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The Indiana Daily Student

Community members reflect on power of food to fight xenophobia

Chef Pema Wangchen crushes garlic for the first meal of the night at Little Tibet on 4th Street. Wangchen says their most popular dishes are their momos, curry and pad thai.

Surrounded by pictures of the Dalai Lama and paintings of Himalayan villages that decorate the walls of Anyetsang’s Little Tibet, the Tibetan restaurant’s owner Pema Wangchen stood behind a counter in the back. He dried forks, knives and spoons with a dishcloth as a plate of two half-moon Tibetan dumplings sat on the table beside him.

“I eat one almost every day,” he said.

The dumplings, called momos, are also his favorite food to make.

Wangchen’s uncle was born in Tibet, moved to India and then immigrated again to the United States. When he opened the restaurant here 20 years ago, he brought his momo-making techniques with him.

Now, Wangchen carries on the same tradition.

The process of making momos begins with mixing flour and water into dough. After setting that aside, he minces meat and vegetables for the filling. Last, he cuts pieces of dough into circles, scoops in the filling and carefully pinches the folds together.

“By sharing Tibetan food, I honor my country,” Wangchen said. “Food is life for us. It is powerful.”

In response to crackdowns on undocumented immigrants, restrictions on entry from Muslim-majority countries and calls for stricter overall immigration policy under the Trump administration, proponents of immigration have rushed to tout its benefits.

Those who support immigration often claim it benefits United States culture and the economy.

One such proponent of immigration is Merna Hecht, the founder of “Our Table of Memories” — a project that encourages immigrant children in high schools around the country to connect with their cultures by writing poetry about their traditional foods.

Hecht said the U.S. boasts the inclusion of global cuisines that create a melting pot, or rather a cooking pot, of flavors from all ends of the Earth.

“It’s the combination of all these unique and different flavors that make up this country and makes us who we are,” she said.

Even just on Fourth Street, Wangchen said the variety in American cuisine is apparent.

“You see Indian,” he said. “You see Chinese, Korean, Tibetan — everything here on this street. This is what food is like in America.”

In the past, ethnic restaurants like those situated on Fourth Street have not been welcomed with open arms.

Anti-Chinese sentiments surrounding the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 were bolstered by claims that Chinese food threatened American workers. Riots and violence against Chinese immigrants during the time were what drove them to build Chinatowns, which were fertile grounds for blossoming Chinese restaurant scenes.

Sauerkraut and hamburgers were even renamed as “liberty cabbage” and “liberty steaks” respectively during the first World War to avoid using words with German roots.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, people across the country boycotted Japanese restaurants. During the U.S.‘s subsequent involvement in WWII, many Americans used the word “garlic eater” as an ethnic slur for Italians whose flavors and dishes from pizza to pasta are cornerstones of American cuisine today.

As recently as 2003, a North Carolina fast food restaurant temporarily renamed French fries “freedom fries” in response to French opposition to the war in Iraq.

But today, Charles Hirschman, University of Washington professor and author of the paper “The Contributions of Immigrants to American Culture,” said almost no one would consider boycotting or renaming the foods of immigrants. They are too entrenched in American cuisine, he said.

In effect, food has become the demilitarized zone between those who support and oppose increased immigration. Hirschman said this can be seen in the continued success of ethnic restaurants.

“Diversity of food seems to be a universal value now,” he said. “There may be some who may call for these kinds of efforts, but today there is a pretty universal love of ethnic foods.”

While the current political climate reflects calls for increased isolationism, Hecht said American food palettes are becoming more global. She said this globalization of appetites can’t happen without immigrants who bring their techniques and distinct blends of spices and ingredients to the U.S.

“From the beginning, it was immigrants who really built the American food scene,” Hecht said.

New York City, New Orleans, San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles were included in the top five U.S. News 2016 Best Foodie Destinations. Of those cities, New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles are included in the list of ten U.S. cities with the highest foreign-born population, according to a 2015 Martin Prosperity Institute study.

Areas with more immigrants tend to have good food, Hirschman said.

When people from different backgrounds immigrated to big U.S. cities, they helped build American society and brought along their food, Hirschman said.

But the influence of immigrant foods on American cuisine doesn’t stop at restaurants, Hirschman said. He said cans of Budweiser stored in refrigerators around the country also had immigrant roots through Budweiser’s German-born co-founder. The sriracha and hummus in those refrigerators were also brought to the U.S. by immigrants from Thailand and the Middle East, respectively.

Man does not live on bread alone, but if he did, the breads Americans eat — baguettes from France, hamburger buns and rolls from Germany — almost all have immigrant roots.

While Jewish community centers have faced more than 90 bomb threats around the U.S. in just the first two months of 2017, it was Jews who brought Americans corned beef, pastrami and bagels.

While some residents Middle Eastern countries were previously barred entry to the U.S., it was the Middle East that gave the U.S. gyros, shawarma and kebabs.

Hirschman said the fact remains that American cuisine would be nonexistent without the contributions of immigrants because nearly all American foods are derived from immigrants. The adoption of immigrant foods into American cuisine throughout history and today is inevitable, he said.

“There isn’t a time in American history where cuisine has existed without the influence of immigrants,” Hirschman said. “We’ve been an immigrant society for so long even though we forget about that.”

“A Day Without Immigrants” on Feb. 16 of this year emphasized the importance of immigrants to American cuisine when restaurants around the country closed their doors for a day in response to the Trump administration’s immigration policy decisions. In Indianapolis alone, more than 250 people took to the streets in support of these immigrants.

The influence of immigrant foods has made immigration the bread and butter of American cuisine, Hecht said. So if you care about food, you should care about immigration, she said.

Hecht said food can be used as a weapon against xenophobia and prejudice in the world today because of its capacity to promote understanding.

“Food is an emblem of peace,” she said. “That universal image of breaking bread together at a table where everyone is welcome really inspires love and understanding.”

Hirschman said while American reliance on foreign foods is a reason to respect the role of immigrants in society, most Americans don’t think about the influence of immigrants in the food they eat every day.

“Not everybody sees the nose in front of their face,” he said. “They need to be reminded.”

Once people point out that almost all of American cuisine has immigrant roots, Hirschman said it’s difficult to deny the importance of immigrants in American society. In order to bring the contributions of immigrants to people’s attention, Hecht said she recommends subsidizing the restaurants of immigrants and refugees catering in mainstream locations rather than small pockets of urban areas.

“That way we can make the food of these cultures visible,” she said.

On the back of Hecht’s book “Our Table of Memories,” a 16-year-old girl from Mexico had written the words, “I believe that food is the blood and soul of our ancestors.”

Once people understand one another’s blood and souls, Hecht said it is difficult to hate one another.

“It’s a universal source of memory,” she said on food. “When people look back on their childhood and identity, food is always there. So food becomes a means of understanding childhoods and identities of others.”

Wangchen said by serving food in his own restaurant he promotes mutual understanding between him and his customers.

“We need to know each other,” he said. “If I give you food, you get to know me. You see that the food is good, and you respect the culture.”

Hecht said it’s easy to brand people who are different as the “other” when you haven’t met them or lived as their neighbors — or if you’ve never broken bread with them.

“We’re welcoming in the so-called ‘other’ to our table, sharing our food, our identity, our lives with them,” she said.

For Wangchen, cooking for one another is what creates bridges.

“Food changes the minds,” he said. “When you come in and eat, and you like the food, how can you hate the one who gave it to you?”

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