What is the Language of Taste?

Stanford's Institute for Advancing Just Societies and Zócalo Public Square held the third in its nationwide series of events entitled “What Can Become of Us?” on October 9, 2025, at BRIC Arts Media in Brooklyn.

With this series, IAJS and Zócalo, a unit of Arizona State University Media Enterprise, invite everyone to envision new perspectives on migration, America’s changing communities, and how people come together across differences.

BRIC Arts Media unites Brooklyn through art and creativity to build community and make change. 

Food Is a Force for Cultural Preservation, Assimilation, and Possibility

By Jackie Mansky | October 10, 2025

Last night’s stop: Brooklyn, New York. The third program in the series, “What Is the Language of Taste?”, at the cultural programming institution BRIC, explored how food can be a force for preservation, assimilation, and possibility for migrants and their identities. 

Pakistani American artist Sarah K. Khan’s art installation Speak Sing Shout: We, Too, Sing America (2025) inspired the event. Before the discussion, Khan shared how her work is an homage to poets Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Langston Hughes, who inspired her to “speak” and “sing,” respectively. 

“I try to build worlds that are beyond the confines of the archive, beyond histories denied,” Khan said of the eight blue-and-white serving vessels that made up the centerpiece of Speak Sing Shout.  She adorned the porcelain with images of black pepper, cinnamon, clove, frankincense, myrrh, nutmeg, orange blossom, and rose—culinary ingredients found in kitchens worldwide today that originated in the Global South.

The panel that followed, moderated by Stanford IAJS founding faculty co-director Brian Lowery, featured Artists Athletes Activists (AAA) founder Power Malu, Ninth Avenue International Food Festival co-founder and cookbook author Joan Nathan, and New York University food studies scholar Krishnendu Ray. 

Identity By the Spoonfuls

One of the major topics of conversation was how food helps tether people to their history and to the world around them.

Malu, who works with migrants and asylum seekers in New York, said the first thing people ask at AAA is, “Can we cook a meal?” Recipes are one of the few things easily brought across borders and perilous conditions. The kitchen becomes a safe space, said Malu, where people can break bread with their family as well as others, who may not even speak their language. “It serves as a community builder,” he said.

But food can also be highly divisive. Take the culinary culture of Northern India and Pakistan. It’s “indistinguishable,” Ray said, but “don’t tell it to the Indians, don’t tell it to the Pakistanis.” He noted that things like caste and hierarchies create ethnocentric boundaries around dishes. “Even a beautiful thing like food can be turned into a weapon by the wrong people,” Ray said. 

Still, by and large, the panelists talked about food as a form of connection, especially for those who are far away from home. Ray shared that in researching his first book, The Migrant’s Table, he found that the more Americanized Bengali Americans became, the more their breakfasts shifted to American foods to keep up with the pace of U.S. life. But they were able to retain elements of Bengali culture through home-cooked dinners. Such diasporic sensibilities help us think about how people can be of both places at once, he said. 

“I have this idea called culinary lag,” said Nathan. Take lutefisk, a dried fish cured in lye, which Norwegian immigrants still eat at Christmastime in Minneapolis. “Nobody does that anymore in Norway,” she recalled a Norwegian ambassador to the U.S. telling her—yet the immigrants kept a faded tradition alive, thousands of miles away.

Food is not static, and neither are identities, said Lowery. How, then, can we define culinary authenticity?

“It’s really hard,” said Nathan. “I don’t know where you get real authenticity.” Everything changes as the world changes, she said. Take cooking fat—we use vegetable oil or Crisco today, where people used tallow or lard in the past.

Malu drew a line. “When things start becoming mass-produced, they lose their authenticity,” he said. People or businesses that create dishes they don’t know much about hijack them. “Authenticity stays true within community and within small rooms,” he said. 

Authenticity is the quest for a “true copy,” Ray said. Such quests are searching for “accuracy and sincerity in the context of your life experience.”

During the audience Q&A, the panel discussed questions of appropriation as food crosses borders.

An audience member recalled how 1980s Americanized Chinese restaurants on New York’s Lower East Side sold Latin American dishes like plátanos. She asked: Would that be considered appropriation by Chinese immigrants, or were they sharing food by Puerto Rican friends?

I don’t think it’s appropriation, Malu said. “It’s sharing and connecting with something that they know.” Many restaurant owners were Cuban Chinese, he added, so they did “Chino Latino,” adapting dishes to the places where they had lived and traveled around the world.

“The question for me is less about assimilation and more about migration versus colonization,” another audience member said. “Are you respecting the culture?” That’s the challenge.

Jackie Mansky is senior editor at Zócalo Public Square.

Editor: Sarah Rothbard