There is a take-away shop in Neutral Bay and next to where the B1 bus stops, that sells Bahn Mi. I have not yet gone in but I have stopped outside enough to read that on their menu boards they have the following chart:
**** Very Hot
*** Hot
** Medium
* Mild
0 White People
As I am a straight white male and therefore the comprehensive winner of history for the last 1000+ years, I am not even the slightest bit offended by this. Is this racist? Probably. Does it matter? Absolutely not; because gentle mocking pushing upwards is quite tame compared with everything that people that look like me have done. On a scale of 1 to Genocide, this barely rates more than an amused titter.
But it got me thinking - where did the myth of white people not liking spicy food come from? Because it doesn't really square with my general reading of history.
Imagine that you are European in the 14th century. Your total food choices are a few kinds of fruit, grains such as wheat and barley, and other things like hops and cloves; from which the basis of beer and other concoctable comestibles might converge. Even if you are Queen Isabella, King Louis the Nth, or Pope Pius Innocent Totally Not Taking Bribes VII, the best that you can hope for by way of cuisine is boiling carrots for eight years. It is no exaggeration to say that Europeans headed out and crossed oceans for the headline purpose of finding a quick route to India and all of their lovely spices.
This is where my knowledge of history begins to fail me. Everyone in Europe gets access to lovely spices and suddenly the Enlightenment happens, science happens, theatre begins to flourish, and England which is supposedly the butt of everyone's jokes about bland food, acquires India through the cunning use of flags and guns and puts nine people in charge who are all called Clive or Dennis, and in response India invents ever hotter and hotter fishes as a joke upon their colonial thieving masters, that it metastasises to the point where Coronation Chicken, Lamb Vindaloo, and Chicken Tikka Masala are virtually the national dishes of Blighty. It is also worth mentioning that curried egg sandwiches and Keen's Mustard are also very British and that Hot English Mustard is the hottest of all mustards because of that same English demand for heat. It makes perfect sense if you live in a nation which is known for its rain.
If I am the distillation of hundreds of generations of people who have been scientifically bred to live at the bottom of a peat bog and supposedly white people do not like spicy food, then my preference for million of Scoville units and to be keeled over with blood coming out of my eyes because the food is so hot, makes no sense given the myth.
Except...
Myths do not exist without some shred of truth at the centre around which a web of candy floss is spun. The myth of white people not liking spicy food, has origins in the early half of the nineteenth century and the beginnings of religious movements in the United States. America has always had sections of the community looking for performative puritanism and so we get various religious groups like the Seventh Day Adventists, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Quakers, and other assorted groups actively calling for bland food in the hope that it will calm the excitations of the spirit. Some famous anti-scoodily-wooping activists went into breakfast cereal production; which explains both the Quaker's Oats and Dr Kellogg's companies.
There are also other elements to this as well. The use of spice was seen in some parts as a thing that black people, that native American people, that Mexican people, and that people who do not look like leftover puritans look like. Racism permeates this particular aspect of life in America like any other; because identity politics that seeks to cast the other as xenos polis, often has a habit of drawing strange lines. Once you throw in the rise of the Temperance Movement and the period where synthetic drugs aren't regulated at all in what is known as "The Great Binge", then it is little wonder that a desire for supposedly clean, white, boring food emerges.
Indeed the most wonderous of the clean, white, boring food is the poster child for blandness. White Bread is totemic of the desire for clean, white, boring food. That stems from the fact that as the industrial age took off and people no longer knew who made their food, there was a temptation for industrial capitalists to cut costs and cut quality. With bread, that also meant cutting flour with other things like sawdust, plaster, chalk, alum and other adulterations. White Bread which begins to appear at the end of the nineteenth century on an industrial scale, is again a method of performative proof that the contents are clean, white, boring.
This only accelerates with the First World War, the invention of longer lasting food and the need to ship it across many hundreds and thousands of miles and oceans; the general public begins to be trained to accept that clean, white, boring food is a sign of quality. The latter half of the twentieth century which is marked with white flight to suburbia, the widespread use of motor cars and the invention of supermarkets, only helps to create a desire for more processed foods. White, clean, boring food, then becomes a profit maximising instrument and in the stampede to sell stuff to the most number of people that means that spicy food which might offend people's palate, gets economically pushed out of the marketplace.
If all of this sounds incredibly Americentric, that's because it is. Although xenophobia exists across the world, the rubbing of 50odd nations side by side meant that Europeans always had a far more varied palate. Britain and her empire which breaks up after the Second World War also begins to import people and flavours from across the world. America which has always had the melting pot of people, has in fact always had the mixing bowl of flavours; so the myth of white people not liking spicy food isn't the result of flavours and spice not being available.
As a result of being separated from the rest of the world by two oceans, the United States was the only great power to have survived two world wars almost completely undisturbed internally. That put it in top spot to export both goods and services and culture after the wars. Its myth which is partly grounded in fact, then got exported as a cultural artefact, which without the context of two hundred years of internal oppression and slavery, then gets mapped onto other white people's history of oppression, slavery and colonialism. You don't need a lot of truth to spin a myth; it just has to have enough distilled truth to make it plausible. In that respect, the myth of white people not liking spicy food is itself a culturally processed story with all of the spice taken out. It is palatable to the most number of people and is therefore an apt demonstration of itself.
Aside:
I was sitting in Mosman Square with a bowl of Samyang 2x Spicy Hot Chicken pot noodle, recently. I was listening to the radio with some headphones in and had tears streaming down my face (just like Hochi on the packaging), when a Korean lady who was pushing a pram tapped me on the shoulder and wanted to know if I was okay. I explained that I was fine and that this flavour of pot noodle is phenomenally good, and thanked her for her kind concern and she told me that I was both "adventurous" and that my tears were "tears of happiness". I couldn't agree more.
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