From Cultural Dish to Viral Trend: The Rise of an Asian American Food Culture

A clip recently went viral of Simu Liu on CBC’s “Dragons’ Den” — a Canadian reality show where budding entrepreneurs pitch their business ideas to a panel of potential investors. On Oct. 10, Liu went on the show as a guest judge and investor, and his interaction with a bottled bubble tea brand, Bobba, quickly gained notoriety after he accused its founders of cultural appropriation.

“I would be uplifting a business that is profiting off of something that feels so dear to my cultural heritage,” Liu said, declining to invest in the product. In particular, Liu expressed concerns that Bobba failed to indicate the Taiwanese origins of boba in its product packaging.

In an era when Asian foods are becoming increasingly popular amongst non-Asian audiences, Liu’s concerns about how these foods are being framed to the public are not unfounded.

Over the summer, TikTok creator Logan Moffitt amassed millions of fans and the title of “Cucumber Boy” as a result of his cucumber salad recipes. His most viral recipe features a few essential Asian condiments: soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, sesame oil, and chili oil, among others. This recipe took the internet by storm, with influencers posting videos of themselves recreating and praising the cucumber salad.

This same cucumber salad recipe has been a staple dish in Chinese households far before it went viral — it is a dish that, growing up, I learned to make because of how often we ate it at family dinners, a dish that always appeared at potlucks with other Chinese families.

While it is worth celebrating the popularization of a cultural dish, it is not a coincidence that the face behind its virality is a white-passing male. Although Moffitt has credited a Korean chef in the past as a source of inspiration for his love of Korean cooking, viewers often refer to the dish as simply “Logan’s cucumber salad,” failing to mention the Chinese origins of the recipe. Even if Moffitt himself may not be explicitly committing an act of cultural appropriation, the media spin and complete erasure of the Chinese origins of the recipe appropriates the cultural recipe, instead crediting a non-Asian male creator for its invention.

Moffitt’s cucumbers are not the only example of an Asian cultural food item being rebranded by a dominant culture. Take Trader Joe’s — or the controversial former branding, “Trader Ming’s” — in the past two years, the brand added “Spicy Squiggly Knife Cut Noodles” and “Crunchy Chili Onion” to their product offerings, further evidence of the increasing popularity of Asian foods to American audiences. Like Moffitt, the Trader Joe’s brand feels familiar to a Western audience: Trader Joe’s appropriates an Asian product, and, by labeling it with their name, makes it palatable to non-Asian consumers. It is worth celebrating the increased presence of Asian-inspired foods on the shelves of quintessential American grocery stores, but the erasure of and profiting off of these products’ cultural origins should not be excused.

Chili oil is a prime example. While different branded chili oils have rapidly popped up in recent years, one particular Chinese chili oil brand, Lao Gan Ma, has preceded the recent trend for decades. The brand was started by Tao Huabi, a Chinese woman born to a poor family who started making chili oil during China’s Great Famine, using plant roots and other medicinal plants to season the little food her family had. It feels ironic, then, to compare the origins of Lao Gan Ma to Trader Joe’s mass-developed “Crunchy Chili Onion.”

Yet the larger shift in culinary culture towards popularizing Asian foods and flavors simultaneously holds promise for a new era of American food culture. There is an emerging Asian American food culture, marked by a fusion of traditional, home-cooked Asian meals with similarly familiar American cooking. Asian American creator Emily Mariko is one example; her viral salmon bowl recipe combines classic Asian ingredients of kimchi, seaweed, and siracha with ingredients familiar to a Western audience like salmon, avocado, and mayo. Even the cooking method — microwaving frozen rice — is reflective of an American culinary culture of convenience. Mariko makes Asian flavors accessible to an American audience, complicating traditional notions of an “American” dish and developing a unique Asian American food culture.

Mariko is not the only Asian American creator who has found success in sharing Asian culinary traditions with Western audiences. On Instagram and other platforms, Joanne Molinaro (@thekoreanvegan), Frankie Gaw (@littlefatboyfrankie), and Tina Choi (@doobydobap) are just a few other Asian American creators who have contributed to creating an Asian American food culture, sharing cultural dishes and teaching others how to make them. Asian culture is more popular than ever, especially among younger generations. Asian Americans, in turn, are not only reproducing the culture of their ancestral countries but rather developing their own version, marked by their experiences of growing up in America.

American food culture is at a turning point with the emergence of a uniquely Asian American culinary tradition. Yet with the popularization of Asian foods, it is simultaneously important to credit the cultures from which these dishes originate. The trope of the Asian American kid with the “stinky” lunch is a childhood memory many Asian Americans share. With such a cultural context, it is frustrating to see the same audience, once repulsed by what was unfamiliar, now embrace the same foods when they are appropriated and repackaged by a familiar brand. A dominant culture should never claim to “make better” the product of a minority, as many have claimed that the founders of Bobba did. Food is a creative pursuit: something to share, something to experiment with, and something to relay the stories of the people and places responsible for its creation.

–Staff writer Juliet Bu can be reached at juliet.bu@thecrimson.com.