In our explorations of how Japanese food is represented in modern media, we explored many mediums, but by far the most fascinating to me was its portrayal in mainstream American food television. As someone who grew up with Food Network playing in the background on my family’s television for most hours of the evening, I have always accepted its programming as a normality without turning much of my attention to the subtext it propagates. Discovering the gendered nature of many of my once-favorite shows, such as Kitchen Impossible, Man vs Food and Iron Chef has been a revelation for me, and has inspired me to return to one of the other food-media pillars of my childhood for introspection. What I speak of is the long-running culinary magazine: Saveur. Saveur is an American published, monthly collection of recipes and essays exploring cuisines from around the world, and has been in print since the 90’s. My father picked up a subscription to the magazine early on in its publication and shared the issues with me as I was growing up, encouraging me to read the articles to learn more about international foods and cooking methods. He grew up internationally, and I am certain that he wanted this foreign influence to percolate to me. I can fondly remember spending many hours curled up in an armchair with the latest copy of Saveur, leafing through stories of bustling Chinese markets and remote Swiss lodges. While recipes were featured for most of the articles, I only ever attempted a few of these. The primary reason I read Saveur was not to learn new cooking techniques, but to transport myself to new and exciting locations in which the craftsmanship and hospitality of local chefs shone through. The articles were eloquently written, often featuring intensely descriptive passages bursting with adjectives, such that you could just about taste the food in your mouth and feel the warmth of the fires. High-quality, page-spanning photographs offered close-ups of key dishes, as well as a glimpse into the lives of the chefs themselves. Whether the chef was an old woman with a furrowed brow bending to knead bread dough, or a tanned-armed man reading to his daughter in the shade of a peach tree, Saveur always made sure to present them as an element just as enticing as the food itself.
While my family no longer subscribes to the magazine, we received issues from them for over fifteen years, from issue 5 all the way to issue 172. We made a point of never throwing the magazines away; my father and I enjoyed them so dearly that we couldn’t bear to. Under the pretense that we would eventually open them up again to prepare lavish family meals, we have kept the 168 issues in a large stack at the back of my closet. They have remained there, largely untouched, for the better part of six years.
Our studies of food media have raised my awareness of how often it relies on stereotypes to stay popular. In particular, if Rebecca Swenson is to be believed, Food Network promoted itself differently (though the early 2000s) to men and women on the basis that the genders would find enjoyment in different aspects of cooking. In doing so, it further propped up the sexist undertones that men could cook for fun, sport, and competition, while women must cook for their families. Popularizing these tropes in media enforced their rigidity, and has likely had lasting impacts on viewers of the network. Of course, it is unlikely that the channel has a hidden sexist agenda; as a long-running commercial enterprise with food as its focus, Food Network is likely most concerned with just turning a profit. In attempting to be as appealing as possible, the programming resorted to the tropes which attracted the largest audience, one must suppose. Shifts in programming over time seem to support this idea. While women were once entirely relegated to home-cooking shows as the men explored abroad, newer iterations and spin offs of older ‘men’s’ shows have begun to incorporate female hosts. The media has adapted to suit an audience that is more aware of and adverse to gender stereotypes. In returning to Saveur, I was interested to see if a similar trend would emerge in the publications as years passed. Would Japanese cooking be portrayed more fantastically in older issues, relying on the mystique of “Oriental” cooking to draw in audiences? And would this change over time? These were the primary questions I kept in my mind while searching through my collection.
More specifically, I read through my old issues of Saveur with an eye for possible fetishization of Japanese culture. As evident in our other studies, in recent years many Americans have come to obsess over Japanese culture to the point where they distort its reality into a sort of mythical, imagined ideal. The level of interest and idealization becomes so great that in some cases, the cuisine and the people who enjoy it become removed from reality. They are reduced to objects of enjoyment in the minds of the obsessors. And unfortunately, this dehumanization is not a one-way street. In attempting to appeal to the booming market of foodies, food literature has partially begun to cater to their tastes over time. In some cases, they rely on the racial fascination with Oriental culture to attract an audience, playing up and highlighting cultural differences as points of fascination to be gawked over. As Western food-media enthusiasts become more passionate about Japanese cuisine, the food-media adapts to suit those tastes and encourages them to spread further. With all that said, the primary examples of this cyclical propagation of cultural stereotypes that we have thus far examined have all been mainstream sources with very broad appeal. Food Network casts a large enough net to be a household name in America. Saveur does not. Every time I have cared to reminisce about the magazine and bring it up in conversations with friends, I have been met with kind confusion. While Food Network has 5 million readers of its magazine alone, Saveur has only 325,000 subscribers, and lacks the substantial television presence of its peer (“Saveur Magazine,” Echo Media, 2020). Saveur does not cast as wide a net, and this is partially by design. It markets itself as a “Gourmet Food and Wine Magazine,” with a focus on food journalism rather than practical recipes or sensationalist competitions. Saveur is nothing if not focused; its photographers expertly capture the key moments that constitute the souls of the chefs and the food they create, and the writing which accompanies it is exhaustively researched and literary. What is presented is meant to be as close to “authentic” as possible. At least, that’s how I remember the magazine. In returning to it after years apart, I was interested to see whether or not the magazine lived up to my memories and expectations. Would it elevate itself above other contemporary pieces of food media as I hoped, or fall into the same tropes as larger publications? With my eyes peeled for markers of cultural fetishization, I opened the first magazine to its table of contents and began to read.
