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Comment by bllguo | Hacker News Reader

who is saying you can't eat unauthentic dishes, or that there's something wrong with experimenting? they are saying hey, can you not call this X if it's not authentically X. this is not a lot to ask and I will never understand all the hostility about it.

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But what exactly is authentic? Cultures mix all the time and food tastes shift rapidly? Just to clarify - I'm not trying to be hostile here... I just have problems with how authentic is trying to be defined. I ate "authentic" Alsatian food that would be entirely unheard of a thousand years ago in the region and is largely the product of those peoples being repeatedly displaced and adopted into different nationalities and adopting one ingredient from here and another from here as it suited their needs.

Food is constantly evolving.

> But what exactly is authentic

Something that is what it claims to be; “authentic” isn’t a free-standing adjective for cuisine (I mean, beyond that if it is food that it is intentionally prepared, it is “authentic cuisine”.) It applies only to some claim about the cuisine, e.g., that is of a particular origin. So, the question isn’t “is X dish authentic” but, e.g., “is X dish authentically Mexican”

> I ate “authentic” Alsatian food that would be entirely unheard of a thousand years ago in the region

That’s…not surprising. I mean, its not “authentic pre-1000-BCE Alsatian food”, then, but…

(OTOH, American-style tacos are an invention of Americans in the United States. They are authentic American cuisine, but not authentic Mexican cuisine. They are inspired by Mexican cuisine, and they have also inspired some things in newer Mexican and Mexican-American cuisine, but they themselves are just plain American.)

See for example all of the "authentic" Italian dishes that use tomatoes.

That started like 500 years ago, in 1500s. At that time America was just about to be settled by Europeans. That makes tomatoes in Italy as authentic as Mexican cuisine. Whatever authentic means.

> That started like 500 years ago, in 1500s. At that time America was just about to be settled by Europeans.

Tomatoes came to Europe from America as a consequence of settlement, so you have that backwards.

> That makes tomatoes in Italy as authentic as Mexican cuisine.

Well, it makes it almost as old as Spanish-derived Mexican identity. There is quite a bit of cuisine now identified as “Mexican” that is older, e.g., of Aztec origin.

What bothers me more is when someone generalize about a large country with a lot of different regional styles. I've been told stacked enchiladas aren't authentic or traditional, when as far as I can work out, they're just kind of localized to in New Mexico/Chihuahua area. And authentic (American) BBQ isn't served covered in sauce, when they actually are just talking about Texas-style BBQ. Just because that's what you've experienced doesn't mean it's the only authentic way to do it.

Another thing is that everyone makes "authentic" food differently.

hey to clarify, not accusing you of hostility. was a general statement.

i dont dispute that authenticity can be hard to nail down at times but there are plenty of situations where it isn't, so why does the whole concept need to be tossed out? saying american tacos are not like mexican tacos is objectively true; if someone lets that affect how they enjoy american tacos, that's a personal problem, but the statement itself doesnt imply american tacos have no value

i feel like this is a touchier subject than people realize. many cultures have rich and storied culinary traditions regardless of all the one-off examples like fry-bread and so on. saying "authenticity is meaningless" is easily interpreted as an attack even if that wasn't the intent.

I've watched videos critiquing Italian American dishes while simultaneously watching an old southern Italian lady do the same thing the master youtube chef was saying was inauthentic. As an Italian American it's especially annoying to hear in a negative connotation that somehow a dish made from the same recipe in writing from my Great/Great Grandmother is "inauthentic".

At this point, Italian-American cuisine is distinct from Italian, which itself has a ton of distinction between regions. People who go on about Italian-American stuff being inauthentic fail to realize this.

The article is commenting on a very common critique of food not being “authentic” and therefore inferior or not worthy of eating, especially foods that visibly derive from other national cuisines like tex mex.

If your goal is to help people find something that they could try, i.e. telling people about using galangal instead of ginger, then sure.

Since "authentic" is such a weird and ephemeral thing that's hard to pin down, policing people's language generally just comes across as petty and small.

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