“ I marinate the quail eggs a few days in advance/ the same process as tea eggs, its marbling reminding me of after-school snacks and hiking with my family,” Dorsey says, reminding me that a Michelin star restaurant may drive up the price of a dish to triple digits because it has been marinated for 72 hours, while the cheap takeout in Chinatown has been lovingly prepared for the same period of time. The food is Asian fusion, combining traditional East Asian ingredients with French techniques or molecular gastronomy, but as Dorsey’s poetry points out, many of the cooking methods are not exclusive to Western culture. Though I couldn’t taste the haute cuisine, I could see how the virtual mise en place transformed into the beautiful molds set out before me, preserved under glass like the ancient artifacts on display in the museum’s other galleries. “Andy’s fish sauce caramel ice cream” and “Rick’s chapulines cake with mole sugar” showed how Westerners use ingredients associated with Asian or Mexican cuisine and claim them as their own by attaching authorship to their creations.Īsian in America ’s real-life dining experience debuted back in 2018 at New York City’s Museum of Food and Drink, and the pop-up exhibition at the USC Pacific Asia Museum cleverly uses VR, resin food replicas, and photography to recreate the experience. This dish represented the white savior complex - each component described as a white male chef’s signature. ” One plate was geometric and minimalist, with a perfectly rounded globe of fish sauce ice cream and a cake made of mole sugar and chapulines - a type of grasshopper - delicately balanced over bone marrow gel, surrounded by pearls of persimmon moose and small towers of pear.
The meal, which is also accompanied by three handcrafted cocktails mixed by her husband, Matt Dorsey, is a sensory metaphor for Dorsey’s experiences as an Asian in America - the title of her pop-up exhibition at the USC Pacific Asia Museum.Įach stage of the meal offers a different cultural critique, “ from cultural hierarchies in the food system and the lack of the individualism granted to minorities to the internalization of the ‘white savior’ complex. The narrator is chef, curator, and poet Jenny Dorsey, co-founder of the educational culinary nonprofit Studio ATAO, and she is describing the fourth dish of a six-course dinner while I watch the food manifest in an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. “It’s a lucky exception from the rule that offals are distasteful/an aspiration for all minorities.” “The star of this dish is veal sweetbreads/i find we have much in common,” she explains in poetry, and as she speaks, illustrative brush strokes scribble and stack until a gourmet sweetbread dish and its individual ingredients float all around me. I’m standing in a black void and hear a woman speak to me in a mix of frustration and pride.