Celebrity chef David Chang explains why ethnic food aisles are basically 'the last bastion of racism [...] in retail America'

Sarah D | 1:42 PM on October 02, 2019

If this isn’t one of the First-Worldiest of First-World Problems, we don’t know what is.

In an interview with the Washington Post (of course), celebrity chef David Chang elaborated on his contention that ethnic food aisles in grocery stores are actually relics of America’s ugly racism:

“If you go to the ethnic food aisle, that is sort of the last bastion of racism that you can see in full daylight in retail America,” David Chang, the man at the helm of the Momofuku empire, said on his podcast this summer. “It is something that’s got to go.”

In a telephone interview, Chang says there is an “invisible ceiling” on some supermarket items: Italian products that were once marginalized, such as olive oils and vinegars, are now routinely integrated into grocery store aisles, while Chinese, Japanese and Latino foods remain stuck in their own sections. The ongoing segregation of these foods, Chang says, isn’t about acceptance among the mainstream. Asian and Latino cuisines have long been embraced by Americans of every stripe, he says. You can sometimes even see this acceptance play out in supermarkets: Instant ramen and tortilla soups may sit right next to boxes of chicken noodle and cream of chicken soups, those standards of mid-century America. Same for the produce section, where plantains and mangoes will be sold in the same area as apples and iceberg lettuce.

Yet in supermarkets there are still aisles dedicated to soy sauce, duck sauce, oyster sauce, rice vinegar, coconut milk, rice crackers, stir-fry sauces, yum yum sauce, curry paste, corn flours, adobo seasoning, bagged tortillas, refried beans, salsas and hundreds of other products connected, sometimes tenuously, to Asian and Latin American countries.

“All the foods in the ethnic food aisle are already accepted. So why do we even have them?” Chang asks. The aisles, he adds, are an echo of “1950s America, which was not a particularly good place to be, especially if you were Asian.”