To the Briar Patch
On the Limits of Food as Protest
There’s a folktale, most commonly attributed to the rich lexicon of Black Southern storytelling, that I’d like to share: the tale of Br’er Rabbit and the Tar Baby. There are many versions of the story, and the one told to me goes like this:
Br’er Rabbit is going about his day when he comes across a figure in a field wearing his clothes. He doesn’t know this figure is a doll made out of tar by his nemesis Br’er Fox, so he says “Hey, why are you wearing my clothes? Give me back my clothes” and the figure of course is made of tar so he can’t respond, but the hot sun is slowly melting the tar and makes the figure seem alive, so Br’er Rabbit becomes affronted at being ignored by this apparent thief. He punches the Tar Baby and his front paw gets stuck. He says “hey let go of me,” but of course the Tar Baby just keeps being a Tar Baby and moving ever so slowly but not letting go of Br’er Rabbit’s paw, so Br’er Rabbit gets more affronted and punches it again, and his other paw gets stuck. Then he kicks it and his foot gets stuck too, and before he knows it he can’t move. And then he dies, trapped in the tar.
My friend Kale, who let me borrow this allegory, is a Black storyteller, and the Tar Baby is our shorthand for decoys deployed by white supremacist capitalism.
“That’s a Tar Baby,” Kale will often remind me when I find myself getting worked up over something on social media. “Don’t punch the Tar Baby”
This piece is me, squaring up and punching a Tar Baby, to demonstrate what that looks like so we can all stop fucking doing it.
~~~
You’re here because you already know about the popular Instagram account The God of Cookery, and I’m not here to rehash any of the recent controversies Clarence Kwan, the person behind the account, has been involved in, including my own tussle with him. Instead, I’m trying to make sense of The God of Cookery as a dark refraction, or metastization, of the things we purport to fight for. How does accountability-seeking become vigilantism? How does speaking up turn into clout-chasing? How does anti-racism become anti-Blackness?
I’m interested in The God of Cookery in the same way that I’m interested in the street in front of the Brooklyn courthouse that got renamed BLM Way at some point last year: a horrified, gaping interest in what appears to be everything wrong with our current moment. Why we as a country cannot fucking stop being anti-Black and also cannot seem to recognize when we’re being taken for a ride (these two things seem closely connected).
~~~
The first red flag for me was the $50 zine. It was September 2020, and a friend had just sent me a link to an Instagram account called The God of Cookery that was selling a recipe booklet called Chinese Protest Recipes.” The stated goals of the project were to “support BLM, raise awareness about food racism, and resist through Chinese food”
Screenshots of the pages showed Chinese-American recipes with names like “FTP Fried Rice,” “ACAB Crabs,” and “Anti-Racist A-Choy” interspersed with personal backstory, photos of Civil Rights protests, and block text blaring “BLACK LIVES MATTER,” and “IF YOU”RE A COP YOU DO NOT HAVE PERMISSION TO COOK THIS.” In content, tone, and aesthetic (scratchy, black and white, freewheeling with font choice), this booklet was clearly modeled after zines, which have long been used by anarchist organizers and mutual aid groups to disseminate information outside of traditional publishing.
“Wokewashing or actual skills?” my friend asked.
Disclosure: I did not shell out the $50 and so I have not read Chinese Protest Recipes in its entirety, but as a Chinese recipe developer with anarchist leanings, I was curious enough to do a close read of The God of Cookery’s Instagram, and what I saw made me deeply suspicious.
Firstly, $50 is what a Taschen cookbook costs; a $50 zine is useless as any sort of grassroots effort. Therefore, putting a $50 price tag on a cheaply produced cookbook that co-opts zine aesthetics and anarchist politics is just wokewashing. Kwan appears to have donated most of the proceeds from the book to Color of Change, which meant the whole project was just another tidy neoliberal fundraiser. But, I guess a random Asian dude hawking a self-published booklet of generic Chinese recipes to raise money for a nonprofit would not have gotten the same attention in the era of Corporate BLM as selling something called “ACAB Crab.”
I also wondered what exactly made a recipe a “protest recipe,” aside from what Kwan had chosen to name it. The A-choy recipe with doufuru provided one thesis: “if you want to be anti-racist, you have to eat the funky stuff.” Was abolishing the carceral police state really as simple as consuming fermented tofu? I’m being facetious, but not by all that much: a series of Kwan’s Stories last fall called out white people for not “eating like an ally,” including the sentence: “Not supporting BIPOC restaurants, not having a diverse diet and eating primarily at white-owned, coolguy restaurants are tantamount to an act of culinary violence.”
Since 2020, police abolition has become a mainstream idea. When radical ideas meet the mainstream, sometimes they lose meaning. They become co-opted and defanged by corporations and people suggesting that liberation is just a matter of consuming the right thing. I am queasy at Kwan’s slick elision of “culinary violence” with the real violence of the police state, and more so by the suggestion that we can somehow eat our way out of the latter. As one onlooker put to me over DM, “if we can all just make protest jerk chicken or jollof rice, cops and capitalists would be thrilled.”
