The Authentic Ethnic
“For the most part of a decade that saw unprecedented middle-class disposable income and status-conscious spending, we were so self consciously enamoured by our new interest in restaurants with different, fresh menus and with the promotion and celebration of particular chefs that we found no time to examine the culture from which this excitement and change appeared”
Michael Symons
‘One Continuous Picnic’
“The Ethnic is charged with the veil of authenticity”
Krishnendu Ray
‘The Ethnic Restaurateur’
“I’m running out of ethnic friends”
The Moldy Peaches
“Lucky Number 9”
On the way home from work I was shocked out of my doom-scroll-walk-repeat malaise by advertising on public transport which managed to steal my attention. Admittedly, I was mostly just amazed to see something other than the usual stunnah-baiting visual affront that is White Fox marketing strategy.
(Side note - Sydney’s general public are nowhere near mad enough about the ways in which a fast-fashion company has bought off our cityscape, highways and the backs of Irish immigrants.)
The advertisement in question was a Canva-designed and local government approved promotion for the ‘Ramadan Mark…I mean the Lakemba Mark… I mean Australia’s largest “Multicultural Event!” & “Authentic Cuisines”. At the time of writing it is Ramadan, and for the uninitiated, of which there are surely few, the Ramadan markets are the pride of Australia’s most densely muslim populated suburb, Lakemba: And now all of the “foodies” as well. Beginning almost two decades ago in the way all great things do, the markets were a functional expression of community and cultural initiative outside opportunism and bureaucracy.
The positioning of the Ramadan markets as Australia’s largest “Multicultural Event” found me at a very questioning-the-multicultural-project-time-of-my-life. I had just finished ‘Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalism’ by the late Post-Colonial theorist Sneja Gunew, and her generative criticisms and unveiling of the haunting of multicultural policy by colonial ghosts have been enacting their own spectral force over my thinking and creative practices as of late.
In a moment of Freudian dream-like chrysalis, one particular open ended question from the book seemed to have found its answer via the real world light rail ad. The question was - “How do these state, public, and capital multicultural discourses, apparatuses and imaginaries defuse struggles for liberation waged against the modern liberal state?”. Answered simply: instead of Eating the Rich and dismantling oppression, we now Eat the Ethnic and gate-keep “authentic” eats.
What follows is the long answer.
The Palestinian genocide, growing wealth inequality and the Epstein Files, to name oh but a few, are contributing in genuine ways to current and future “struggles for liberation”. As it relates to Australia’s localised liberal centres, there appears to be a genuine reluctance or impossibility to recognise the role of food not as liberator, but as a weaponised panacea for colonial and exploitative histories which haunt and make impotent contemporary racial discourse.
Through an over-indexing on “culture” without anti-racist commitments ( we still call IDERD “Harmony Day” btw) Gunew presciently reminds us how Multicultural policy, the jewel in our nation’s crown, excluded Indigenous affairs and self-governance from policy and the popular, banishing such to the academic enclosure of post-colonialism whilst reinforcing a sanitised plurality and racial inequity amongst different migratory diasporas - “What is not in doubt is that state multiculturalism serves to construct dominant versions of multicultural difference…informed directly by the legacies of specific colonialism”.
Admittedly, this obsequience to the revered and almost defied nature of “food” isn’t wholly novel to our nation; Netflix produced films, media spin stories and Instagram reels produce a plethora of snippets regaling the wondrous nature of eating and its embedded diplomatic function both within and between nations. As if there weren’t enough ghost talk already, Anthony Bourdain in particular re-animates along algorithmic highways and his politics, just like the Ramadan markets themselves, become de-fanged. He appears often to push straight forward narratives like; Working in hospo is hard! There are countries who cook food other than France, Greece, Spain & Italy! And eating can change the world, right?!
On this Substack I’ve written at length about Australia’s particular engagement with food as it relates to the outworking of Multicultural policy. But because there is no clearer and more succinct way to draw attention to our nation’s dining particularities, I will repeat once more the words of academic Ghassan Hage - “Multiculturalism is primarily conceived and expressed in everyday life in Sydney through the quantity and quality of available ethnic food”
In many ways, Multiculturalism is positioned as our reparation policy - “Multiculturalism is represented as… political testament to the nation’s aversion to its past misdeeds and to its recovered good intentions” (Povinelli 2002:17-18 - Gunew, 44). It was a shift which failed to bring our un-ceded nation’s original inhabitants to a sovereign table, elevated and respected the status of certain ethnic groups against others along market logic and racial fault-lines, and set the groundwork for major cities as touristic destinations via the influx of an immigrant subaltern working class. For academics like Hage, it is in no way an exaggeration to say that a large part of the strategy rested on the dining scene (e.g. the prioritizations of skilled working visas for cooks in the 70s’). And so by virtue of such support, the dining scene’s relationship to capital has only grown in monstrous, insidious and also positive ways.
