Food for Thought

By Joakim Andersen

Piers Morgan recently xeeted about how he would “happily trade a lot of English white people” for a tikka masala, which set the internet ablaze. Joakim Andersen decided to take a “culinary journey” down the path of pizzas and sushis to serve you this hot piping reflection of our relationship with immigration, culture and identity. One bite at a time.

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The debate on mass immigration is interesting, among other things, because one side brings up issues such as the sharp increase in sexual crimes it has led to, while the other side very rarely addresses or even objectively comments on this fairly substantial argument. Instead, their argument is reduced to the idea that the former are racists and that mass immigration has brought exciting food.

This illustrates that we are dealing with a question that is central to the hegemonic ideology and the actors who represent it. Instead of a genuine debate, we get the illusion of one. To some extent, we are also dealing with post-rationalizations rather than arguments: people who never really had a say in immigration policy must now defend the policies pursued, without acknowledging that they have been, are, and will continue to be pursued regardless of public opinion. They are thus forced to come up with arguments on their own, and the food argument is often the first one they arrive at. This suggests that food is the only positive thing immigration defenders associate with the profound demographic transformation of the country.

At the same time, the food argument punctures the now increasingly rare cultural enrichment argument. In its time, this was used to justify mass immigration on the grounds that Sweden would be enriched by several new cultures (the subtext here being that the native culture was as dull and lifeless as the Swedish people, though this was rarely said outright). A few decades later, we can note that the most visible cultural expressions Sweden has been enriched with are food and gangsta rap.

The former is the most superficial cultural expression one can imagine—exotic fast food that is chewed and consumed. The latter is today generally regarded as a problem, even though it is difficult to criticize openly given the hegemonic ideology. In short, Sweden has not been enriched by Persian poetry, Chinese philosophy, or Islamic economic theory. To what extent this is due to Swedes not being interested, to the actual immigrants lacking the capability, or to something else, we leave unsaid. However, as Ezra Pound suggests, such enrichment was entirely possible without massive population movements. It is even possible that such movements hinder it. Interest in Islam among Swedes, for example, has not been helped by the fact that it is now seen as an immigrant religion.

Regardless, the food argument is an interesting area to sink one’s teeth into as a starting point for a humorous culinary-ideological cultural analysis, even though we admittedly take some liberties below. Beyond the aspect of superficiality and consumption, it is worth noting that the food consumed is often strong and/or spicy. Here we discern the contours of, on one hand, a gastronomic oikophobia where traditional Swedish home cooking is constructed as boring, and on the other hand, a racial mythology where certain races are coded as “warm” and others as “cold.”

The ingestion of hot and/or spicy food then becomes a way for cold peoples to symbolically consume the warm “Other” (Northern Europeans are most often associated here with their chilly homeland, something which, in an oikophobic era, is rarely experienced positively by those concerned). The dichotomy “warm”/“cold” also calls to mind the one between “blood-consciousness” and “mind-consciousness” that D.H. Lawrence explored in Studies in Classic American Literature, even though the two do not fully overlap.

Tied to the aforementioned dichotomy and symbolic consumption of “the other,” we find the postcolonial aspect, crystallized in the standardized term “kompis” (friend) (or, more rarely, “10 minutes, boss” when at the pizza place), whose spread suggests it may well be part of the experience the customer is paying for. This does not exclude the possibility that this familiar relationship, mediated through monetary exchange, can become more or less genuine over time, especially since for many Swedes, ordering a pizza is the only multicultural experience that is voluntary.

Also interesting is the strong standardization in the field of exotic food. The same pizzas and the same interiors appear from north to south: there are pizzerias, Chinese restaurants, and sushi places. Interest in innovation and in deep dives into local culinary traditions seems limited, though not entirely non-existent.

Finally, we note the clear similarities between the food argument and the biblical story of Jacob and Esau, where the latter sold his birthright for a meal. Behind the ideological complex where the superficial, consumer society, standardization, oikophobia, and racial mythologies coexist, we find an anthropology that is not entirely appealing.

(Translated from the original Swedish article)

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Buy Joakim Andersen’s Rising from the Ruins: The Right of the 21st Century