Of the 168 magazines in my possession, twenty contained articles with either reference to or a direct focus on Japanese cuisine. At first this seems like a fairly impressive metric, given that the magazine only publishes a half-dozen articles or so in each volume and presents cuisine from most cultures around the globe. However, I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed. Unsurprisingly, given the magazine’s point of origin, American cuisine from some state or another was featured in nearly every magazine. Only a little less surprising was the magazine’s fascination with two specific European cultures. French and Italian cuisine appeared in the magazine more often than that of all other countries combined. Explorations of Sicily and Champagne dived into hyper-specific regional dishes whilst broader articles focused on holiday and summer meals both in the home country and as they were adapted in America. Just about every imaginable dish, from roast rabbit confit to foie-gras canapes surfaced at some point over the years. Many dishes appeared multiple times over the years as the periodical’s writers re-tread the same ground (that roast rabbit appears at least five times over the years.) Given that France and Italy are considered some of the most influential cultures in regard to Western cooking, I expected them to appear often in the magazine’s publication, but perhaps not so often as this. The only other country which came close to rivaling the appearances of America, Italy and France was China, which featured in approximately 35 magazines. The sheer size of the country and the variety of its regional cuisines constituted enough material for more articles than was standard, I must presume. Japan’s 20 articles and mentions seemed a little more meager by comparison, especially given our past research on the country’s cultural influence on modern media. After my initial search-through of the magazines, I separated the volumes of interest for a closer reading, interested in what Saveur had chosen to present. With so few comparative articles to examine, I was sure that I would be able to avoid the repetition of ingredients and dishes that I saw in the European and American editorials.
This did not prove true. A wide range of Japanese dishes were featured in the twenty issues, including aged meats, egg custards, fermented vegetables and more. However, even within the twenty issues, I began to detect a patterned focus on specific ingredients and dishes, most of which stood out to me for having mainstream appeal. Of particular note was the magazine’s preoccupation with Japanese knives, pickles, wasabi, fish, noodles and miso, all of which appear multiple times in articles throughout the years of publication. If you had asked me beforehand to guess which articles I expected to overlap between Saveur and Food Network, these would have been my six answers (with the possible exception of the pickles). Often summarized on the covers with quick, eye catching bylines such as “Japan’s Magical Miso” and “Wasabi Reconsidered,” I can imagine why these ingredients were returned to so readily. Readers of the magazine were likely entranced by the promise of learning the secrets of Japanese food as they knew it. Wasabi, miso, knives and even pickled ginger are cultural markers of Japanese cooking that are present in the eye of Americans through sushi restaurants and take-out joints. They are, to an extent, already known to the reader in some sense or another, and as such it is easier to form a bridge between them and the culinary environment being explored. As a former reader of the magazine myself, I can attest that I found myself drawn this way, eager to experience the “true, authentic form” of the foreign cuisine I had only tangentially experienced. I was less interested in cultures and foods I had absolutely no familiarity with, such as Russian borscht. There just wasn’t an emotional connection. I am certain that the magazine was aware that its readers might have similarly limited cultural experiences, because the Japanese food articles always kept themselves narrow in the scope of what they explored. Foods such as takoyaki, which are a culinary mystery in America, might be mentioned as a side note in these articles but never got their chance to shine or to be featured with a recipe. To an extent, the primary focus always remains on the ingredients and dishes which Americans might already be expected to have some familiarity with.