~~~
As I followed The God of Cookery over the next few months, the impression that solidified was of someone very young and very angry, who based his brand as a rapidly ascendant food influencer on calling out examples of whitewashing and cultural appropriation (there are now 7 highlights full of content labeled “White Food”). Aside from putting BLM hashtags on photos of Chinese food, The God of Cookery didn’t talk about the abolition movement. Overwhelmingly, his writing consisted of calling out perceived slights to Asian food. In total, it all seemed rooted in insecurity rather than solidarity.
I can relate to feeling protective over Chinese food, I used to write about it here. But I started outgrowing those feelings, or at least wanting to complicate them, when I went to cooking school in China. In school, each class was structured around a classic dish that illustrated a particular concept: squirrel fish and flowering kidneys for knife work, fish-fragrant eggplant for flavor balance, kung pao chicken for velveting, and so on. The recipes drew from techniques and foodways from all over China, and each lesson was underscored by the same point: what we were learning were the textbook versions of each dish, and we’d be hard-pressed to find them out in the real world.
Chefs have to be competitive in an ever-changing market, my teachers explained, and are expected to innovate constantly. Moreover, regional tweaks can always be expected: many hot and numbing Sichuanese dishes become sweeter when they leave Sichuan. (“And in America, everything gets sugar”)
This was liberating to hear. There at the heart, the gatekeepers of authenticity simply shrugged and flung open the doors.
I thought of my teachers when Kwan called out Rebecca Firth of the Displaced Housewife Instagram for sharing a recipe for mooncakes filled with chocolate. He accused her of choosing “willful ignorance that catered to your own personal white comfort and white palettes [sic],” of “engaging in white supremacy,” “whitewashing,” “cultural erasure,” and suggested that Firth should lose sleep and take down her account. These accusations rested on Kwan’s authoritatively stated yet untrue generalizations about mooncakes: that they have to have an egg yolk inside, that they’re not made at home, etc. Yet, if Kwan has walked into a Chinese grocery store anytime in the last 10 years (and it’s hard to believe that he hasn’t), he would have seen a plethora of mooncakes with newfangled fillings like ice cream, bubble tea, seafood, cheesecake, and yes, chocolate (Chinese people love Ferrero Rocher).
Chinese cuisine, like any other, is dynamic. I left cooking school knowing how to slice ginger into threads so thin that they almost disappeared when submerged in water, but the most lasting lesson was witnessing what a lack of insecurity around my culture looked like. It would be news to my teachers, and for that matter anyone else in my Chinese community, that “our culture is dying,” as Kwan wrote on one of his posts, due to either lack of attention from white people or the wrong kind of attention from white people.
Call it #diasporaproblems, this fretting over owning food when you are disconnected from ancestral land and language. And call it #Americaproblems, actually, because everyone who lives here is part of a diaspora or was displaced by one.
Indeed, Kwan’s posts before May 2020 make me a little sad. They consist of the same banal photos of Chinese food, except the captions back then were apolitical. One post from March 2020 is a photo of pork belly hanging on a balcony. The caption says “Dad’s homemade, air-dried, Chinese balcony bacon. So embarrassing but maybe that’s just my programming.”
I often wondered, whenever Kwan’s anger seemed disproportionate to the point of absurdity (like the time he dragged someone for geotagging Chinatown in a photo of non-Chinese food), whom he was truly angry at. Was this someone who felt that last year’s protests against white supremacy finally presented an opening to claim his food and claim his heritage? Was his anger the only real connection he could legitimately establish between The God of Cookery, a cultural pride project, and Black Lives Matter, the largest radical movement of our generation?
Perhaps cultural pride is one precondition to sovereignty, but isn’t that all it is?
~~~
I empathize with anger, of course I do, but anger cannot be the only basis for solidarity, nor the start and end of activism. Moreover, Kwan’s anger feels stifling rather than energizing, and I think it’s because getting angry at cultural appropriation is like punching that Tar Baby. White establishments can and should repatriate land, money, and looted objects, but cultural products like food, music, and fashion are not like that. They are ideas that can be plagiarized, but they are simply too alive to guard. If you wanted to, you could find endless cases over which to litigate appreciation vs. appropriation, cultural exchange vs. co-option.
In short, you could spend a lifetime calling out examples of appropriation, but the thing is, white supremacist capitalism is indifferent to anger. The Tar Baby is not going to give you your shit back, and you’ll die expending your precious energy falling for its taunts. White supremacy keeps us responding to it rather than focusing on finding each other, in solidarity and in play, to create new possibilities.
What happens when we stop punching the Tar Baby? Perhaps as the next small step, we follow the trail to Br’er Fox. What we’re really talking about when we talk about cultural appropriation is access to capital. If an ethnic food or recipe is an asset that can be monetized (and that seems to be why we care about guarding it), we have to be clear-eyed on the capitalism of it all. In one post from September 2020, The God of Cookery posted a photo of Cantonese barbeque with the caption: “If traditional BIPOC food is to be elevated, we should be the ones to do it. I would start by pricing this Char Siu and Roast Duck combo on rice at $24.”
