Poor People Ate It First. Rich People Gave It a Philosophy

Recently, I came across a review of a restaurant that opened in New York City. The luxury eatery, described as serving borderless, innovative cuisine, was praised above all for its environmental consciousness. To drive the point home, the reviewer raved about a lineup of dishes that use offal from organic animals the restaurant slaughters ethically in-house, which the review termed a clear motivation to let no part of the animal go to waste in the true spirit of a circular economy. I couldn't help but grimace at the glowing words.

Growing up in Asia, eating offal was neither innovative nor borderless; it was ingrained in the local cuisine. From pho to hotpot to stir-fries to stews of all kinds, intestines, tripes, and organs of all kinds adorn the dinner table, with no one treating it as a matter of self-sacrifice to save the environment. Offal, like other pieces of more "normal" meat, was just regular ingredients, no different from the vegetables they were cooked with. People even valued offal for their unique texture, supposed health benefits, and ease of cooking.

And most of all, people valued offal for its low price. Colonial and postcolonial poverty in Asia meant the best slabs of meat could only go to the affluent. Normal people had to make do with the leftovers. Pho didn't become offal-filled by accident. The regular meat went to the French elites, so it wasn't available for the commoners. The story of poverty replicated itself wherever poverty struck. Outside Asia, offal also became a mainstay of curries and barbeques, initially as a matter of survival, but over time, a beloved part of the cuisine. The rich whites who visited, of course, turned their noses up.

Until they themselves "discovered" the benefits and restructured the narrative. When they invent, the leftovers are no longer for the poor, but a sign of sophistication, grounded in concerns for humanity. This story has been told so many times before. While a new wave of psychologists speak of the wisdom behind musical therapy, Asians have been singing their hearts out in marathon karaoke sessions for decades. They credit themselves with taking "ethnic" practices global, whether it be yoga, acupuncture, or eating raw fish.

In the process, they rarely acknowledge the fact that they are simply reinventing the wheel. Sure, the orientals may have had some ancient wisdom, they would say. But ultimately, they did what they did as a matter of necessity in poverty, rather than systematically turning the practices into commercially scalable and scientifically justifiable operations. Like any ideas for starting a new venture, the real value lies in being able to produce it for everyone, market it to the ever-larger masses, and make them accept what was foreign as part of their own personal lifestyle.

But when the adaptation moves in a reverse direction, they call it bastardization. Western foods, political systems, business strategies, and cultural practices found their way across the world in recent decades. Westerners no doubt take pride in the convergence of the globe based on everyone becoming more like them, but the hierarchy remains: authentic Western ideas remain in the West. Those that are adapted to local conditions are imitations riddled with flaws that ultimately prevent those societies from becoming as sophisticated as the West.

That insistence on hierarchy is grounded in a hidden anxiety that the West may no longer have a monopoly on what can be defined as sophistication. Economic development has spread across the world, with many non-Western societies taking a path toward prosperity that is often at odds with Western prescriptions. Some, China in particular, refuse basic tenets like universal suffrage, human rights, and the free market. To compete, the anxious whites now need to take what works there and rebrand it as Western. 

Perhaps that's behind the praise for the humble offal. Western pride refuses to die, even though cultural exchange has never been a one-way street in the history of mankind. For the West to remain competitive and at the center of globalization, it has to take in non-Western practices, not just disseminate its own. But just saying so would invert the hierarchy. But to strenuously justify that something that isn't new in fact is, rather than admit that it has merely copied something poor people do. After all, there is nothing sophisticated about poverty.