Global Impact: food as identity is nothing new – but for the Asian diaspora, the world is finally listening
- Global Impact is a fortnightly curated newsletter featuring a news topic originating in China with a significant macro impact for our newsreaders around the world
- In this edition, we look at how food has played a role in providing support and community for marginalised groups of society
March 31, 2021, saw the beginning of the Stop Asian Hate movement, a roiling series of demonstrations across the United States – as well as major cities around the world – to protest against the sharp rise of violence targeting the Asian-American and Pacific Islander community.
The movement highlighted the injustices and discrimination they faced in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, when a terrifying number of accounts of individuals being attacked, and Chinese and Asian businesses targeted and vandalised, became part of the regular news cycle.
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Talking Post: Chef Gaggan Anand on ‘food racism’ and the future of fine dining, with Yonden Lhatoo
For others, revisiting the root of cultural shame helped them to heal – and a proliferation of memoir-based cookbooks released in 2022 have touched upon Asian identity and all its complexities through the lens of food.
What does it mean to be “Asian” for a chef who is born in Singapore to a Kashmiri father and a mother of Chinese-Filipino descent, with Eurasian and Indonesian grandparents? Or to an immigrant who, as a child, denies her Hunanese background in desperation to fit into modern-day Australia?
