Nicolyn Woodcock on Jennifer Lin LeMesurier’s *Inscrutable Eating: Asian Appetites and the Rhetorics of Racial Consumption*

In Inscrutable Eating, Jennifer Lin LeMesurier explores how we learn gut orientations that shape our reactions and our interactions with certain communities via food practices in the United States. As she notes, there are “common ways of discussing consumption [which] orient our ways of speaking and eating away from certain practices and therefore toward or away from certain racial characteristics” (2). As she explains in the first chapter, gut orientations are important to understand because, like most food studies scholars know, they are not really about food or eating practices; rather, they become the paradigm for how we think about and treat people associated with the foods or food practices in question. In four additional chapters, LeMesurier showcases how gut orientations shape the racialization of Asian immigrants and Asian Americans in the US, using four culinary examples––19th century stereotypes about “rat eating” (Chapter 2), COVID-era panic about “bat eating” (Chapter 3), health and wellness narratives that villainize the ingredient MSG, or monosodium glutamate (Chapter 4), and the reaction to an internet-viral op-ed about Asian salads (Chapter 5)––to demonstrate that talking about Asian food is always also a way of talking about race, gender, sexuality, class, and cultural belonging and citizenship.

In the second chapter, “Rat Eaters,” LeMesurier provides an historical overview for one of the most enduring stereotypes in the United States about Asian food and Asian people. Analyzing print culture, she argues that the visual reproduction of a link between Chinese men and rats, in particular, became a rhetorical sign of flawed embodiment––they were not masculine enough to eat beef, for instance, and not human enough to eat “real” foods––which had implications far beyond what one did or did not eat and which have outlived that time. By taking the time to revisit these rhetorical foundations, LeMesurier offers compelling arguments that anti-Asian bias is not merely a subset of anti-Blackness in a binary idea that race is White and Black in the United States, but rather Asian racialization has a unique and complex structure of its own. While its original intention was to block the immigration of the Chinese (and other Asians) into the US, its secondary and most enduring function has been to determine and enforce “necessary level[s] of separation between differently racialized bodies” well into the present (49).

Using contemporary examples in chapters three, four, and five, LeMesurier demonstrates how deeply ingrained these anti-Asian gut orientations are and how expansively they influence other dimensions of Asian American life in the United States. In Chapter 3, “Bat Lovers,” LeMesurier analyzes “bat eating” discourse that emerged with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, illustrating that the “rat eating” discourses of the late-19th and early-20th centuries is not a relic of a “more racist past” but part of the foundational playbook on racialization which continues to put Asians “in their place,” both in the global and in the US racial order. In particular, she is fascinated with viral videos and cartoons that depict Asian women supposedly eating bats, the popular allure of which is contradictory to the disgust they apparently provoke. LeMesurier builds on the prior chapter’s discussion of Asian masculinity by turning attention to similarly linked beliefs about eating and femininity––that is, how the sexual consumption of Asian women’s bodies is often discussed in terms of eating. In contrast to rat eating discourses that dehumanized, desexualized, and feminized Asian men, the fascination with Asian women bat eating align with discourses that hypersexualize them as alluring, readily available, and more willful than White heteronormativity allows. Because Asian women’s sexuality is simultaneously regarded as a source of danger, a possible source of disease or a security risk (she could be a spy), these videos were also the visual affirmation viewers needed to define bat eating as the source of the coronavirus.

While stereotypes about rat and bat eating may lead American eaters to be suspicious, cautious, or avoidant when it comes to Asian foods, in chapter 4, “MSG Users,” LeMesurier considers the notion that trusting our US-centric gut orientations can lead to the redemption of Asian flavors by analyzing various attempts by White people to offer “clean” and “healthy” Asian dishes. Through rhetorical frames that treat health as value neutral, they attempt to side step discussions about people, race, and class; instead the discussion centers the effect of that people’s food on the individual. In this way, a person cannot be racist in their “rhetorical impressions” about broad food categories but is only trying to make the healthiest choices for themselves (80). Food, however, is a messy medium for working through these health-related ideologies because the bodies associated with a food are almost always conflated with the food itself––meaning that the rhetorical impressions that Asian food is unhealthy and can be reformed are similarly imposed on Asian people, who are seen as in need of “assimilation” before they can properly belong in the United States. Ultimately, they and their food are welcome only if and when they can be controlled, which LeMesurier discusses further in the final chapter, “‘Too Sensitive’ Speakers.”

Chapter 5 explicitly discusses how stereotypes about Asian docility and acceptance of “honorary whiteness” in the US racial hierarchy is part of the same gut orientation that casts Western food and Whites as superior while determining Asian foods and Asians as unhealthy. The object of analysis are reactions to Bonnie Tsui’s New York Times opinion, “Why is Asian Salad Still on the Menu?” (April 2017), which vociferously mocked Tsui as “too sensitive,” as “fetishizing authenticity,” and as “anti-diversity” (101).  Comments showcased that salad names like “Oriental Chop Chop” and the limited range of ingredients that constitute them as “Asian” (i.e. mandarin oranges, sesame oil/seeds, scallions, fried wonton strips) have become so “normal” that most people (including other Asian Americans) do not see how they reflect the everyday institutionalization of casual racism. As LeMesurier has spent the previous four chapters laying out, these are gut orientations at work. Importantly, LeMesurier emphasizes the number of other Asian Americans who opposed Tsui; their comments, she suggests, succeed only if the presumed-White audience expects that “Asians all think and act in lockstep” and, thus, they reify the values of a white-dominant sphere, normalizing its “multicultural emphasis on collecting types of food/people” (118-119). These Asian Americans not only police Tsui’s behavior but demonstrate––and therefore satisfy that audience’s imagination about––what is “proper” and expected for Asian Americans, especially if they are women. Without challenging the dominant gut orientation toward Asianness, these commentators claim themselves as exceptionally “healthy” and “qualified” for American belonging, while Tsui is rendered part of the flawed and unhealthy who must, by rule, be excluded.

In Inscrutable Eating, LeMesurier brings nuance to the ubiquitous maxim “you are what you eat” by unraveling the rhetorical process of how one comes to be defined by how and what you eat. As scholars in food studies, Asian American studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and gender and sexuality studies (among others) continue to critically examine “how the stories we tell about people and their appetites are inextricable from tacit assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality” (123), her theory of gut orientations offers a fruitful framework that can enhance this work.