The first of the dishes that I would like to examine the representation of are noodles. Almost every article in Saveur that includes recipes for Japanese cuisine features some variation of ramen, soba or udon noodles, usually in broth but sometimes without. In the cases of the article on dashi (issue 122) and the one on pushcart noodles (153), this emphasis makes sense, as noodle dishes are the focal point of the writing. But in other cases, the dish feels auxiliary, added to bulk out a lacking list of recipes with an approachable way of incorporating whatever other ingredient is the focus. The vinegar-focused article in issue 54, for example, featured far less methods for preparing home pickles than I expected, and instead chose to include yet another generic ramen recipe—distinguished from other iterations by the addition of a small amount of rice vinegar to the broth. While I think it is all well and good to teach novice American cooks to incorporate Japanese ingredients into their cooking, one could get the sense from reading Saveur that noodle soups are all that is eaten in Japan, so heavily featured are they in the recipe catalogue. The diminishing of Japanese cuisine to only a select few select dishes is somewhat demeaning given that the country is host to a variety of multicultural dishes and regional influence. There is more to its cuisine than just udon, and yet that is what Saveur seems primarily interested in reporting on. The article in issue 106, of which the thick noodles are the centerpiece, presented itself as problematic in this regard from the outset. The author—a food-film fanatic lacking Japanese heritage or expertise—became obsessed with Japanese noodles after watching the cult film Udon, and travelled all the way to the remote village of Takamatsu to experience them in their authenticity. He begins his article by explaining that the village was lovely, but “don’t get me wrong… I never would have visited if it wasn’t for the udon.” Upon arriving, he finds that “Takamatsu has hundreds of udon-ya, more than in the densest concentrations of any metropolis in Japan, not to mention udon-specfic souvenir vendors and other tourist businesses catering exclusively to the udon-craving hordes. It sounded like my kind of town” (105). When he describes his desire to visit the village to Japanese friends, they also joke with him that he ought to bring them back some udon, as it’s the only reason they can think of for visiting the place. What is being described sounds to me like a cultural warping of a small village. What was once the birthplace of a specific type of noodle has been transformed by tourism to become a sort of theme park which caters more so to visitors than its own population. Doubtless, the locals of Takamatsu turn a tidy profit on all the business they get, but it is at the cost of the narrowing of their culture. So monumental has their udon become that it eclipses anything else that has come out of or might emerge from the region. It will forever, in the eyes of locals and hungry tourists alike, be “the place where you get udon.” I saw this as a fitting metaphor for Japanese cuisine portrayed in American media as a whole. The more that we become fascinated with a narrow aspect of the cuisine, the more we shut out from the broader, richer periphery, reducing a place to a few key tropes.
A later issue is even more problematic in this tunnel vision, to the point where I had to do a double take. In issue 153, in which another American author pays a visit to Japan to seek out noodles, he describes his favorite pushcart ramen stall in detail. Surprising is that he “doesn’t know the hawker by name, and his cart is unbranded, but his ramen I am intimately attached to” (36). I find it a little unnerving that the author hasn’t even bothered to get to know the person who prepares his favorite food—isn’t this magazine meant to portray people as well as dishes, after all? A later remark seems to affirm that the author feels little attachment to the community that produces the ramen. While he may love the dish, he says, “the Japanese are absolutely nuts for this iconic stuff.” The subject of this sentence not only creates distance between the author / reader and the community being featured, but bluntly reinforces a stereotype. There is nothing wrong with examining Japanese noodle soups more closely—they are a prominent part of the region’s cuisine, after all—but there are much more tactful ways to do so, and I expected better from a “gourmet” magazine.
