Foodie-in-academe
By Jeannette Cooperman
Photograph by Dilip Vishwanat
On top of the crammed bookshelf in her Washington University office, Rafia Zafar keeps an African-themed cola from Germany and a can of vegetarian haggis from Scotland. “Now there’s an oxymoron,” she exclaims. “Haggis should be lamb’s heart and liver, and it should be stuffed in a sheep’s stomach and boiled, or it’s. Not. Haggis.” She’s amused but indignant, like a housewife cheated by her favorite butcher.
This Harvard-educated professor of English and African-American and American studies cares passionately about food—as a political tool, as a clue to social identity, as a way to savor life.
The daughter of a Jewish mother and an African-American father, a jazz drummer who converted to Islam, Zafar grew up in New York City. She’s pretty sure she was the first employee of Giorgio DeLuca, of Dean & DeLuca luxe food fame. “Back then I could lug a 40-pound wheel of Emmenthaler up the stairs,” she says wistfully.
Last spring, Zafar received a Fulbright grant to hold the Walt Whitman Chair at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. When she returned, laden with new ideas about food, we thought it would be clever to interview her in her kitchen. “I have to say, with great sadness, that I currently do not even have a kitchen,” she emailed back. “Well, I’ll be accurate and say that our kitchen is under renovation: What we prepare is done with microwave, toaster oven, hot plate, rice cooker and one of those British tea boilers—and we can do more with those things than I had ever thought possible! But just as most of us do not like to watch sausage being made, so most folks would probably not like to see me in action in my current gastro-spontaneity.”
Fair enough.
You’re renovating your kitchen, so I’m guessing it’s going to be spectacular? Nah. I look at those trophy kitchens on house tours, and I know people don’t cook in them. You know how I know? They are too big. Everything you need should be in a triangle: sink, refrigerator, stove. You’d have to be on roller skates to cook in those kitchens.
You write that eating together—or not—is a marker of social status. How? Think back to the civil-rights movement: lunch counter sit-ins, students being pelted with food when they quietly asked for a grilled cheese and Coke. Food is used to show that you are part of a group—or not part of a group. If you make a Venn diagram, there’s a circle of people you’d go out for drinks with. But only part of that circle holds people you’d also go to a restaurant with, and a smaller subset you might invite to your home.
You hint that in the kitchen, women do not easily fall into sisterhood. People think of the kitchen as something all women share, this bond that will erase differences of race and class. It’s not automatic. The kitchen can sharpen those differences.
Any clashes in your kitchen? Only with my sister. I’ve given up on her affection for sweet potato casserole with marshmallows. I think it’s little short of an abomination. But last Thanksgiving I bought homemade artisanal marshmallows from Julie Ridlon, instead of the bagged supermarket erasers, and that reconciled me.
Why is food such a powerful symbol? Everybody eats. And because everybody eats, because it’s so primal, as Brillat-Savarin says, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.” This is akin to the idea of terroir, that wine is distinctive according to the soil in which it’s grown. People are products of their terroir too. What their mother ate when she nursed them, what they ate as children ...
And what did you eat? Want to laugh at my favorite childhood foods? Creamed spinach and chocolate pudding in little blue-and-white containers from the Horn & Hardart’s automat. Tang, I loved. And bacon. Put all that together, and to me, that would have been a gourmet meal.
Oh dear. Surely you have more sensuous food memories? I do. Eating at my grandmother’s house on the back porch in South Haven, Mich. She’d be toiling over the stove, and I would sit there and eat shredded wheat and quarts of just-picked raspberries and drink milk from her brother’s dairy farm. My other grandmother was from Virginia. She was a beautician; she did Marilyn Monroe’s hair once. She’d fry up all that bacon for me, and make biscuits and fried chicken and collard greens and make me drink the potlikker for the vitamins.
When did you learn to cook? My sister and I learned in self-defense. My mother thought it was a waste of her time; she was rebelling against her mother, the fabulous farmwoman who got up at dawn to bake homemade coffee cake. The woman bottled her own sodas. My mother, on the other hand, embraced efficient food: Minute Rice—so dry!—and TV dinners. I would cook them when she was working late, and then I would scrape the food out of the tin and take a separate trash bag out and leave the semi-cleaned-out tin in the garbage. I don’t even think my sister knew. I was slick.
Then you had a vegetarian phase, right? Yeah. As teenagers we’d hang out in macrobiotic restaurants on the Lower East Side. I still have a secret love for Earth Mother Commando Sludge. Well done, it is a fine thing.
Why do people urge guests to eat, whether they’re hungry or not? Offering food is a sign of love, wealth and hospitality. The late Jerre Mangione describes with horror how his poor Sicilian relatives would buy a chicken they couldn’t afford and he’d have to manfully eat the whole thing. In the Middle East, where many peoples lived in desert conditions, there’s not a lot of food, and hospitality is a highly valued sacrifice. It’s hugely important.
