Cookbook confidential: global appetites, culinary fantasies, and Thai food

摘要

Thai cookbooks offer a productive lens for examining the inequalities at work in contemporary processes of cultural commodification. In the past, these ethnic cookbooks often imagined their non-Thai readers' encounters with Thai cuisine in sharply hierarchical terms, crafting neo-colonial fantasies that normalized cosmopolitan appetites for cultural difference. Today, English-language Thai cookbooks remain similarly entangled in a global hierarchy of value that privileges a culturally unmarked 'West" over its subordinate and culturally marked "others." Nevertheless, a number of recent Thai cookbooks reveal a greater awareness of the inequalities involved in eating difference and related processes of cultural commodification. Such cookbooks offer invitations to eat otherness that, if not ultimately transformative, suggest both the potential and the limitations for ethnic cookbook narratives to craft models of more equitable, anticolonial ways of eating.