An Immigration of Flavors

Iowa's Melting Pot Stirs its Spoon

The history, even the prehistory, of Iowa recounts a series of immigrations. Glaciers descended and dumped the world’s richest silt on a tongue-shaped midsection of the land. Then grazing animals migrated to eat the bountiful tall grasses and hunters tracked that prey here. When planters came, first slowly in wagons, then rapidly on railroads, they cleared the grasses and the forests to grow corn, the king of crops. In the 19th century, western and northern Europeans came to reap the greatest harvests in the world.

In the 20th century, Italians, Greeks and Irish followed, then Mexicans, African-Americans from the American south, southeast Asians, Africans, east Europeans and Central Americans. Most came for the land, and for the jobs that the land produced, first in Iowa’s coal mines and on the railroads, later in the farm machinery factories and then in meat packing houses, in pig confinements, on chicken ranches and in our universities. Each immigrant wave came to work jobs that second and third generations of previous immigrant groups did not want.

Every new group of Iowans brought their taste for distinctive foods with them. Immigrant groceries and restaurants sprouted to feed a longing for the flavors of their homeland. Originally, these stores and cafes were in ethnic neighborhoods and catered to immigrants. After curious diners from outside the immigrant group visited, new markets were born. More importantly, the first footsteps of assimilation had been taken. When a person breaks bread with a stranger, tolerance is digested.

Just as Italian food was once strange to German Iowans, Italian-Iowans found Vietnamese food strange, and Vietnamese-Iowans found Sudanese fare weird. Honduran food is strange to the Sudanese, and Bosnian food to the Hondurans. Those who adventure into new culinary lands discover something more valuable than flavors. Ethnic restaurants are instruments of acceptance and understanding. What doesn’t kill you, makes you more open minded.

If that’s too touchy-feely for your taste, then consider another reason to support ethnic foods in Iowa. They add choices in a time when food choices are being reduced by economic conglomerations that don‘t much value diversity. Despite all the aisles and all the different brands on your supermarket shelves, its harder to find a variety of pure foods than it was 30 years ago. The last quarter of the 20th century was the Dark Age for Iowa’s greatest natural resource -- its farmland and the independent lives it begat. The family farm disappeared as a cultural entity, sold off in most cases to an industrial-agricultural complex that exploited the land, the animals that live on it and the air above it. All in a rush to produce food faster and cheaper -who cares what it tastes like?

Most of our supermarkets and franchise restaurants do not prioritize food quality. As long as customers don’t get sick and sue, they will emphasize consistency over freshness, long shelf-life over purity and price over flavor. The agro-industrial complex became so efficient that they produced more food than Americans needed. To expand their markets they had to convince customers to increase personal consumption. Crap was super sized. Now no obese child in America ever needs to go to bed without a belly full of empty calories.

Our mainstream grocers and restaurants specialize in long distance, highly processed foods that have nothing to do with the great natural resources of Iowa. Consumers must search the marginal niches for alternatives to “enhanced pork” and “vine-ripened” produce that was actually picked weeks ago and later shot full of gas to “auto stimulate” ripening. Most Iowa grocers are not interested in locally grown foods because the supply is too inconsistent.

Immigrant niches, from farmers’ markets to ethnic grocers and restaurants, present alternatives to the status quo. The elongated Chinese eggplant you find in Iowa is more apt to be grown in Iowa than the familiar purple egg-shaped version. The Thai basil you get at farmers’ market is probably fresher than the European basil you find at the supermarket, if you find any there. In one great irony, most all “fresh” garlic in American supermarkets is harvested in Asia, but most all garlic that Asian-Iowans sell at farmers’ markets is grown in their backyards.
Ethnic groceries, like small town lockers, do most of their own butchering, so they aren’t as apt to be selling “fresh” pork that is shot full of chemicals, so it won’t change color when it is shipped pre-cut and prepackaged.

They also stock cuts of meat that you won’t find in our supermarkets, cuts that our ethnic forefathers would never think of wasting and that their American grandchildren have never tasted.