What foods did you miss when you lived in the Netherlands? Just last night I went to Global Foods and got my stroopwafel [cookies], my Douwe Egberts coffee and my drop [salty licorice]. The Dutch eat more licorice than anyone in the world. But what I really miss is raw herring, which they load into their mouths with their heads tilted back. It’s street food. Usually I ate it cut up, because otherwise, when they sprinkled it with onions, I’d end up getting onions in my bra.
Always a problem. Any other food adventures abroad? My grad students and I visited the ethnography museum in Leiden, which had a huge installation on food and human culture. At the end of the exhibit, they had a tasting booth—and my students were watching, so I went first. We decided that the mealworms tasted like dusty Cheetos and the dried grasshoppers were kind of salty, but we thought that if they’d been fresh, they might have had more taste.
So ... let’s move on. How would you describe U.S. cuisine? The anthropologist Sidney Mintz once riled some students by saying the U.S. has no cuisine. One point he wants to make is that the United States is so big, it’s actually a group of cuisines. A snack or late supper of cornbread crumbled up in buttermilk is Southern. People in Michigan say “ick,” but they eat chowchow. In New England, lobsters used to be so common they were used as fertilizer.
OK, if there’s no single U.S. cuisine, which foods are iconic? When I asked my Dutch students that question, they listed hamburgers, hot dogs, French fries, pizza and bagels—which are all ethnic imports! It’s also been said that people acquire a taste for a certain food because they have conquered its people. Tex-Mex cuisine? Gastronomic imperialism.
So we’re eating bits of everyone else’s identity and losing our own? Maybe that means America is finally going to be an e pluribus unum.
Say what you will about Freedom Fries, France does food well. Why don’t we? Some of that’s cultural. In his autobiography, Ben Franklin prides himself on not paying any attention to what he’s eating. He talks about having water, dry biscuits and a handful of raisins for lunch so he can get right back to work, and he praises the staying power of a large porringer of gruel sprinkled with pepper.
No wonder nobody cooks anymore. Well, more recently there’s been a convergence of what turn out to be not very good forces. Americans have no time, and we love engineering, convenience, speed and efficient delivery. In terms of food, that’s not necessarily the best approach.
Ah, but it’s changing. And aren’t class lines dissolving a bit? Oh, yeah. You’ve got celebrity chefs and cooking channels and sushi at the supermarket ... We are all food-obsessed right now; we get upset if we can’t get the right balsamic vinegar. It goes in cycles. Our children will probably eat very simply.
What’s your next place to research? There’s a drive-through chitlins place in Atlanta I’d love to study: All these people drive up in Mercedes, because it’s poor people’s food, smelly food, and their families don’t want to smell it in the house. If they’re going to have Southern food it’s got to be Emeril, not chitlins—which are, of course, pig intestines. Yet in France, they are called rillettes, and they’re a delicacy.
Where do you shop? I like small grocery stores—Straub’s has the best meat. And Soulard I love. It’s uneven in quality, but it’s one of the few places in St. Louis that is genuinely integrated in terms of race and class. We spend most of our weekend going from grocer to grocer, and to the farmer’s market, and to Global Foods, finding cheese mixed with stinging nettles and taramosalata—a Greek caviar dip made from the roe of carp. That is what we do together as a couple. We hang out in the kitchen.
Can a marriage survive radically different attitudes toward food? When my husband and I were dating, he had me over for a hamburger. He made some kind of sautéed cauliflower with ginger, and he’d cut up all these squares of tinfoil to freeze one tablespoonful of the grated ginger at a time, for future use. The burgers were great—he does not eat supermarket meat, and he once had a dog who would only eat meat from the kosher butcher. I thought, “Got a compulsive one here.” Then I thought, “On the other hand, I’m someone who forgets she needs ginger. And he is definitely someone who likes food.” I think if he had just eaten what I consider junk food, it wouldn’t have gone very far.
What’s your favorite breakfast? Coffee, crusty bread with butter or cheese—if my husband hasn’t baked bread for us, a French baguette from Companion or Whole Foods—and, ideally, fresh fruit. Today I had figs and yellow raspberries.
What fascinates you most about food? The human imperative to stuff things. All over the world people take carbohydrates and put things in them. Dumplings in China, dumplings in Germany, empanadas in Spain, ravioli in Italy ... This apparently universal instinct is, in my opinion, related to what anthropologists call “deep structure.” All humans do certain things: tell stories, make calendars and stuff carbohydrates with something. That’s my personal contribution to anthropology—I’m claiming the territory, staking my toothpick.