Another set of articles I would like to examine more closely are those concerning Japanese cookware, the subset of which contains by far the most problematic article I found in my readings. Predictably, when Japanese tools are mentioned in Saveur, it is to praise them for their refined craftsmanship. Often likened to pieces of art, “painstaking preparation” is a buzz-phrase repeatedly deployed. In issue 162, the author of a short insert remarks that with such esteemed implements he can finally “serve drinks as a Japanese bartender would” (154). The interjection seems to imply that Japaneseness is not only embedded in the tools, but can somehow be transferred to their wielders by mere possession of them, a line of racial transference which I find ambiguous. Another insert in issue 153 highlights an outlet for Japanese-style cookware in California. These tools can be used to “properly prepare sushi, wasabi and tempura” (69), which are three of the most generic buzzwords of Japanese cuisine I can think of. Again we see a reduction of Japanese cuisine to familiar ingredients, and more so the idea that Japanese tools can imbue Japaneseness into cooking. In issue 48, “Japanese-style French-made knives” are expounded on, and marketed for those “who don’t know sushi from shiso” (57), as if the possession of them will somehow make up for the lack of education. (Also, the idea that a French knife can make your cooking more Japanese is an interesting one, in my mind.) The article which really drives this notion home is the cringe-worthy editorial on Japanese knives in issue 112. When the author—an American man with no Japanese heritage—first acquired a Japanese knife, he “felt as though [he]’d acquired a small sword” (61). The author goes on to refer to himself as a “Japanophile,” and likens himself to a samurai multiple times. When he arrives in Japan at a blacksmith’s traditional workshop to learn about the process of making knives, he “couldn’t help thinking [he] was being inducted into an ancient brotherhood that practiced the martial stoicism and precision of the Way of the Sword.” (61) I had to put the magazine down for a moment after I read that. The fetishization of Japanese culture was not subtext in this article; it was blatant, to the point where it became a feature of the writing. The author goes on to describe the knife-making process in detail, expounding over the simplicity and elegance of the crafting process, and all the while I had a bad taste in my mouth knowing that many readers probably walked away from this article with their stereotypes of Japanese culture reinforced. When the author neglects to sharpen their knife, they remark that “I failed to respect one of the core principles of the samurai tradition: the meticulous care of one’s sword” (63). While I would agree that there is an art to the blacksmithing process, and think that there is something commendable to the author’s “deep reverence for lifetime skill of traditional knifemakers” (58), there are far less problematic ways to characterize the culture. The article as presented does little more than transform a subset of skilled artisans into samurai-stereotypes, and propagates the notion that one can become a samurai by adopting aspects of Japanese culture. There is no question that the author has little, if any, idea what a traditional samurai actually is. He is just playing up a borderline racist depiction to entice the readers of the magazine, drawing on the assumptions of Japanese culture they already hold.
Though the articles I have discussed thus far have all been penned by white American authors, Saveur also has a few Japanese authors on staff, evident by their sporadic writings throughout the years. In general, these articles were overwhelmingly more informative, respectful and insightful in regard to local cultures. The author of “Magical Miso” in issue 27 relates the difficulties of translating Japanese cuisine culture into something that Americans can understand. As they say, “Miso can be confusing for anyone who didn’t grow up without it—first of all, there is no western counterpart” (104). They walk their reader through the processing cycle at a miso-producing facility in Japan, and relate the myriad of different ways that the ingredient can be used. There is clear familiarity with the cuisines mentioned, and the author integrates multiple Japanese terms into their writing with translations following in brackets. They appear to be doing their best to translate their home cuisine in a way that will portray it objectively. Similar in tone is issue 41’s main article on sake production, which portrays the process in a straightforward, no-nonsense manner. The author, a Japanese native, dictates the family history of Japan’s oldest sake-producing family in a congenial, respectful way, and provides a variety of insights into how the alcohol became so popular. Unfortunately—and perhaps because the ingredient was not mainstream enough to merit so at the time—there are absolutely no recipes or drinks utilizing sake offered at the end of the article, which is an anomaly for Saveur. These two articles, penned early on in Saveur’s publication history, demonstrate that the magazine’s native authors are far more adept at writing respectfully about Japan than its American ones. However, in later iterations of the magazine I did notice a shift in this regard. This evolving dynamic of Saveur is evident in its cover pages: early versions are very simplistic, usually just a small portrait framed in white with a few small headlines at the bottom of the page. Newer editions are far more commercial, popping with visuals and buzzwords, and have certainly been pushed by editors to attract new readers. Issue 168, a fall cooking special edition (note that ‘special editions’ are another new adaptation to the magazine that demonstrates a change in editing style) contains an article written by a native Japanese author that sound much more like those the Americans have written. The focus ingredient is seaweed, which the author describes as “magical, transformative,” and a slew of other adjectives (41). They hyperbolize the sumptuous nature of the cuisine in a way that feels like fetishization, which comes to a head in one of the final lines of the article: that seaweed in Japan is “as essential to us as the air we breathe” (42). I didn’t know what to make of this line at first. On one hand, the author lives in Japan, so it is much more difficult to discern what level of fascination with the cuisine might be a step too far, if any. On the other, the author is outright grouping all of Japan together and saying that they eat seaweed as an essential bodily function. This sensationalism, even if it is well-intentioned and meant to display the author’s appreciation of a widely-eaten food he is familiar with, will doubtless leave an impression on American readers. They might not realize that the author is being hyperbolic, and stick it in their heads that “the Japanese sure do love to chow down on seaweed.”
