Eat Your Words

Response to Calvin Trillin's New Yorker Poem on Chinese Food
On this week's episode of Eat Your Words, host Cathy Erway speaks with Karissa Chen – a writer who is currently a Fulbright Fellow in Taiwan – on the importance of being responsible when writing about another culture's food. Specifically, they tackle food writer Calvin Trillin's controversial poem "Have They Run Out of Provinces Yet?" which was recently published in The New Yorker. While major news outlets have interviewed various food writers who are critical of this situation, very few have bothered to ask Asian American writers what they think.
"I think there's a lot of levels of problems in this poem, but the short of it is, it's starting off with reaffirming the status of Chinese people in this country as outsiders, and that's something that all Asian Americans and immigrants in this country battle with on a daily basis." [6:20] – Karissa Chen