During Wednesday’s class, we discussed at the very last minute the “anomaly” of having an unexpected customer in an ethnic restaurant. There was a shared opinion that often when we see a restaurant, especially an ethnic restaurant, that has diverse clientele, then that restaurant must be doing something right and worth trying.
This raises the question of why do we have this mindset? What influences or persuades us to take the leap of faith to try someplace new when we would never have bothered to notice it before solely because others are going there? One of the many answers is social media. When mouth watering images of food plague our feeds and dashboards, it’s difficult to not notice or at least get curious. However, why is there a party heralding this movement to begin with? These “trendsetting” foods would never have been considered as “trends” if they were never “discovered” by a third party. Whomever this third party is, in regards of which racial, age, professional group whom we put our trust in, they undeniably have the omnipotent power to define which stores or restaurants will be successful and which will be left in the dust.
The example I am most concerned with are “food trends” that appear all over social media and as a result, credit and respect for diversity seems to be thrown out the window. For example, rolled ice cream in 2016. The concept at first is indeed inventive and the making process is possibly classified as art. However, what is herald and validated as something “brand new” and “innovative” by whomever received credit as the first store to have it available to the public, completely disregards its cultural history and presence in Eastern Asia where it has been a popularized decades prior to its first appearance in the states.
Simply put, go beyond your favorite dishes and the Instagram posts that decide for you what you should eat, what you should visit, and frankly who you should care about. To solely give social media the benefit of the doubt that this is the “correct” way to “genuinely” seek out “authentic” and “trendy” foods because an unrelated third party decided to take the opportunity to capitalize off something that has been around us the entire time is quite disappointing. There are established communities where locals and other people do enjoy without the approval of anyone else why they should go there instead of here because they live in and know their neighborhood. NYC itself allows us the privilege to do the very same thing as exploring the world with a simple train ride to the multiple ethnic neighborhoods throughout each borough of the city to discover. There will be places worth going and knowing if you simply explore for yourselves what the world really is and not the world only present behind the screen of your phone or computers. With that mindset, one can find themselves grow and learn more and more about themselves and about their world.
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