‘Taste the Nation’ seeks to answer the question, ‘What is American food?’
The first episode of Hulu’s new documentary series, “Taste the Nation,” begins with the rumbling sound of helicopters flying through the sky. The camera pans to a burrito being prepared in a restaurant kitchen, tomatillos and jalapeños sizzling on a griddle, tortilla dough being spread out into a circle on a pan. The host, Padma Lakshmi, is trying to have a conversation with her interview subjects, but the air traffic keeps interrupting. “Hold that thought,” she says, a couple times, pausing for the noise to pass.
The place is El Paso. The helicopters surveilling from above? La migra, border patrol.
This moment of disruption serves as an introduction to the episode — which examines Mexican food and culture in the United States — and the series as a whole. “Taste the Nation” gives viewers a full picture of food in this country, one that cannot be divorced from its context, past and present. Whether it’s a burrito, chop suey, or fry bread, they tell complex stories of migration, assimilation and persecution.
Lakshmi is an immigrant herself; she came to the U.S. from India when she was 4 years old. In her show, she’s interested in a seemingly simple question: What, exactly, is American food? Each of the 10 episodes focuses on a population and its eating culture in a particular place. Iranians in Los Angeles. Thai in Las Vegas. Japanese in Hawaii. Lakshmi weaves a narrative through her candid conversations with immigrants, as well as Native Americans and descendants of enslaved Africans.
The answer to Lakshmi’s thesis question is a moving target. Take hamburgers and hot dogs, both considered so quintessentially American that people often don’t realize they were brought over and adapted
“Taste the Nation” is available now for streaming on Hulu.
by German immigrants. Chop suey, on the other hand, doesn’t exist in China; it’s a dish that early Chinese immigrants invented to make their cuisine more palatable to American tastes at the time. Each community has its own story of assimilation through food. It is, of course, not always a pleasant one.
At times, “Taste the Nation” confronts viewers with uncomfortable truths: Food in history was often weaponized, and some foodways that exist today are the product of incredible pain.
Fry bread is a Native American staple, but it’s far from an ancestral one. When European settlers forced Indigenous peoples off their land, they were cut off from their source of fresh food — the vegetables and fruit they picked and the game they hunted. Moved to reservations and put on rations, Natives created fry bread from the ingredients the settlers imposed on them.
Elsewhere, Englishmen contemplated the low country swamplands, wondering what to do with them. They specifically targeted West Africans, who had knowledge of rice crops, and brought them over as slaves to turn the marshes into profitable rice fields. The Africans’ forced labor transformed the American economy.
“Taste the Nation” also recounts happier, more hopeful chapters. Food is joy, food is resistance, food is a way to reconnect with your roots and preserve your culture for future generations. About 200,000 Gullah Geechee, the descendants of enslaved Africans, still live in the southeast coastal areas where their ancestors were forced to work. “The Gullah Way” episode highlights their rich culture, through interviews with proud Gullah legends such as food writer Michael Twitty and chef B.J.
Dennis. Rice is now a prized staple of their foodways, and eating off the land and from the surrounding waters is an integral part of their identity.
Lakshmi speaks with Native Americans in Arizona who’ve found happiness and solace from foraging their land and cooking with ingredients their ancestors used — long before fry bread came into the picture. Food sovereignty, they tell her, is key to Indigenous sovereignty.
In a part of LA nicknamed “Tehrangeles,” Iranian immigrants use food to remember the home they left behind, one they don’t even recognize as their own anymore. Food is simultaneously used as a tool for their children, who’ve never even been to the country, to connect with their roots and understand who they are.
The first, second and third generations feature prominently throughout the series alongside their elders. When Lakshmi examines her own cuisine of India, the episode begins with her Americanborn
daughter timidly admitting to her that she prefers pancakes to dosa. Later, she speaks with
Indian food personality Madhur Jaffrey, former U.S. attorney Preet Bharara and others about how difficult it is to instill that culture in the next generation and make sure it’s not lost. Food, the argument goes, is a great start. In a parallel moment in “Where the Kebob Is Hot,” cookbook author Naz Deravian’s young daughter — who, like Lakshmi’s, is half white — says she feels Persian when her mother cooks Persian food.
Several next-gen kids in other episodes express this key tension of the immigrant experience: not Iranian or Chinese or Thai enough, but also not white or American enough.
Chef Brandon Jew and farmer Scott Chang-Fleeman, both Chinese American, aim to honor their heritage in their work while also pushing forward to create something entirely new. Chang-Fleeman grows rare Asian vegetables at his Shao Shan Farm in Marin County. At his San Francisco restaurant Mister Jiu’s, Jew cooks his own take on modern Chinese food; his homemade hoisin sauce, for instance, contains peanut butter instead of emulsifiers. Together, they want to define a novel concept: Bay Area Chinese-American cuisine.
“Taste the Nation” does a good job of acknowledging history in American food while also looking to its future. The show also made a concerted effort to showcase immigrant populations in the U.S. that aren’t often at the forefront of the conversation, such as the thriving Peruvian community in Paterson, N.J. Other, more prominent identities in the U.S. are noticeably absent, hinting perhaps at a second season.
And if there is one, Ms. Lakshmi, may we suggest you come to Houston? As locals know, there is more than one immigrant food culture to discover here. Take your pick.