Let’s begin with the positive. Hage in his work speaks at length about how the uptake of hospitality as connate with a national identity offered unforeseen entrepreneurial opportunities to those newly migrated but also to those who had their identities historically denied via Assimilatory policies and public will. This is the birth of what I casually call the Authentic Ethnic. As nations became more globally interconnected with the collapse of Capitalist alternatives (Soviet Union, Yugoslavia etc.) and the continued out-workings of the “market”, the pursuit of the real, the alternative and the authentic turned inwards towards fertile grounds. And the pathways between the underground and the mainstream, the resistant and the integrated, became indistinguishable.
This has been dissected ad nauseam within the “arts” (Mark Fisher etc) but its application to food and Australia’s urban layout is as viable as it is under-documented. Suburban enclaves, once hermeneutic, cracked open as the local became foreign, marketable and tasty. But to shoe-horn in the profound work of William Butler Yeats - “A terrible beauty is born”.
Hospitality in Australia is monopolised to an unprecedented extent: 45% of all operators own multiple venues. F&B sales are incidental for dining empires who accrue wealth and value through property, gambling and temporary accommodation. Working conditions within said groups have been uncovered as abusive at best and existentially dangerous at worst. The middle class of independent entrepreneurs are fighting valiantly to not go gently into that growing rate of restaurant closures night (1/11). And like natural flora and fauna variance, creative diversity has disappeared in the face of tightening and extractive material realities (Cost of living, council fees, tax, rent etc.).
So predictably, the authentic (cheap) migrant story has become a source of financial respite for share-house dwellers amidst the melee and deluge of genuine structural inequity. But it has more insidiously become a moralistic stand to rest political and social opinion on from the professional managerial class of masthead journalists and policy makers, as well as the ever growing genre of foodie influencers. A genre we are all increasingly implicated in.
I call this evolution the ‘Free Range Ethnic’; a class of migrant entrepreneurs who unburdened from the shackles of overtly racist policy are “free” to simply be. In the language of dining this means to exist somewhere outside of design moodboards and commitments to Only. The. Best. Produce! And whilst the food is of course tastier than small plates at “local wine bars”, its contemporary adoration gains particular attraction by virtue of its ability to smuggle in the unconscious moral absolution of Sydney’s liberal centre. The work of monkeyboy.sydney both instantiates the FRE class, and as of late, has begun to tangentially critique the phenomenon.
This social and economic diagnosis of the industry is not occurring within a vacuum - as below, so above. In 2026, housing for the aspirational upwardly-mobile is absconded as elitist asset accrual exacerbates and the middle of our political system cannot hold. Why? because we are being dragged into genuine social collapse by a fucked centre-right and a cuckolded labour left which feels destined to repeat the arrogant sins of the para-social optimism of the Barack Obama administration.
Pauline Hanson and the rise of One Nation as a genuine alternative to the same-same but shit dual party options of the Australian government problematically projects straight onto the above mentioned authentic ethnic moralising. Hanson can be seen as the “real” choice. The Trumpian equivalent of acceptable hypocrisy. The only one saying what an uncomfortably large portion of our nation are thinking. She is slowly occupying the “authentic” and therefore the more irony-pilled, marketable section of modern politics.
The insightful journalists at Lamestream have bemoaned this reality as the media continues to give Hanson and her lackeys easy questions and free air time. Such is her unavoidable presence that her Islamaphobic dismissal of the suburb of Lakemba doubled as promotion for the Multicultural Event of The Year! from both public and private reporting.
