TEDx for having me this is a real thrill
for me really really exciting actually
and it’s even more exciting having heard
the other talks because they’ve been
really insightful really interesting so
thank you to my fellow panelists
speakers I got speakers will call him
anyway I cook Japanese food uh-huh and
I’ve been interested in Japanese food
from a very young age that’s another
story but in 2005 I got a research grant
to go and study noodles in Japan the
idea was to investigate the historic and
cultural differences between ramen and
udon and soba and I know what you’re
thinking and yes i did get paid to go
eat noodles in japan but you know i’m
american i went to American University
and our tuition was very expensive so I
had to get something out of it other
than an Asian Studies degree which is
pretty useless let’s be real so I focus
my research on two major sites one was
the soba museum which you see here these
are real these are not joke slides um
the soba museum in a small mountain town
called toka cushy an another museum
called a ramen museum in Yokohama but
the more I traveled around Japan
especially after I moved there in 2006
where I was on working holiday I found
more and more of these food museums all
over the country dozens if not hundreds
of them often they were connected
somehow to agriculture or nature in the
area where they were sometimes they were
based on more modern developments and
sometimes kind of a mix of both like
this sapporo beer museum which is real
and it tells a nice story actually of
how they the japanese moved to hokkaido
the northernmost island and started
growing hops and barley there and
brewing delicious japanese lager but
there’s all kinds of other museums as a
rice museum in a he may there’s a tea
museum and a sushi museum in Shizuoka
there is an instant ramen museum in
Osaka as well as a takoyaki museum there
a champ own Museum in Nagasaki what am I
missing us salmon museum in Sapporo as
well a confection Museum in Kyoto
weirdly Tokyo has no local food museum
there’s one exception actually sort of a
half exception which is the kind of
bizarre salt and tobacco museum which is
owned by Japan Tobacco and apparently
the the kind of tenuous connection comes
from the fact that they were once both
regulated by the same government agency
and anyway they’re two very important
pastimes in Japanese society salt and
tobacco so why not but it’s it was weird
to me because Tokyo is known around the
world for its amazing astronomy and
Tokyo does have local specialties things
like no my sushi you probably heard of
this it’s it’s delicious if you haven’t
tried it really good food some things
you may not have heard of like manga
yaki which is kind of hard to describe
kind of like okonomiyaki if you’ve had
that and I know it looks like well like
somebody ate a bunch of cabbage then
threw up on a hot griddle but it is
really delicious trust me on that so
there are these foods in Tokyo that are
beloved by locals but evidently none of
them are beloved enough are considered
important enough to warrant an
institution like a food museum in fact
what I realized was that actually what
people in Tokyo really love or what
they’re most interested in perhaps what
they most identify with aren’t local
foods but actually foods from around the
world boots from elsewhere so for
example it’s really easy to get good
French food in Tokyo really easy to get
good Italian food there good Mexican
food korean chinese thai indian these
are all very well represented in tokyo
this is letellier from joelle Robuchon
french chef it’s one of several Joel
Robuchon restaurants in Tokyo and also I
should mention that Tokyo will have a
lot of restaurants that focus on food
from around Japan this one is a izakaya
selling food from Hokkaido actually
translates very poetically it says
something like the flavors of the North
a travelogue with sake something like
that and it’s interesting to compare
this to London as well because London is
I think quite similar in Tokyo it’s it’s
it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me
actually because Tokyo
does it’s not a very diverse City it’s
not very pluralistic they’re actually
only three percent foreign-born the
population in Tokyo is compared to say
Hong Kong which is nine percent in New
York and London are both thirty-seven
percent la is forty percent Sydney I
learned is forty-three percent and then
you have oddball cities like Dubai which
is eighty-three percent foreign-born so
it makes a bit more sense in some more
like London and actually I think London
maybe even more disconnected from its
own quote unquote local food culture I
mean when a lot of people think about
local foods in London they may think of
classic British dishes like fish and
chips or pie or bangers and mash you
know all this great British stuff and in
fact whenever my friends from America or
my family come to visit they always they
really want to have fish and chips and
I’m like you know what maybe save that
for the seaside because the fish and
chips in London’s not that good I try to
tell them we’re better off getting ramen
or tacos here because that’s actually I
think more plentiful and more delicious
but they don’t listen we get the fish
and chips they’re disappointed i say i
told you so we go get a taco and
everybody’s happy many ways the fact
that there is a sort of disconnect
between cities and what you might think
of as local food and more of a
connection with each other whether there
you know notice the matter where in the
