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Munchies

The Struggles of Writing About Chinese Food as a Chinese Person

Growing up, I was the weird kid who adored boiled pig intestines and fermented tofu. So imagine my surprise when the 2000s hit and the food of my people was suddenly cool.

Lorraine Chuen was browsing her Facebook feed when she noticed an argument between a person of colour and a white person, the latter of whom could not be convinced that food often does—and perhaps should—feel political for people of colour. As a scientist formally trained in experimental psychology, Chuen was inspired to find quantifiable evidence that food is, indeed, extremely political.

"This was something that had been on my mind already. I wanted to find the data to show that structural oppression exists," she says.

What she found: Of the 263 entries under the "Chinese" recipe filter on the New York Times food section, almost 90 percent have a white person listed as author in the byline. Only 10 percent of the recipes are authored by Chinese writers.

Chuen's data set is open-sourced and her findings are meticulously broken down on her blog, Analyst. She researched each of the author's ethnicities and listed them publicly; after she published her post, some of the authors contacted her to confirm or dispute their ethnicities, and she revised her document accordingly.