Stinky Tofu Pizza and the Pitfalls of Globalization
Text and images by Cyrena Lee
If there were ever two foods in diametric opposition to each other, they would be stinky tofu and pizza. One is a universally loved and accessible American staple with roots in Italy. The other a niche food with various mythical origins in China, whose powerful stench (it has been compared to everything from old socks to rotting garbage) prevents it from ever gaining commercial popularity. The two foods exist in different worlds: Pizza is easily obtainable in virtually any major city on the globe, whereas stinky tofu is often only found in Taiwanese night markets or street vendors in China. And yet, one spring day in Taipei, I seemingly stumbled into a parallel universe built just for me and my niche desires—stinky tofu pizza on the menu inside a hip pizzeria nestled the trendy Da’an district. Though it had just opened, the restaurant had all the markings that usually signal a fast-casual chain; an Instagram-friendly, clean, white interior decorated with plants and neon signs.
I ordered this food unicorn eagerly. Stinky tofu pizza was myself, embodied as a food. It was a symbolic mashup of my Taiwanese heritage and upbringing in a Central New Jersey town with at least seven pizzerias. As I bit into this wonderfully paradoxical combination of fermented tofu with kimchi and melted cheese, tomato sauce and dough, I felt seen. More than seen, I felt as if I were tasting the glory of what it means to be a third-culture kid.
I went back three times during that trip, before returning to my newly adopted home country of France. I savored each bite, because I knew that such a niche food would not be available elsewhere. Because as much as the landscape of food in big cities has become more diverse, foods traditionally associated with specific cultures are also becoming far more homogeneous, or worse, the cultures themselves are being sold and marketed as commodities.
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It’s only when you’ve lived in a place decades when you can see how much things change. When I moved to Paris as a student in 2009, France still felt like an entirely different country. There was not yet an Apple store, no Instagram to scroll through, and so I sat in cafes doing nothing except stare at people all day and smoke with abandon. Classes were often canceled because of a teacher strike, and on certain Sundays, I walked around hungry because supermarkets and restaurants were closed, a representation of a cultural norm that everyone deserves time off. I lived off the local food—baguettes, cheese and cheap wine. If I wanted Chinese food, it was hard to find except in the tiny and somewhat dingy traiteurs, or buffets of broadly pan-Asian delicacies like stir-fried meats and vegetables, egg rolls and spring rolls.
But the landscape of Paris in 2020 is vastly different. Asian food is as abundant and varied as in Asia itself: there are numerous hot pot joints, hipster fusion-Asian restaurants with neon signs and edgy Instagrams, Korean barbecue, street Thai food, spicy Sichuan, Cantonese, a street of ramen shops, authentic Laotian, buns and bubble tea shops that look copied and pasted directly out of Taipei.
Supermarkets, restaurants and boulangeries remain open for business on Sundays, especially in tourist areas. More and more young Parisians with fancy business school degrees are leaning into startup culture of working all the time, likely even at one of the three WeWork locations found in the City of Lights.
It’s a bit disheartening, to see echoes of New York in my beloved adopted city. After all, what’s the point of going to Paris if one simply goes to eat Chipotle in Saint Germain? I already knew that France is McDonald’s second biggest market after the US, but to see a sprout of fast-casual cuisine pop up in the ancient streets of Paris gave me slight anxiety to think what else is coming to the storefronts of Paris down the line. After all, fast-casual dining is a category born out of the need for convenience for those who can afford higher quality, fresher food. Shake Shack was always billed as the classier, fancier version of burger chains, and Chipotle created a new category of loosely Mexican food—burritos and bowls that could be doled out in perfect proportions and made just to the customer’s liking with chicken, beef, pork or grilled vegetables. Now Asian food is having its moment in the fast-casual boom, with newcomers on the scene like Junzi Kitchen, where people can get bings and noodle bowls made to order, and Boba Guys, an enormously popular bubble tea chain that often boasts lines in San Francisco and New York.
These fast-casual chains are often rooted in coastal elite cities and armed with sophisticated branding, marketing, technology, positioning and pricing: a bowl of cold sesame noodles at Junzi Kitchen costs $10.49, and $1.50 for a soy egg if wanted. Pricing is fine-tuned to customer preferences, which means that less popular foods are cheaper and more popular ones more expensive. Since the chain is also cashless, it is accessible only to those with smartphones and credit cards, a policy that is viewed as discriminatory toward low-income customers who don’t have bank accounts. In 1978, Massachusetts was the first state to ban cashless restaurants, and New Jersey followed suit in 2019. Restaurateurs, of course, argue the case for cashless-ness in the name of employee safety (no cash, no robberies) and efficiency.