The unthinkable relationship between people selling delicious camel burgers and the racist Hanson has a sort of twisted logic to it. This is made apparent in the 2023 Voice to Parliament failure; a reminder that without genuine class based politics, identitarian issues can be evoked for the left AND the right - “Multiculturalism is now, a kind of floating signifier which gains both meaning and strategic capabilities only in a specific context. It is available for use by any faction and has no privileged or unchanging meaning” -(Gunew, 29)
Much was made of Murdoch media’s successful smear campaign against the referendum. But to apply a longue durée approach, Multiculturalism’s inert Aboriginal integration is largely at fault there. Sydney’s inner city footsoldiers of progressive politics came face to face with a diverse, moneyed working/labouring class and historically ostracised migrant diasporas of the outer suburbs. No amount of social cohesion lip-service could make up for a largely exploitative immigration program set against an inability to acknowledge and dismantle the system which enacted Indigenous extermination and set the dogs of capital on sequentially and conditionally acceptable racial groups.
Food has brought an idea of being Australian to the table and given its citizens something to talk about and be proud of - “Mykonos is great, but nothing beats my local Thai joint”. But it must be made clear that Australian Multiculturalism too often postures as progression, confining racial harmony to be documented via the availability and quality of ethnic food, in as much as it continues to ensconce not only Colonial modes of government but also Eurocentric dispositions: a national day of mourning for Jewish victims of the Bondi Terrorist attack exist next to the criminalising of Palestinian protests as hate speech and a periodic villainization of brown immigrants for the housing crises. This is because, and this should go without saying, buying “authentic” food does nothing to address and restructure the material conditions at the heart of empire which impact and divide all of us. For Gunew, spectacles like this relegate the valid and communal struggle for political legitimacy in their differences to a “‘museum culture’ relevant to the cultural tourism industry”.
Again: We must eat more than just the ethnic.
It’s now obvious that Liberalism counted its eggs too early. The rise of conservative and fascist politics, the collapse of democratic trust, the lies of neo-liberal capitalist logic (China went renewable AND lifted people out of poverty) have all contributed in their own ways to Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, the genocide of Palestinian people, civil war-preconditions and the Iranian crises. The hospitality scene as vehicle of such groupthink has hitherto been undiagnosed past surface level Pierre Bourdieu takes and Habitus analysis. And like most academic titbits, they pop up along the newly potent micro-podcast movement: jobless arts degree individuals on TikTok & Instagram Reels condensing political theory through a handheld lapel mic whilst vibe content appears behind their head.
The beautiful community members who invited Pauline Hanson to the most multicultural event ever, have their heart in the right place of course. And this is utterly commendable considering not only her comments but also Anthony Albanese’s continued no-where-ness when it comes to standing up to American & Israeli aggression. But as Anne Ally, the newly appointed Minister for multicultural affairs, stated clearly, it is not up to multicultural communities to provide the foundations for “social cohesion”.
I’d like to add, because I’d hope I’ve made it clear by now that Multiculturalism, migrants and food are kind of interchangeable; it is also not up to food. It is more important than ever to remember how distraction works in the 21st century where the fault lines between left and right, liberation and capture, are as ill defined as the text boxes which frame those instagram videos you scroll past.
The advice from talking heads to discover your city, the journalistic lists of authentic ethnic restaurants desperate for online traffic and the electioneering by politicians using whatever multicultural event is deemed fit for purpose, is primarily distraction - unfortunately.
What you eat and how you eat is political yes. But so is straight up politics. It may be time to stop only organising our weekends around suburban safaris which can be seen to rehearse tribalistic notions of national identities like: Italian = pasta, Indian = curry, Indonesian = not as good a cuisine as Malaysian. Rather, there needs to be an equally exciting, aesthetic and morally inclusive organising of our communities across and through cultural differences to co-ordinate a targeting of racist, colonial and anti-humanist policy decisions and infrastructure.
I’m not suggesting to entirely dismiss dining excursions. But we should see the work of figures like the NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani, who successfully galvanised bodega entrepreneurs’s and cultural difference into an election campaign co-ordinated around resistance of exploitative private/corporate interests (e.g. rental prices, supporting BDS organisations, child care) as an important case study. The wonderful, but very recent acceptance and funding of cultural storytelling and moneymaking by government bodies is to be taken primarily at face value.
We can’t simply settle in the field of the image and representation which garners clicks, views and in giving us things to do, sedates essential criticism and unrest. Instead, a rage against the plain and obvious decisions which work against all of the people of this nation must be maintained e.g. housing affordability and accessibility, coal and gas companies, Indigenous incarceration and sovereign denial.
If now - as everything gets more expensive and dining out becomes more proliferated - is not the time for class consciousness via the dinner table, then when?