Leave it to Third Cultures to Chip Away at Unchanging Traditions

When my wife first showed me that Worcester sauce goes well on a meat bun, I was a bit skeptical. A classic sauce of England on a classic snack of the Orient. It sounds like too much of a clash of civilizations without hard evidence on the palate. But with the first bite, I was surprised. Yes, we know that Worcester sauce goes well on grilled meat, but even through a soggy steamed flour covering, the sauce can still evoke the satisfaction of a (thankfully much healthier) steak. Defying culinary categorization at the get-go, the combination transcends international boundaries of what tastes good.

The word "epiphany" can be used to describe finding a new taste. But often, people limit such epiphanies within the boundaries of narrowly defined cuisines, based on generalized stereotypes. The Japanese are for umami and the Indians are for spices. Americans favor grilled grease while the Chinese like their food stir-fried and saucy. By marrying certain cooking styles and tastes with their cultural origin, we reflexively balk at the idea of experimentation in cuisines. A fear of unknown taste becomes only enhanced by the the fear of getting sick from iffy combinations. 

The fear of getting sick among its purveyors is not the only thing stopping a cuisine from expanding beyond its traditional tastes and cooking methods. Food is often the first and most easily accepted part of a foreign culture. Many cultures leverage food as a means to project a positive image of "cool," enabling other customs, traditions, and cultural idiosyncracies to be accepted and adopted in foreign lands after the food becomes commonplace there. Logically, having an ever-changing culinary tradition, defined by experimentation, makes it difficult for others to grasp the unchanging essence of a culture in visual, physical forms.

The cultural baggage associated with a particular food, however, becomes much less of an issue if the food in question is not associated with the local culinary tradition. Like the Japanese putting together the very English Worcester sauce and very Chinese meat bun, a third culture with no emotional attachments to the food being experimented with can be much more innovative with the food. Without the fear of diluting one's own culinary identity, "foreigners" can play around with potentially unsuccessful food combinations in a bid to create more delicious output that transcends traditional cuisine-based definitions.

The innovativeness of the detached foreigner can go much beyond food. Any emblem of culture, from the spoken language and the national dress to architectural design that defines traditional dwellings, can be absorbed by third parties and regurgitated in some sort of a modified form. In the process, new traditions are created by and for these third parties. Centuries after the innovations occur, one would not even remember the original constituent parts, or indeed, what is innovated from what. People simply accept the new traditions as a given and move on.

That reality of innovation becoming tradition only makes it sillier that people would respond with an uncompromising yuck when seeing something like a Worcester sauce-coated meat bun for the first time. Sure, not every culinary experiment ends with a delicacy (itself a subjective concept that differs from person to person). But by criticizing the motivation and process of experimentation in the first place by predicting the yuck without empirical evidence, people inadvertently kill off many possibilities of major discoveries that can change the (culinary) lives of future generations.

Sure, a Worcester sauce-coated meat bun may not improve human civilization to a significant degree, but each similar experiment can help create something new, with the accumulated total output easily bettering every part of the average Joe and Jane's life. Only a conservative mind, the belief that traditions, and the cultural identities that they underpin, need to remain unchanged, stand in the way of such an all-rounded transformation. Eroding the conservatives, then, needs to become more frequent, more vocally advocated, and more rewarded for the effort.

It is easier said than done. People are taught from a young age to be part of a community defined by existing, seemingly unchanging traditions, with little personal ability to immerse themselves in alternative traditions. Cultural exchanges, short-term and knowledge-based, risk entrenching black-and-white thinking that accentuates differences through stereotyping. But if more third parties, without the emotional baggage, can become mediators in bringing together elements of diverse lands and historical roots, then perhaps resistance can fall away much faster.