ESSAY: What immigrants eat

(Even sometimes without a fork)

In recent days, Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, has been vilified in certain corners of the far right for not only eating biryani, a crime enough, but eating it with his hands in a now-viral video. Mamdani, who was born in Uganda, is an immigrant, and it appears that some Republicans, including the one who called for Mamdani to “go back to the Third World,” are unaware that America is a nation of immigrants.

Since some seem to have trouble remembering who is here and who they represent and who isn’t going anywhere, here is a reminder. It’s an essay I wrote a short time ago, during another scare about immigrants and eating, that one involving Ohio and new migrants and pets.

I hope this clears things up for the confused. Open invitation to any Republican member of Congress to have home-cooked biryani at my place and discuss what makes this country great.

---

There appears to be some confusion about what immigrants eat. As a son of immigrants and a native Ohioan, I want to help to clear up this confusion.

From far-right demagogues, we hear suggestions that immigrants prey on dogs and cats, smacking their foreign-born chops on 100 percent, all-American pets.

This week, as the Republican vice presidential nominee, J.D. Vance, doubled down on his petivore allegations, while admitting that he was lying, he was asked to respond to another claim, this by the conspiracy theorist and Trump groupie Laura Loomer, who said that, if Vice President Kamala Harris were elected, the White House “will smell like curry.” This is presumably because Harris is descended from immigrants on both sides of her family, from two notably flavor-blessed countries — India and Jamaica.

Vance, as ever caught between the rock of white nationalism and the hard place of having a brown wife and children, answered with the culinary equivalent of having a Black friend: “I make a mean chicken curry.” Only the “mean” part was convincing.

So here, at the highest levels of politics, were questions of what immigrants eat. Your pet dog? A cat near you? Stinky curries?

This is, of course, classic, straightforward Othering, straight out of the white nationalist and authoritarian playbooks. The far right is always a little scared, because the number of people who are more interested in hating others than seeking a better life for their families is not a majority. To win elections, you have to rouse a lot of people into anxieties about fantasies built on lies premised on smoke and mirrors.

With apologies to Kendrick Lamar, the right wants people to think: “They not like us.” And eating is so visceral, so quotidian, so central that it is a fertile place to sow these seeds of dehumanizing, of justifying your proposed “cleanse.” If you have spent time in certain parts of the world, you know that food can be serious political business, and the matter of what people eat and what people smell being cooked and allegations of impurity and different ideas of clean and dirty and holy — these can get people killed.

Because of these high stakes, it’s dangerous to lie about what immigrants eat. So I thought it might be useful to offer some reflections about what immigrants do eat.

For one thing, immigrants tend to eat the spices and flavors that everyone else eventually adopts and capitalizes on financially and before long cannot seem to keep out of their cookbooks and restaurants and home pantries. You know how suddenly gochujang is in all these recipes you see? Yeah, immigrants eat that. That’s how you know about it! You know how fish sauce seems to be in everything now? Immigrants! As the critic Navneet Alang once wrote:

We are living in the age of the global pantry, when a succession of food media-approved, often white figures have made an array of international ingredients approachable and even desirable to the North American mainstream — the same mainstream that, a decade ago, would have labeled these foods as obscure at best and off-putting at worst. This phenomenon is why you now see dukkah on avocado toast, kimchi in grain bowls, and sambal served with fried Brussels sprouts. It’s a kind of polyglot internationalism presented under the New American umbrella, with the techniques and raw materials of non-Western cuisines used to wake up the staid, predictable flavors of familiar Americana.

If you want to know what immigrants eat, in other words, look at what fancy restaurants serve some years after immigrants arrive and stink up the place: “squash tahini…with burrata, sumac-galangal dressing, pickles, and dukkah,” to cite one of the prestige dishes Alang mentions; or “a ‘Turkish-ish’ breakfast of vegetables, a sumac- and Aleppo pepper-dusted egg, and three-day-fermented labneh”; or “a veggie burger with harissa tofu and a dish called huevos Kathmandu that paired green chutney and spiced chickpeas with fried eggs.”

What do immigrants eat? They eat what others will eat when they stop being scared and recognize the commercial opportunity.

And while it is common to use the fear of foreign flavors to gin up fear of immigrants themselves, sometimes it backfires because the flavors are so good. When Trump promised a taco truck on every corner if immigrants were allowed to flow in, many Americans begged for a corner near them to be granted one of the early trucks.

Indeed, there may be no better case for the multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-everything society America is becoming than the flavors. Yes, pluralism is hard. But, damn, it’s tasty. America, if you want our spices, be prepared for our flavor.

And what else do America’s immigrants eat?

Does swallowing their pride count? Because so many immigrants know that, to rise in this country, you must first fall. Computer programmers over there become gas station clerks over here, trading C++ for 87 octane, because they are chasing a star no one else can yet see. Graduated doctors redo medical school to prove themselves in a place on the cutting edge of research. People with bustling multi-generational homes and layers of care and support abandon their kin and go it alone here because they dream. People who were somebody in their faraway town or village — known entities, trusted, grandmother-verified — leave the social capital of there for the anonymity of here, on the faith that there are different rewards to be reaped in being seen with fresh eyes by people who will not say, “But you don’t come from a business family…”

What do immigrants eat? As little as they can sometimes, the cheapest rice and beans sometimes, the cheapest rice and lentils sometimes, the cheapest ground meat they can find, food bought in bulk at Costco or somewhere like it — food that does the caloric minimum to fuel them for tomorrow, so that one day their descendants can eat like kings. Immigrants often have special powers of eating one thing and tasting in their mind’s mouth another: even as they chew the gruel, they taste future greatness.

I am a son of immigrants from India. I’ll tell you what we ate growing up. Sometimes we ate unfussy Western food, like penne with tomato sauce, because my mother wanted to prepare us for the new world my parents had brought us into — and because she didn’t mind the freedoms she had gained as a woman in America to spend less time in the kitchen, less time toasting coriander and cumin seeds and crushing them and making a tadka and on and on and on. But on other nights she went to those lengths and made us Indian food — Punjabi, in the tradition of her people; or Tamil, in the tradition of my father’s people; or from some other place in that vast republic of tastes. She went to this effort because she wanted us not only to be at ease where we were but also to carry certain things onward. And sometimes, when she didn’t feel like cooking, when we all felt like a change of scene, we went out. And we usually found ourselves eating food made by immigrants, in restaurants owned by immigrants: restaurants that were modest and little-known, but someone’s wildest dream.

So the question we should ask is not: What do immigrants eat? It’s: What would America eat, and be, without immigrants?

---

A request for those who haven’t yet joined us: The interviews and essays that we share here take research and editing and much more. We work hard, and we are eager to bring on more writers, more voices. But we need your help to keep this going. Join us today to support the kind of independent media you want to exist.

---

Photo: Cavan Images/Getty; Houston Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers via Getty