By Tom Plate
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, the former U.N. Ambassador and now Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.
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," the pleasantly punchy policy journal out of Washington. ``With China and India moving once again to center stage, we will return to the historical norm in which these countries are the world's two largest economies, as they were for 1,800 years."
His book ``The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East" predicts a new world order that's as much Asian as Western. Asia is rising, insists this public intellectual, and the West has to learn how to share power, not hog it - just like diners sharing off 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 Americanizing 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 U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Dr. David Kessler. In lean prose, he singles out for applause the basic Japanese food grouping: fish, soy, miso, rice and veggies; but has no kudos for mass-produced American foods. Indeed, with the severe tone of the family doctor trying to get grandpa to get off the (alcohol) sauce, Dr. Kessler rails at America for its nutritional imperialism. We steal Asian cuisines, bring them here with fanfare, and then absolutely destroy them with harmful additions or additives.
His dishonor roll is led by the example of Americanized teriyaki sauce, which is transformed into a sickly-sweet, body-marinating mayhem of soy sauce and rice wine, ``far sweeter than anything in Japan," Kessler writes, and decidedly un-good for your health. He trashes our penchant for large quantities of mayonnaise-topped tempura shrimp, wrapped evilly in rice as a faux sushi roll.
The good doc says we Americans imperialize so many world cuisines that we should be ashamed of ourselves. ``American Chinese food is not Chinese," he complains. The classic Chinese dish General Tso's Chicken, after mass-Americanization, is 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, well marketed and much ballyhooed by the media, 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 skillfully and 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 ― with the worst of the West ― and you have major mishmash and nutritional meltdown.
Sure, not all American makeovers of Asian things are bad by any means. In the States now, some 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 (the Bento, or, strictly speaking, Obento) is decorated with cartoon characters. Good old imaginative American packaging tries to save the child!
This informal mothers' movement is a response to the parenting challenge of raising children nutritionally. It shows moms battling the fast-food chains and pushing back on the bulbous norms of the American diet. A recent New York Times newspaper 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 globalization, when it is not a train wreck of colliding cuisines (and cultures). According to Dean Mahbubani, Asia is rising in part because ``the caliber 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 honor of seeing our best-thinking American mothers in forward-looking fusion action. They don't want their kids losing the battle of the bulge. Maybe we should put some of these hell-Bento mothers in charge of East-West geopolitical fusion, as well.
At least it's food for thought.
American journalist Tom Plate celebrates the 15th anniversary of his regularly appearing column on Asia and America next month. He can be reached at platecolumn@gmail.com.