Food Fighter

Kyoto, Japan—The meal begins simply, almost religiously: a bowl of rice, a plate of pickles, a pot of green tea. Pour the tea over the rice and take a sip, then pinch a half moon of daikon between your chopsticks. Later comes a plate of tofu scraps dressed with green onions and dried fish, a seaweed salad, and a small bowl of miso soup.

This is obanzai, Japanese home-style cooking, but the cook is no ordinary homemaker: Setsuko Sugimoto is the matriarch of one of the oldest families in Kyoto, a city where everyone knows exactly how far your family goes back. Her home is older than the United States and protected by the Kyoto government. Tonight’s dinner stretches back to the Edo period, and to prove it she drops before me a telephone book–thick copy of the original recipes her family has preserved for 10 generations. “These are the traditions that we are starting to lose,” she tells me.

Not more than a few blocks from Sugimoto’s centuries-old home is a thicket of unwelcome invaders: Starbucks slinging monster soy lattes, a pizza delivery chain prepping seafood pies, a rainbow array of 24-hour convenience stores, portals of warmed-over carbohydrates and general gastronomic mischief. It’s a familiar tale: waves of brutish Western culture crashing on the shores of foreign countries and encroaching upon their long-held traditions. But the phenomenon is all the more striking here in Kyoto, in the heart of one of the world’s richest culinary cultures, with cooking traditions that stretch back millennia and more Michelin stars per capita than any other city in the world.

But Kyoto and the rest of Japan are not prepared to see their food yield to the mitigating forces of the modern world. Sugimoto is a part of a formidable coalition of government officials, nonprofit organizations, scholars, and food luminaries who have been working for two years on a proposal to include washoku—the traditional dining cultures of Japan—on the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s list of “intangible world heritages.” On Thursday, they received word that their bid had advanced to the final stage, making Japanese cuisine all but certain to win this prized UNESCO designation in early December. It may seem a benign marker, but the UNESCO program is itself not without controversy. Moreover, it begs the question: Can a U.N. body’s imprimatur do anything to protect something as intangible as a style of cooking?

by Matt Goulding, Slate | Read more:
Image: Matt Goulding