world they are it’s interesting to me
and I don’t fully understand it but one
thing I think is a good example of this
is the Korean taco so the Korean taco is
a delicious food we can get them a curb
actually known they’re not tacos Korean
burritos there’s a korean burrito stand
called kimchi nari it’s cooked by a
Swedish woman and I think Korean
burritos made by a Swedish woman is like
the most London thing ever i just i
absolutely love it i really really do
but the korean taco started in los
angeles by chef named Roy Choi
korean-american and in Los Angeles it
makes sense it’s kind of a genuine local
food because there’s huge immigrant
populations of Koreans and Mexicans
there and there’s so much so that these
have become just part of the local
culinary landscape everybody eats Korean
food in LA everybody eats tacos it’s
just part of our culinary vocabulary
there
but somehow it’s also a thing in cities
that don’t have these populations and
don’t have much precedent for korean or
Mexican food you can get korean tacos in
New York you can get korean tacos in san
francisco in austin in london in sydney
in amsterdam and i also found in mumbai
this is an ad for a korean taco special
at two sister pan asian restaurants in
mumbai which is very interesting to me
and it says to me that there’s an
exchange of ideas an exchange of
language of food that’s going between
different cities of the world regardless
of where they are and what their
histories or their own you know
homegrown cultures are now I’m a I’m a
big fan of maps any map fans out there
way I didn’t expect the response from
that but I like maps because they
sometimes they simplify they help you to
understand the world you live in like
the London Tube map a very functional
great way to understand just how poor
you are you know by placing your home on
that map but i also like maps that have
a more cultural bent like these maps of
europe from the atlas of prejudice by
yang coats beg of to the tomato you’re a
potato europe map i would say what about
patatas bravas sienko but that good
cuisine bad cuisine map ooh that cuts to
the bone but i also like map maps that
complicate things i like maps that make
me think about the world and see the
world a little bit differently I’ve seen
several these maps that made me think
aha I never thought of it that way in
the past year one of them is this map of
economic mega cities by an economist in
para conor and basically it shows the
relative size of different economies
within their countries and he grouped
cities together because he thinks of
them as one economic unit and that’s
interesting to me I never thought of
that before when i think of economies i
think of state economies in America the
economy of California or I think of
national economies I don’t usually think
of them as being connected by cities or
being based or
cities so seeing Los Angeles in San
Francisco together like that or the
whole Boston DC corridor including New
York as one big unit it’s interesting to
me and look at tokyo and osaka in Japan
I mean it’s massively important and then
of course reflects the sizes of the
populations and significance of the
populations there as well I think what
would be even more interesting to see is
how these mega cities can cross
political borders so you’ve got London
up there and a little bubble inside the
UK and you’ve got rhine ruhr in the in
Germany there but what if those were
combined along with say Madrid and Paris
and the wrong stuff I think that would
be a massive circle in the EU circle
similarly we have this Eurasian silk
road’s map by the same economists which
basically shows how goods and
commodities and money try and travel
across Eurasia the ones that are most
interesting to me are the red and the
brown it’s not easy to make out the
brown ones but those are railroad
railroads and highways because those
will carry people and therefore culture
as well as goods and what’s really
interesting to me about this is first of
all boundary national boundaries are
just ignored the better the borders do
not matter in this map they’re they’re
meaningless basically but also I think
what’s even more interesting is how
decentralize this is you see major
junctions in big cities which are little
black specks on the map but there’s no
one or even two or three sort of central
loci that all of these things flow in
and out of it’s all over the place we
often think of globalization as
something that starts in one place and
then carries on from there like say
Hollywood films from Hollywood to
America than the rest of the world or a
lot of people in East Asia they say that
hong kong shanghai and tokyo are the
sources of globalization and global
culture but it’s actually more
complicated than that now another map or
a series of maps that i’ve seen recently
that I’ve been very deeply invested in
our the electoral maps of the u.s. from
the last presidential election so we
talked about
red and blue states Republican and
Democrat and we I’ve always kind of
accepted that like I think of Oh Georgia
red of course you know Washington yes
blue of course all blue but what’s
interesting about these mess if you look
at them by county is that it’s far more
complicated and they’re actually
basically no states that are blue except
for Massachusetts Connecticut Vermont in
Hawaii every other state that goes blue
only does so because of their big cities
that vote that way and when we talk
about liberal and conservative in
America at least we may as well be
saying urban and non-urban you look at
