What We Talk About When We Talk About “White People Food”

Welcome to You Are What You Eat...or Are You?, a mini series about the ways that we project our identities through food.

You probably know the stereotype of “white people food”: bland, pale, unseasoned stuff, so flavorless it could make you cry. This cliché has been widely embraced as a joke, a meme, a barb that even white people throw at themselves with a self-deprecating chuckle. Anemic-looking meat and potatoes garnished with a single speck of salt, almost anything with excess mayonnaise—this fare is commonly greeted on social media with “where’s the seasoning?” or some variation on “white people colonized half the world for spices and still don’t even use them.”

In this popular imagining, the opposite of “white people food” is bursting with seasoning, spice, and everything nice. Think aromatic curries that light up your taste buds, juicy fried chicken lacquered in a fiery sauce, crispy vegetables tinged red from paprika and cayenne. There’s not really one term for this culinary grouping that encompasses what could easily be hundreds or thousands of regional varieties of cooking, all crammed to fit under one convenient umbrella. “Ethnic food” has been side-eyed for years now as a shorthand for cheap and exotic; “minority food” is easily met with the retort “who’s the real global minority?”; “immigrant food” is laughably hegemony-centric; and I’d sooner crawl under a rock than refer to anything as “BIPOC food.”

In any case, what this category of food is matters not so much as what it is not. A binary has emerged in popular culture—especially online in the bowels of TikTok comment sections and viral tweets—cobbled together from half-logic and sweeping generalizations: If “white people food” is bland and unseasoned, then all food that appears to be bland and unseasoned must be “white people food.” And if that is true, then the logic follows: “Non-white people food” must therefore be well-seasoned and generously spiced, a welcome antidote to the tyranny of pale provisions. But it’s worth asking: What are we trying to prove by upholding this forced binary of taste?

Splitting these categories into “white” and “non-white” even within this essay obviously doesn’t circumvent that constructed binary, but for the sake of this argument, let’s operate within the widely adopted framework and language that we’ve got. The idea that “white people food” (or at least what is typically considered as such) lacks seasoning and spice has some historical basis. Though spices were in high demand for centuries in medieval Europe, that changed by the 18th century, according to historian Paul Freedman’s book Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination. Spices largely fell out of favor among European aristocrats, with appetites trending more toward the French preference for “letting the natural flavor of the main ingredients of a dish speak for themselves,” as Freedman put it.

Today’s version of “white people food” is likely largely rooted in American cuisine of the past century. The sustenance of the Great Depression trended toward canned vegetables, various creamed substances, and starchy casseroles that were purposely designed to prioritize nutrients over flavor, culinary historians Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe tell NPR; spicy foods were considered a stimulant, similar to caffeine and alcohol.

The postwar years helped homogenize “white” food further. “At school and other institutional settings, American food was coalescing into a middlebrow mess of perfect squares of white bread fried in margarine with melty processed cheese inside, instant potatoes, casseroles, and fish sticks,” Annaliese Griffin writes in Quartz. That 1950s image of frozen TV dinners and mass-produced, shelf-stable blandness became an “iconic stereotype of what ‘American’ food was,” even if it wasn’t accurate to what everyone in the United States was eating, Smithsonian food historian Ashley Rose Young tells me. Somehow, whiteness became associated with this specific genre of American cuisine, even though both white and non-white Americans were also buying packaged foods sold by migrant or second-generation entrepreneurs at the time, like Goya Foods and Chinese American frozen-food company Kubla Khan.

The slice of midcentury suburban fare as “white people food” has endured as a stereotype, and, over time, has become even more entrenched in popular imagination. What was once an inside joke on Black Twitter and in diaspora communities has become a common rejoinder on social media, boosted into a mainstream culture that has embraced all things hot over the past decade. Riffs about all “white people food” being casseroles or mayonnaise or mild in flavor started appearing in the annals of content farms, food publications, and comedy videos. In 2015, an Indian restaurant in the United Kingdom made international headlines for reportedly writing the words “VERY MILD, WHITE PPL” on the receipt for a white customer who had indeed ordered his curry very mild (similar incidents go briefly viral every so often). In 2016, Beyoncé’s “hot sauce in my bag” lyric sparked widespread conversation about the significance of hot sauce to Southern Black identity, as well as the question of who gets to authentically claim a love for spicy food. Meanwhile, the flavor binary continued to solidify online as a meme, even becoming enshrined in Urban Dictionary definitions.

