The average supermarket carries over forty thousand items; in 1960 there would have been fewer than six thousand. Once inside, however, you would not know whether you were in Florida or Montana given the standardized layout and brand names and the dominance of a few companies (Walmart accounts for at least half the groceries bought in the United States). Beginning in the last decades of the twentieth century, thanks particularly to containerized shipping, produce is available all year round. While many formerly exotic products such as mangoes, cilantro, and shishito peppers have become mainstream, the lack of seasonality increases the disorienting impression of sameness.
Laresh Jayasanker, who became fatally ill while completing this book, was alert to the paradoxes of technology, globalization, and economic gigantism. At one time, the future dystopia (à la 1984) was based on images of fascist and communist regimes, imagining a rigid uniformity and miserable food, but instead what has come to pass in the wealthier nations is a deceptive cornucopia of choice. The many brands of packaged tortillas disguise the hegemony of the Mexican companies Gruma and Bimbo; 71 percent of all the beer in the world is produced by Anheuser-Busch InBev and SABMiller.
Jayasanker was interested the basic paradox of the growth of diversity through immigration and the simultaneous homogeneity of the food sold and eaten across time and distance. His book updates Donna Gabaccia's study of immigrants, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (1998), as it discusses ethnic food entrepreneurs and their ability to market to the general American population. The emphasis in Sameness in Diversity is on “translation”—how intermediaries educate and popularize what were originally foreign products regarded with distrust. Chinese restaurant food, sushi, pasta dishes, and tacos all required orientation and adaptation to convey exotic authenticity joined to appealing flavors.
This book is more a sociology of globalization than a history of food and so there is not the same long chronological view that Gabaccia offered. It contains some fascinating historical asides, however, that illuminate the deliberately obscured nature of what has been happening. A few firms have dominated the meatpacking industry since the days of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906). At that time, the livestock came from the western United States to Chicago and some of the packaged meat was exported to Europe. Now there is no single source or processing center. Pigs might be born in Canada, or cattle in Mexico, then fattened and slaughtered in the United States, and finally exported—including back to the two neighboring countries. The supply and export chains are decentered and complex but still controlled by a few big players that are no longer inevitably American: Nestlé is Swiss, for example; JBS (Swift & Company, Tyson Foods) and 3 G Capital (Kraft Heinz, Burger King) are based in Brazil.
Diversity and sameness are thus not opposing forces but rather, in the currency of globalization, two sides of the same proverbial coin. Seen in this way, immigrants to the United States introduce new tastes and new perceived needs. Jayasanker's book devotes attention to suburbs such as Monterey Park, California, where the foreign-born population is the majority. There is no longer a contrast between white suburbs and “colorful” urban ethnic enclaves. This can be interpreted favorably, as with Michael Gold's food columns for the Los Angeles Times, which displaced the notion of the food adventurer from Chinatown to the architecturally bland but gastronomically exciting San Gabriel Valley. Jayasanker would not deny the benefits or fruitful complexity of edible diversity, but his book looks beyond and behind celebratory discourse about choice to show the enabling technology and consolidated organization.
The sameness is not the same everywhere, however. Much of the book is devoted to so-called ethnic restaurants, and here the small-scale business remains the rule despite the success of Panda Express and Olive Garden. The menus of Chinese or Mexican restaurants may fit a pattern, but that is what makes them recognizable—and would apply to restaurants in France a hundred years ago. Jayasanker underestimates the retrospective longevity of American infatuation with foreign food. He assumes a baseline of “meat and potatoes” restaurant dining in the 1950s against which the subsequent growth of immigration after the repeal of the repressive laws of the 1920s led to the burgeoning of international restaurant options, but in fact Americans had enthusiastically embraced dining at immigrants’ restaurants by the end of the nineteenth century. Chop suey and curry might not have been authentic in the early twentieth century, but then again, neither are today's California rolls or fajitas.
One of the announced themes of the book is the tricky question of culinary authenticity, especially against the background of sameness and performative tradition. It may be that the author's untimely death prevented the full realization of answers to this question. Authenticity appears suddenly in a concluding section, counseling acceptance of watered-down fidelity to tradition as a way of bridging some current social divides. Not that Jayasanker was excessively optimistic. His conclusion opens with his original hope that food might transcend racism and his dismay that bigots often like foreign food. One of the attractive features of this comprehensive treatment of food and globalization is its sober rather than naïvely festive or naïvely horrified tone, indicative of the author's perceptive, tolerant, and basically good-humored understanding.
