Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America
Document Type
Blog
Publication Date
9-1-2017
Publication Title
Pacific Affairs
Publisher
University of California Press
Publisher Location
Oakland, California
Volume
92
Issue
1
First page number:
1
Last page number:
249
Abstract
With a uniquely balanced combination of salty, sweet, sour, and spicy flavors, Thai food burst onto Los Angeles’s and America’s culinary scene in the 1980s. Flavors of Empire examines the rise of Thai food and the way it shaped the racial and ethnic contours of Thai American identity and community. Full of vivid oral histories and new archival material, this book explores the factors that made foodways central to the Thai American experience. Starting with American Cold War intervention in Thailand, Mark Padoongpatt traces how informal empire allowed U.S. citizens to discover Thai cuisine abroad and introduce it inside the United States. When Thais arrived in Los Angeles, they reinvented and repackaged Thai food in various ways to meet the rising popularity of the cuisine in urban and suburban spaces. Padoongpatt opens up the history and politics of Thai food for the first time, all while demonstrating how race emerges in seemingly mundane and unexpected places.
Controlled Subject
Thai Americans; California--Los Angeles
Disciplines
Asian American Studies
Repository Citation
Padoongpatt, M.
(2017).
Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America.
Pacific Affairs, 92(1),
1-249.
Oakland, California: University of California Press.