn't had the honour of seeing best-thinking American mothers in forward-looking fusion action. They don't want their kids losing the battle of the bulge. Maybe Americans should put some of these hell-Bento mothers in charge of East-West geopolitical fusion as well.
Originally published September 12, 2009 in The Straits Times (Singapore)
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