NETFLIX’S ‘STREET FOOD’ & THE COLONIZATION OF NARRATIVE

August 30, 2020

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This was originally published in MATAMBRE edition #2, “Tell the tale” an exploration of the stories we tell and who tells them. MATAMBRE is a self-published project that explores food in Argentina and the socio-economic and political questions that surround it. Please consider subscribing and supporting independent journalism.

Brian McGinn and David Gelb, the creators of Chef’s Table, have turned their gaze to Street Food and are back with a second season that explores Latin America with their signature formula: stories of perseverance over adversity and finding strength through familial love, community, and of course, food. The reaction in Buenos Aires was perfectly captured by Max Carnigore, a cook and staunch defender of dives and street stalls, who asked his instagram followers if they felt represented: 382 of 400 people responded with a hard “hell no”.

“This was another missed opportunity. I have never seen a foreign show or documentary that comes close to reflecting the way I feel as a Bonaerense [someone from Buenos Aires province] or Argentine.” Carnigore explains, “It is always this made up version of reality that falls into the most heinous of stereotypes told over and over by the same gatekeepers.”

To start, the story is littered with factual errors. From the inane, like a title frame that calls the colloquially named ‘choripan’ a ‘sandwich de chorizo’, to the head scratchers, like that empanadas are made from maize—unlike other parts of Latin America, the Buenos Aires empanada has always been made with wheat flour. Clichés felt planted, like two tango dancers filmed in a fair with a historic allegiance to folklore, or fatally miscontextualizated by sloppily splicing platitudes like “in Argentina it doesn’t matter what exactly you believe in” over video of protests from the largest grassroots pro-choice and anti-femicide movement on the continent, a group that most definitely cares about “what exactly you believe in”. The most egregious came from narrator Silvina Reusmann, who begins by glossing over the expulsion and massacre of indigenous peoples and continues with false claims like “all porteños [Buenos Aires residents] have Italian blood” and “we are much closer to Europe than to the rest of Latin America.”

Buenos Aires is always framed as a city of immigrants but we rarely hear about more than half of them. Old stock footage shows Europeans unloading off the boats but never the Brown Latinos crossing the border. The vestiges of a myopic colonialist mentality that has been around for five hundred years and that researchers have long disproven. Italian ancestry huddles somewhere around 50% nationally, and in the 1990s, eight decades worth of LATAM immigration caught up with the Europeans. Today, neighboring countries make up 80% of foreign residents. Additionally, an exhaustive 2005 study by geneticist Dr. Daniel Corach found that 46% of the Buenos Aires province also has Amerindian ‘blood’. Add to that assimilated second and third generation Ashkenazi Jews from across Eastern Europe, Armenians and Lebanese, bi-cultural first and second-generation Japanese and Koreans, and recent waves of Chinese, Ukranians, Syrians and Senegalese. Exclusively promoting the story of a city founded by immigrants implies a finality to a process that not only was never stagnant but continues to nourish.

As Carnigore pointed out, we’ve seen a version of the same story told a million times over. Anytime the media comes to Buenos Aires, it is to tell a narrow tale of Europeans lost in South America with a predictable checklist of places that usually fall into three or four neighborhoods in a city with nearly fifty. Routinely ignored is what the city actually is: immense, idiosyncratic, frenetic and plagued with historic inequality along often racialized class lines. In Netflix’s Someone Feed Phil, host Phil Rosenthal readily admits that he has never been to South America and “knows nothing about” Argentina. A glaring reinforcement of hierarchy, Rosenthal visited eleven different restaurants, seven of which are in the same upper class neighborhood and four that appear in South America’s 50 Best, whilst a voice-over talks about a city of Italians and Spaniards. The glaring imbalance was that a parade of celebrity chefs were allowed to tell their own stories, while the nameless chefs and owners of the two working class restaurants that were visited remained voiceless servers hovering in the background.

The obsession of the media to break everything down into the ‘ten best’ or speed through an entire city in 36 hours fuels this ecosystem in which all coverage of foreign spaces routinely falls into the trap of telling the story that’s always been told rather than letting the real story fully emerge. As Rosenthal himself points out, this is ultimately contingent on a loop of faulty chains of information—producers, directors, interviewers, hosts, writers, editors—who have little or nil expertise in the area they are capturing, and thus, little vested interest in capturing it accurately. Every time they repeat the same simple narrative, the real one is further stripped of the privilege of human nuance and complexity.