I don’t think self-gentrifying gets us free. For context, Asian-Americans have the highest poverty rates in New York (where I live), and Chinese people are the second-largest undocumented population. So, if we - Asian-Americans - take the mantle, reap the profits, where are they going? Will they contribute to the ongoing gentrification, carceral development, and artwashing of New York’s Chinatown by Chinese-American families? Kwan is right that the price tag on a food usually correlates to how much white people respect it, so then who is the $50 zine for? Who is the $24 char siu for? Who and what is all this anger for?
~~~
I thought that Kwan was young (he’s actually a mid-career professional) because so much of this brand of Asian American activism he typifies feels adolescent. Perhaps this is a leap, but I think we children of immigrants often associate motherland with our actual mothers and fathers (and all the baggage therein), and coming to America traps us in suspended adolescence. It reads as an insecurity and a petulance that comes from not knowing your place in the world (e.g. “caught between Black and white” or “caught between Asia and America”) and not knowing what to do about that besides emote angst and punch Tar Babies.
It also manifests as scarcity-mindedness, in that we feel like we have to defend this uncertain position in America by guarding every fucking thing because we don’t know how to renew ourselves. To be clear, Asians in America are actively being forced to choose between Black solidarity and white supremacy, and the scarcity mindset is a powerful recruitment tool for the latter. It tells us that the only option to some white guy charging $30 for barbeque is that we should compete by also charging $30 for barbeque. It tells us that a pro-cop Asian mayor is a good thing because representation is all we deserve.
Most of all, a false sense of scarcity begets an enthrallment with false security: scarcity turns us into cops against each other.
Over the months, I watched this play out with The God of Cookery. His callout goalposts kept shifting in contradictory ways: you’re not consuming enough ethnic food, or you’re tainting ethnic food with your white gaze; you’re not publishing enough BIPOC writers, or the BIPOC writers don’t count because they’re white-facing...because they’ve been published. I came to realize that the incoherence was not a mark of immaturity but an intentional trap. He was adopting cop tactics on purpose - but why?
As the frantic apologies from the people he called out mounted next to his increasingly high-profile accolades and interviews, I realized The God of Cookery was actually a one-man social justice industrial complex in action. One of the most observable outcomes of last summer’s protests has been that it’s extremely easy to extract guilt, and with it, money, from white people. In fact, Kwan’s thesis of eating as allyship reminds me of nothing so much as “Buy Black” listicles that pop up every time there’s another police murder. I now believe that mining white guilt is the true project behind The God of Cookery. After all, there’s a curious pattern of white creators who have been called out by Kwan first posting very public apologies, and then effusively promoting Chinese Protest Recipes (see: Alison Roman). These high-profile promotions in turn generate opportunities and accolades ranging from podcast appearances to promotional media coverage to museum honors. The more mainstream validation he received, the more followers he gained, and the more powerful his callouts became.
This kind of behavior does not get us free. This kind of behavior is solidarity-destroying, because it doesn’t actually serve anyone except the person doing it. This was never clearer than when Kwan accused journalist Jenee Harris of endangering Black/Asian solidarity herself for not knowing what chicken rice was. It seems too obvious to even need saying: BIPOC solidarity does NOT start with food, it’s certainly not a tit-for-tat game, and being ignorant about a specific food is not racism. To conflate such things, on the other hand, makes us all dumber.
(Like, how did we spend all of the last year (some of us many more) dutifully absorbing the lesson that ignorance/prejudice/bias/bigotry are all not the same as racism, because racism requires institutional power, and then promptly forget it all to shriek about chicken rice? “Food racism”? Not a thing!)
It’s all very stupid, and yet, I can’t just ignore this shit because it’s not just about chicken rice. Historically, policing Black people is how immigrants were initiated into whiteness and thus allowed access to power. Asian Americans are being recruited into that process now. If I have correctly identified Kwan’s anger as a reaction against being denied capital and power as an Asian man, he would not be the first Asian American to let that anger metastasize into anti-Blackness. It turns out that “ACAB” is incompatible with appointing yourself the Asian American diaspora’s Chief Food Cop.
Once you adopt cop tactics to accumulate capital for yourself, once you weaponize your own identity as BIPOC against other BIPOC, you’ve become the Tar Baby. You cannot act out of compassion or even genuine anger, much less a radical politic. The Tar Baby only has the instinct to absorb more of our attention and our resources.
~~~
In the most popular version of the Tar Baby story, Br’er Fox actually comes along at the end, and the trapped Br’er Rabbit begs Br’er Fox to do anything except throw him in the briar patch, so of course that’s what Br’er Fox does. What Br’er Fox doesn’t know is that rabbits thrive in briar patches, so Br’er Rabbit escapes happily into the thicket to live and play and make more rabbits.
Enslaved African people knew that survival depended on not playing the white man’s game. I think surviving and thriving today requires the same of all BIPOC. To be a person of color and expend anger on white indifference is exhausting. It thieves joy from your soul. How can one create from a defensive crouch, or with our hands in tar?
Our people are alive and waiting in the briar patch, and as long as we find each other there, our cultures cannot die.