A final article that I would like to touch on, which I think ties together my selection, is the focus article on wasabi plants published in issue 37. I was somewhat surprised to find, when I turned to the first page of the article, a full-page image of a middle-aged white man growing wasabi at his hydroponics farm in Oregon. To my knowledge, wasabi is primarily grown in Japan and its cultivation methods are largely secretive, so I was interested to hear how this farmer had established his own crop. My assumption was not flawed—the article begins by detailing the absolute secrecy with which Japanese wasabi farmers shroud their growing methods. The scene which follows depicts a group of Japanese men driving up to the Oregon farm, snapping photos out of the window of their car, then racing off again. An air of mystery and suspense is quickly established, intriguing the reader. What follows is the explanation I was looking for: the farmer who runs the Oregon wasabi business—Markus Meade—had to resort to covert tactics to establish his crop. After consulting with an expert in Canada to determine where he could grow the plant, he travelled to Japan and attempted to infiltrate the wasabi growing community to learn their secrets. While he was unable to learn much on his own, he was lent support by the wife of a local Japanese friend. This wife got close enough to the wasabi farmers under the guise of harmless interest to uncover their secrets and reported them back to Meade, who used the knowledge to jump-start his farm. Throughout the article, Meade is boastful and proud of his crops, expounding that he is the most advanced wasabi farmer in the world. Because Japanese wasabi farmers largely use traditional methods, his industrialization and adaptations to utilize high-tech equipment apparently elevate his crops above others. This is propped up by the fact that he is able to sell his wasabi back to Japan, where it is even sold in places like Tsukiji fish market (44). The Japanese farming methods are not described in detail, but are remarked upon as being “ancient” and “traditional.” The sentiment here seems to be that Meade has modernized Japanese methods to be more efficient, and become the master of wasabi. This is especially evident when he remarks that, when he let Japanese chefs try his wasabi in a blind taste-test, they “couldn’t tell the difference—they preferred whatever they were told was grown in Japan” (45). The whole article portrays Meade as a step above his Japanese contemporaries, who rightfully resent him for his underhanded tactics. Wasabi serves as a cultural marker that the farmers in Japan are both proud and protective of, and the American has infiltrated their midst without permission. I had a bad taste in my mouth by the end of the article, which detailed how to spice up your sushi rolls with fresh American wasabi and provided a source for mail orders. I had a worse taste when I found, to my disbelief, that in issue 166 when Saveur chose to feature wasabi for a second time, they chose to focus on the same Oregon farm as before. Meade is mentioned by name, as is the Canadian specialist who informed him of where in America wasabi could most likely be grown, but no mention is made of the Japanese community he pilfered his secrets from. In fact, no mention of his underhandedness appears at all. Granted, this could be because the second article is shorter than the first and had no room to extrapolate, but I find it somewhat inexcusable that no mention was made of the tension which exists between Meade’s farm and the Japanese farms. Again, Saveur provides a mail-order source for American wasabi, and not Japanese wasabi. New readers, never exposed to the first article, would have no idea that they might be buying from a dishonest source if they used it. Certainly, I wouldn’t have thought twice—I was unaware how protective the Japanese wasabi farmers were until I read that initial article. This led me to question what else Saveur has been leaving out of its narratives over the years. Their primary concern is to present the stories that their audience will most enjoy, and to craft these stories they seem willing to exclude information that works against the narrative. I am not sure which of the articles rubs me more the wrong way—the one which excludes the problems surrounding Meade’s wasabi farm, or the one which elaborates on them but makes him out to be a heroic protagonist.
There are many more articles that I could analyze from the Saveur magazines, but they largely fall into categories similar to those I have already taken a look at. Generally, the articles focus on a single ingredient or cooking implement, fascinate over it for a few pages with extensive hyperbole, then conclude with recipes for dashi, ramen and some sort of pickled vegetable. They are quite formulaic, in a sense. The articles written by Japanese natives and Japanese-Americans are far less subjective in their style and more respectful of Japanese cooking on a general basis, usually refraining from “othering” Japanese cuisine in the way that the white authors do. However, in later issues, the writing becomes increasingly sensational to the point where it is indiscriminate from that of broad-appeal magazines or media such as the Food Network. Ultimately, this all serves a purpose: Saveur as a brand survives on the continued subscriptions of its audience, and its audience is primarily white upper-middle class homeowners. At the time of this writing, the average income of subscribers is more than $160,000 per year, and the average age of readers is 53 according to Echo Media, a website which consolidates the demographics of magazine subscribers. Saveur knows what sort of people are reading its articles, and so tailors them to suit the taste of the patrons. Over time, though it has kept its gorgeous photography and international scope, the magazine seems to have increasingly flanderized itself, to the point that its writing has become as sensational as any other generic food magazine. This makes for the somewhat disheartening realization that the periodical I once cherished, and had always thought of as being a step above the competition, has succumbed to many of the same problems which underlie food media in general. An accurate and respectful portrayal of Japanese cuisine, it seems, just isn’t what sells magazines these days.
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