The role of media and journalism in society is to inform collective consciousness. Media in all of its forms doesn't tell us how to think but it tells us what to constantly think about. What we are told is just as important as what we are not. Food and culture media, in particular, often absolves itself from that responsibility, negating an important role in humanizing entire cultures and communities and reinforcing the social pyramid, as if food and culture are simply recreational activities and not reflections of the socio-economics or politics of a specific place. Storytelling can never be decontextualized because no story exists in isolation. Telling the same simple story is like stacking cards into a deck, and the thicker it becomes, the harder it is to tear in half. The only way to shave down the deck is to repeatedly challenge the simple narrative with fuller stories. To repeat the hegemonic story and invisibilize the stories that don’t fit into it are ultimately mechanisms that aid social constructions which, in Argentina, further the goals of colonization. Just because the armed forces have retreated doesn’t mean that the conquest has ended — it continues in the form of ideology that plagues the land they came to conquer half a millenia ago. To assert that there was never much native society to begin with is to empower police in Chaco to douse a Qom family in lighter fluid and threaten to set them on fire just two months ago. To negate the existence of Black and Brown bodies in the city’s cultural framework is to empower historic state violence against young men of color in the city’s villas. It is impossible to separate the societal construct from society’s retelling of it.

When artist Marcel Duchamp arrived in the city in 1918 to escape the encroachment of WWI he found himself in a “Buenos Aires [that] doesn’t exist…a big provincial town full of rich people with absolutely no taste, and everything bought in Europe.” Duchamp encountered a city that was headed towards the final act of its Golden Age, a long period of unprecedented advancement on the global stage and a capital grabbing free for all by the ruling oligarchy who built themselves a cosmopolitan playground. For the reigning elite, food was always a tool for manifesting hierarchy and street food, which was never considered ‘European’ enough, was amongst the biggest losers.

“A lot of the elite referred to themselves as Spanish-Americans. They didn’t consider themselves Latinos. If you look at food consumption in the city of Buenos Aires from the times it was a Viceroyalty, there was always an aversion to the exchange of food culture between the Europeans and Indigenous peoples,” explains food anthropologist Carina Perticone. With respect to street food, “up until the 1860s, the sale of food in the street was permitted and taxed. There was food like grilled chorizo, mazamorra, grilled sabalo [river fish] and empanadas. Around the 1880s, politicians began heavily regulating the sale of street food and until the 1930s there was still what was called “stadium food” [sic] pizza, faina and fugazza. Over time, they pushed street food into designated areas until it mostly disappeared.”

The city’s final push against street vending began underneath eventual President Mauricio Macri, who in 2007 was elected mayor in a conservative power shift. Modeling himself as a Guiliani of the southern hemisphere, he tasked himself with cleaning up a gritty city and endorsed policy drenched in the same xenophobia and white supremacy of a hundred years’ past. His political team, which continues to hold power over the capital, waged a successful assault that still targets disenfranchised street vendors that sell everything from pens to salami sandwiches. They started with food carts anchored outside train stations and other important transport arteries and then went after the city’s coastal borders, where a kilometer’s long promenade of barbecue stands were forced to switch from coal to gas and abide by a strict list of permitted foods. Arbitrary city ordinances, written with the exhausting bureaucratic eye for vaguely specific language, have had less of an impact on strengthening food safety and more on discouraging street food vendors altogether. The government continued their crusade neighborhood by neighborhood where mostly Brown Latin American women selling everything from pork tamales and fried chicken to t-shirts and tennis shoes to customers who usually belonged to their immediate communities.

The justifications from the city government’s team of public prosecutors was veiled underneath a collection of anti-corruption soundbites that often painted vendors as both villains and victims in the same breath. Amongst the discourse was failure to pay taxes on profits whilst stealing business from legitimate shop owners, threats to public health from unsanitary cooking conditions and stories of street vendors being tied to mafia groups and black market money laundering schemes. In a 2016 article published in one of Argentina’s largest newspapers, La Nación, public prosecutor Martín Lapadú warned about the prolificness of black market mafias and the need to “save street vendors from exploitation.” In the same article, a street vendor named Ramón Ramirez complained that his merchandise had been confiscated even though he was “up to date” on police bribes to hold his spot on the street.

The media war consistently worked to build an us vs. them campaign pitting street vendors of all sorts against brick-and-mortar businesses. In some cases, this resentment was legitimately felt, like in the once decadent Microcentro where storefronts found themselves competing for scraps with street vendors over ever-dwindling foot traffic. In immigrant rich neighborhoods, the story was much different. In the Bolivian neighborhood of Liniers, a flourishing commercial district sells products from the Altiplano. Along a three block stretch, colorful produce stands and cavernous wholesale spice and flour shops shared the sidewalk with competing vegetable and food vendors. Sidewalks that were once filled with bakers, juice makers and food that ranged from sweet Bolivian empanadas to fried chicharrón are now a ghost of its old self. The only vendors that are left are the ones who moved to the other side of the same sidewalk to sell out of their own front doors. The rest vanished from sight.

In encountering a visible absence of street food, the show failed to ask the most important question: why?