Nearly two years ago, a friend took me to Besties Vegan Paradise in Los Angeles to buy some kind of fake steak or something else I didn’t want. The chipper woman at the counter told him the store no longer carried that brand. She said the brand’s owner was an Israeli American living in New York and that, when she emailed him to ask about his position on the war in Gaza, he didn’t respond. That told her everything she needed to know.
Being vegan already seemed exhausting enough. But now eating has become yet another form of virtue signaling. New York magazine’s “When Eating Out Is Political” reports that “in the last few years, some Israeli restaurants have been vandalized, spray-painted with notices that accuse them of co-signing the Israeli government’s project,” leading them to drop the word “Israeli” and instead advertise cuisine from the Mediterranean or the Levant. Someone smart is going to start selling Fertile Crescent Hummus.
If we all avoided restaurants serving the food of countries we disapprove of, we’d also have to stop eating Chinese food because of China’s treatment of Uyghurs, Tibetans, and political prisoners. Persian food would be out. We could eat South Korean galbi, but not North Korean naengmyeon. The liberals among us probably couldn’t eat Italian food because of Giorgia Meloni’s immigration policies. The right, because of the trade wars, would excise Canadian bacon from their diets. I would not eat at a single American restaurant right now. There isn’t a falafel from anywhere I could eat. Every meal would be nothing but Swiss fondue.
I’m not going to avoid entire cuisines just to show off where I stand. Because I stand for understanding. I stand for Afghan aushak dumplings. I stand for Russian blini. I stand for Indian chana masala. I also stand for Pakistani chana masala. I stand for using food as a bridge, not a border wall, though if we had to use food to build one or the other, I would choose a chocolate border wall.
I felt really good about that diatribe until I called Johanna Mendelson Forman, who teaches a class at American University called Conflict Cuisine: An Introduction to War and Peace Around the Dinner Table. “I start my classes by asking students if food is political. Maybe one or two will raise their hands,” she says. “Then I give them examples. I say, ‘Remember when Obama went to Ben’s Chili Bowl, a famous African American restaurant, to associate himself with the African American community?’ And James Talarico in Texas was condemned by Ken Paxton for being a vegan, and therefore not masculine, because he ordered a taco with potatoes instead of beef.”
She says we’re in a moment of heightened gastronationalism and that restaurant choices are a big part of it. “It’s a political act like any other protest. Food is a symbol. If you use food as the surrogate for the dislike of a culture, it’s a way of showing disapproval,” she says.
Ukraine, she explains, included culinary diplomacy in its five-year public diplomacy strategy as Russia began threatening a full-scale invasion in 2021. Mendelson Forman went there a few months before the invasion to work with midlevel diplomats on their strategy to build support through Ukrainian food culture. A major victory for that effort came in 2022, when UNESCO added the culture of Ukrainian borscht cooking to its List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding.
Projects such as the Enemy Kitchen food truck in Chicago (Iraqi food) and the now-closed Conflict Kitchen in Pittsburgh (a rotating menu featuring the cuisine of whatever country America was against at the moment) tried to humanize people who were being dehumanized. Chef Enrique Limardo’s Immigrant Food restaurants around Washington, D.C. and Flavors From Afar in L.A. do the same. In fact, in the year after 9/11, I often went to Ariana Afghan Kebab Restaurant in Midtown Manhattan out of sympathy for the hatred Afghan Americans faced.
But the other way around? Forcing every restaurant to answer for its home country’s politics? “I look for Iranian restaurants. I don’t think of it as the country run by the Ayatollahs. I think of it as a country of great cultural value,” Mendelson Forman says.
Most restaurateurs don’t share their politics with diners. When they do, I sometimes go elsewhere. I didn’t eat at Chick-fil-A. Trump Burger became a little more appealing when companies affiliated with the Trump Organization sued it. By then, however, ICE had already arrested the chain’s Trump-loving Lebanese owner, and all four locations had closed or rebranded.
However, I don’t need to make assumptions about a restaurant owner’s politics based on their ethnicity. Nor do I need to eat only at restaurants where I agree with everyone on every issue. That’s not even possible. At least not until the Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music opens a café.