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While quality Chinese food in Europe is much more expensive than at a street market in Taiwan, it is now possible to get hot pot or spicy mapo tofu in Paris whenever the craving strikes me. But I resent the availability.
I resent the fact that standard, run-of-the-mill boba tea in Paris is already exorbitantly expensive at five euros for a small cup, and that one of the fastest, most convenient ways to get in touch with my heritage is through consumption. If the trends continue, Chinese food culture will become represented to the masses in the form of picture perfect bowls by chain restaurants that will satisfy the need for culture and diversity.
Even more concerning is that in the face of the recent shutdown in America, a whopping “75 percent of the independent restaurants that have been closed to protect Americans from the coronavirus won’t make it,” according to an article by Jim Coogan for The New York Times. Large chains and well-funded restaurants will survive and perhaps even take over the empty spaces.
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Food is culture, and by looking at the trends, our culture has us eating what’s served to us by giant corporations instead of real people. When we eat at fast-casual restaurants, we become individuals in a line. It reinforces a sense of the self over a shared collective and shared experience, even when we’re dining with our coworkers, if not scarfing down bowls or salads next to them while staring at our laptops. Most of us don’t have time to sit and eat thoughtfully; we’re too distracted with what we have to do next. Fast-casual provides an easy option, and yet eating at a chain is less of a cultural act and more of a harried experience one engages in to refuel one’s energy in order to go back to work.
Pizza Hut in Taiwan appropriated the beloved street-eat stinky tofu as a marketing ploy, following the stink its durian pizza mash-up caused in 2019. Lily Chou, the marketing director of Pizza Hut is quoted as saying, “Taiwanese consumers live a high-pressure life with long working hours and high cost of living. The creative food scene has become an exciting and creative escape. Taiwanese are looking for quick moments of joy to relieve daily pressures.”
Food as novelty is a very specific philosophy, and it goes hand in hand with food as a commodity rather than a cultural experience. In the fast-casual landscape, humans are reduced to consumers whose creative outlet and escape is in how they spend their money. Local food culture used to be tied to the environment and seasons, as well as tradition. Tawainese treats I scarfed as a kid were impossible to get in the tri-state area. But now, thanks to globalization, we can have kale and avocados any place, any time, and Taiwanese food culture has become a trend written about by The New York Times, never mind that it is a country that isn’t even officially recognized by the United States Government.
I think about my parents, who fled the so-called Formosa island where they were born—as their parents fled a communist China—in order to seek a better life, for the American dream. I, a first-generation American and now third-generation immigrant, fled the American nightmare of upward mobility and the nonstop startup hustle mentality. By tracing migration patterns, it makes sense that we live in a world where capital cities have seemingly all become mirrors of one another, where local food culture competes with or has been obliterated by fast-casual and fast-food chains. In a globalized world, the richness we gain in terms of mash-up foods and immigrant culture is at risk of being lost to watered-down, Westernized versions being doled out by big players instead of individuals.
Since, according to the UN, migration is largely linked to the “broader global economic, social, political and technological transformations,” and in recent years, has been massively changed to due displacement events of conflict and war, food can be a source of comfort to immigrants, to give a sense of home. The unfortunate reality is that the capitalist structure we live in provides little room for people to engage with that in a way that’s not profit-driven.
As much as I feel grateful for the availability of my childhood foods, I loved eating here in Paris before, and I am wary at what this diversity means for the ever-flattening and shrinking world that is becoming dominated by the same familiar giants and chains and has far fewer small businesses and niche flavors.
Some days I wake up, craving stinky tofu pizza. But I know, due to its lack of wide mass appeal, should I ever want to eat that wonderfully weird combination again, I’d either have to hop on a plane to Taiwan or make my own stinky tofu here in France. But perhaps that inconvenience is needed. Perhaps we need to remember that eating well should take time, rather than the whims of our wants. We don’t need more fast-casual chains that bring traditional foods to salaried masses, we need to connect more to the actual land we live on and use our creative imaginations to assemble food in new ways, with old traditions, on our own terms.
