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The search for “authentic” ethnic food is problematic and performative. First of all, the term “ethnic” itself is a problem. The use of ethnic to describe food from nonwhite cultures is not really accurate definition-wise but too accurate in its reflection of how a lot of white people think of people of color.

“In an increasingly multicultural society, the term ‘ethnic food,’ while still commonly used, is now starting to take on an offensive character, lumping all nonwhite people and their cuisines together in a category of ‘other,'” according to NPR’s Maria Godoy. 

So to be an awesome, understanding, accepting foodie, you should not say “ethnic” and participate in that “lumping.” You need to be even more enthusiastic about your search for authentic food because you know how important it is to see individual cultures and not a monolith of otherness. 

However, while this view is better than putting all “ethnic” people in one group, it’s still ignoring diversity within cultures, the overlapping of cultures and the experiences of immigrants. 

For example, there is never one answer to what constitutes the most authentic Chinese food. There isn’t one Chinese restaurant that represents exactly what everybody in China is eating. China has the largest population in the world; it’s ridiculous to assume there’s only one kind of Chinese food.

White people argue all the time about whose grandma from Nebraska makes the best apple pie, but we have no problem deciding which restaurants make the best food from a population over four times denser than the American population and over 700 times the size of the Nebraskan population. 

“Immigrants and their families are really the only people who have a right to care about authenticity because they know what it is. But for the rest of us, our efforts are best spent supporting local immigrant businesses without grading them by our standards of authenticity.”

We also seem to care a lot more about the authenticity of our Chinese food than that of our Italian pizza. We don’t even think of pizza as a foreign food anymore, even though in the U.S., the first pizzeria was opened 56 years after the first Chinese restaurant. It isn’t very hard to figure out why that might be.

Now we have New York pizza and Chicago pizza, symbols of cultures combining to make something new. But forget it if you want chow mein in San Francisco. 

“Authentic is a relative term,” Roberto Ferdman wrote in The Washington Post. “Something is authentic according to your expectations of what it ought to be, right? Most of the Indian food I eat is not particularly spicy, but in the Western world, Indian food has become synonymous with cheap curry that is highly spiced. Americans might say, ‘It’s not authentic because it’s not spicy,’ but that’s an absurd caricature of Indian food.”

If you care about eating authentic Indian food, your best bet is to go to India. Some Indian immigrants may not even have access to the same ingredients they’d have in India to be able to accurately make many Indian dishes.

Immigrants and their families are really the only people who have a right to care about authenticity because they know what it is. But for the rest of us, our efforts are best spent supporting local immigrant businesses without grading them by our standards of authenticity.

It’s OK to want to experience a foreign culture, but when you live in a country where that culture doesn’t originate, you need to understand nothing will satisfy your appetite for 100% authentic foreign food. 

It’s not always ideal that people have to change when they move here, but it is reality, and we don’t make anything better by pushing our often stereotypical image of authenticity onto immigrants. We need to shift our focus from finding “real” food to supporting real people.

Reach Adah McMillan at letters@collegian.com or on Twitter @mcadahmillan.