new york new york you always think of as
one of the bluest of the blue states but
if it was not for New York City it would
be a red state and a few little towns
which i guess like to smoke weed or
something upstate same in Illinois
Illinois Obama’s home turf very very
blue state always been blue but
evidently only because of Chicago on the
flip side you have red states Texas but
the big cities in Texas and there are
several houston dallas san antonio
austin they all went blue just to just
next to texas we have Louisiana where
New Orleans and Baton Rouge are like
blue lagoons and it sort of jungle of
red and to the north we have Kentucky
absolutely blood-red totally red state
except for Louisville and Lexington it’s
two biggest cities and actually I
checked all of the most popular cities
in America how they voted and every
single one of them all of them with half
a million people or more actually went
blue the only exception to this is
Oklahoma City and I don’t know why maybe
they don’t have any good food um and you
know I’m going to come back to London
for a bit in London like I said it
shares a lot with other global cities
and maybe kind of disconnected from the
country that it’s in and that’s how i
feel about cities in America big cities
metropolis is that go blue in an
otherwise red state for example and
london i think is eve
and disconnected from maybe its own
history so jellied eels any jellied eel
fans here no no nobody likes jellied
eels I even met a woman who makes
jellied eels for a living and she told
me she hates them so in London we do
have local specialties just like Tokyo
does there any other city really but
we’re not really that interested in them
unless they’re sort of presented in a
deconstructed almost ironic way this is
a jellied eel dish from duck & waffle
which is actually really delicious as
little vinegar jelly in there and
thinking about this and how how cities
are more connected to each other than
they are to the country’s at there and
kind of made me feel worried and
pessimistic at first actually because I
well there were two things first of all
I worried that we would see a sort of
generic homogenous food culture
spreading across the world and you
actually do start to see that in some
places you go from city to city he sees
some of the same restaurants you see
McDonald’s you see Pizza Express you see
Pizza Hut and that’s sort of worrying to
me like are we losing something in this
spread of global cuisine i was in dubai
a couple weeks ago and that’s where this
idea really struck me because dubai
doesn’t have much of an actual local
population it’s only about seventeen
percent actual emirati so you don’t get
a lot of like really unique local food
everything’s sort of brought in you get
Tim Hortons from Canada you get Apple
views from America you get jollibee from
the Philippines and for me Dubai
therefore ends up feeling a bit like an
airport food court with nice weather but
the other thing that word means that big
cities are going to feel like they need
to extract themselves and be independent
from the countries that they’re in
because they don’t share a common
culture anymore they’re not represented
politically which I don’t I don’t want
to happen i’m sure a lot of you didn’t
support breaks it and voted remain and
woke up and thought well we’ll start our
own country then screw you will do our
own independence thing I kind of felt
that way but nobody really wants that we
still have connections to the rest of
the UK even if we don’t feel like it we
have family we have friends we have
businesses that we deal with all over
all over Britain so nobody really wants
that but I was still feeling a bit
hopeless about this and how to sort of
reconcile
this big cultural divide especially
thinking about food and I thought about
my own hometown thought about where I
grew up I grew up in a town called
Racine Wisconsin small town about 80,000
people very white about two-thirds white
no major immigrant population or ethnic
populations there but even so in Racine
Wisconsin first of all that’s where I
became edged in Japanese food from
watching TV and also if you look at some
of the most popular restaurants in
Racine Wisconsin their tie their Italian
their Mexican the Chinese like they’re
actually quite outward-looking and this
is not a cosmopolitan town by the way
we’re known mainly for our cleaning
products you guys ever use febreze
that’s us but even the supermarket in in
Racine I was shocked last time I went
there because there’s an isle of I think
world foods they call it you can get
three different kinds of sriracha sauce
there and many kinds of tortillas and
Latin American products it’s incredible
so I thought I realized you know it
doesn’t matter where you are or where
you’re from you know in big cities we
tend to have more access to and more
exposure to international foods and so
we tend to come to love them quickly and
accept them quickly but that doesn’t
mean that they’re exclusive to us I
think quite the contrary people all over
the world no matter where they are are
going to be drawn to something that’s
new and exotic just like I was when I
was a teenager in Racine Wisconsin I
think honestly you know I don’t know
where the sort of globalized culture is
going to take us ultimately but I do
think it’s gonna at least in terms of
food and the things we eat give us more
in common and more of a shared language
actually I think that deliciousness
really knows no boundaries and I believe
that delicious food can bridge great cultural divides thank