But it was TikTok that amplified the idea to a new degree. It’s so common to open the comments section of a food video and spot the remarks about the lack of seasoning and spice that it has become a trope in and of itself. In these videos and among their spectators, there’s a hypervigilance about the appearance of flavor. Creators’ and consumers’ anxiety of getting it wrong hangs over much of the cooking content on the app, present in recipe developers’ videos defending their seasoning practices and in the ubiquitous “here before the ‘where’s the seasoning’ comments” comments. The self-consciousness is often wrapped in a joke, but it’s there, nonetheless, like a particularly sensitive phantom.

Enshrining food as bland versus seasoned, mild versus spicy, white versus...not—this has become a signifier, a shorthand, even a way to perform the very self. The French social scientist Claude Fischler writes that “[t]o incorporate a food”—that is, to consume food, to take it into our bodies—is “to incorporate all or some of its properties: we become what we eat.” This incorporation forms the foundation of identity, Fischler writes: “Human beings mark their membership of a culture or a group by asserting the specificity of what they eat, or more precisely...by defining the otherness, the difference of others.”

That seems especially true in the invocation of the binary, which is defined by the perceived differences between one “kind” of cuisine and its antithesis. Jokes and memes about colonizers’ bland-ass food resonate, and not because of their originality or comedic genius; implicit in those quips is a declaration of allegiance with people whose ancestral lands were once plundered by colonial powers for spices and other riches. This reversal in contemporary culinary clout is payback for all the decades, if not centuries, that our food and our flavors were once maligned as strange, smelly, alien, oily, and maybe even immoral.

Or maybe, more realistically, the joke is just that: a joke. Still, its premise is unflatteringly reductive. Insisting, however unseriously, that the cuisines of all people of color are alike in their spices and seasonings flattens the variances and intricacies that make gastronomy delightful, and renders non-white people and their food a monolith. Plenty of cuisines do not fit within the popular idea that non-white food must taste spicy and extra seasoned—or must look like that, in light of the increasingly common expectation that all food must be heavily coated in dried spices to taste good.

Hainanese chicken, in all its pale glory, appears to be the epitome of “white people food,” and is routinely mocked as such. Despite it being one of the most flavorful chicken dishes around, comments under TikTok videos about it span from “It looks so bland” to the meta “If a white person did this everyone would be like ‘where’s the seasonings??’” Emily Mariko, a cooking and lifestyle influencer on TikTok famous for her salmon rice recipe, has been accused of making bland food even when she prepares umami-rich Japanese dishes like chicken teriyaki (Mariko is half Japanese). With critiques like this, it’s only a matter of time before sushi is considered a “white people food”—oh wait, that already happened.

So why do we enforce this binary of taste? There is the possibility of connection, in reaffirming our identity, our community, and our place in it—in claiming membership to the project of being a person of color. But so, too, is there the possibility of alienating both self and others, in prescribing what it means to be a non-white person, or at least to perform as one. So often this posturing is just spectacle rather than a real way to engage with how food informs identity and vice versa. And, not to mention, it is frequently just kind of stupid, like all memes that go on for too long.

A growing backlash to the “where’s the seasoning?” jokes—or at least acknowledgement of how conversations about food and identity have become so extreme—suggest that I’m not the only one finding this essentialist divide a little tired. “Y’all don’t need to mix creole seasoning, Cajun seasoning, blackening seasoning, Tony’s seasoning, slap ya mama seasoning, lemon pepper, old bay and Lawrys to the same dish,” suggests one recent tweet, while others have come to the defense of chefs who rely on fresh herbs and aromatics rather than visible heaps of dried seasonings.

So perhaps it’s time to lay this binary of taste to rest, to find some new jokes about food. I’ll be over here with my liberal dustings of salt, pepper, garlic and onion powders, and red pepper flakes, but you do you. After all, there is no one right way to cook, just as there is no one right way to be a “non-white” person.

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