Food and its Discontents
Sometimes what deems a food different, exotic, and exceptional is not its actual ingredients but rather its mode of existence and presentation. Consider, for example, the entry of the gyro, that ubiquitous alien street food, into the culinary tourist offerings of the Florida panhandle in the late seventies. Here, a little incomplete history: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/15/dining/15gyro.html.
What was so special about processed and pressed meat anyway? Southerners had been enjoying the culinary (mis)delights of vienna sausages and spam for generations. What was it about the gyro, whose meat ingredients were just as mysterious as those found in the above mentioned two? I would suggest it had more to do with the fact that the meat (various sections of pressed and processed lambmeat) was sliced from a greasy steamy revolving gyroscope and not popped open from a tin can (which held various sections of pig and cow meat). This was not just American street meat. This revolving sphere of unidentifiable meat, displayed in all its alien conical differentness, announced its own culinary specialness. This was difference in a good way: Meat from a gryroscope, what a nice switch from a plastic crisscross net of fried shrimp, especially to a populace who could not conceive of eating shrimp any other way than fried.
The differences in the distribution of the food-one accessed from the lone standing, always ramshackled food stand in its full display of marginal and solitary existence outside mainstream channels (as opposed, say, from the middle aisle of the local Piggly Wiggly)-no doubt enhanced its marginal exotica. The other obvious difference is that tourists, or the fact of being a tourist by nature implies an elevated status from their usual daily existence. They are open for the new (Although I would not have thought their mass exodus from south Alabama to the Florida panhandle would have given them sufficient time to actually reach this happy jouissance).
Yet, why didn't it catch on? Why wasn’t it assimilated onto American menus the way everything else was? Why did it retain its street meat status? Why is it now, thirty years later, that the first Greek fast food restaurant featuring our little spherical friend has become so popular? Must we look to the specific cultural culinary makeup of those masses, long ago descendents of their French, Irish, English and Scottish forebears? Their culinary masterpieces did not descend from a revolving stick but rather were usually potted under various forms of duress-hot water or scalding oil. Think lobster in a pot, or a handful of shrimp, or shrimplike components, fried and disguised.
My ongoing interest in the gyro no doubt has been fortuitously directed by the various exposure to my husband's Mediterranean cultural heritage. (I hope no one notices how I have just conflated several distinct regions and countries into one orientalized category). Today the modest Panhandle gyro I experienced as a teenager has metamorphosized into the perfect exquisitely stuffed gyro to be found at Gyros on the Go. Their speciality, however, is souvlakis. The gyro and the souvlaki are two separate entities of course; one is prepared with processed meat sliced from a gyroscope while the other is its more Royal cousin, made with cubed and grilled meat, clearly and discernibly traced to its original source. If the average panhandle tourist had issues with the gyro in the seventies can you imagine what they might have thought about the souvlaki? We Southerners embrace our marginalities, our differences, our collective idiosyncracies.
What was so special about processed and pressed meat anyway? Southerners had been enjoying the culinary (mis)delights of vienna sausages and spam for generations. What was it about the gyro, whose meat ingredients were just as mysterious as those found in the above mentioned two? I would suggest it had more to do with the fact that the meat (various sections of pressed and processed lambmeat) was sliced from a greasy steamy revolving gyroscope and not popped open from a tin can (which held various sections of pig and cow meat). This was not just American street meat. This revolving sphere of unidentifiable meat, displayed in all its alien conical differentness, announced its own culinary specialness. This was difference in a good way: Meat from a gryroscope, what a nice switch from a plastic crisscross net of fried shrimp, especially to a populace who could not conceive of eating shrimp any other way than fried.
The differences in the distribution of the food-one accessed from the lone standing, always ramshackled food stand in its full display of marginal and solitary existence outside mainstream channels (as opposed, say, from the middle aisle of the local Piggly Wiggly)-no doubt enhanced its marginal exotica. The other obvious difference is that tourists, or the fact of being a tourist by nature implies an elevated status from their usual daily existence. They are open for the new (Although I would not have thought their mass exodus from south Alabama to the Florida panhandle would have given them sufficient time to actually reach this happy jouissance).
Yet, why didn't it catch on? Why wasn’t it assimilated onto American menus the way everything else was? Why did it retain its street meat status? Why is it now, thirty years later, that the first Greek fast food restaurant featuring our little spherical friend has become so popular? Must we look to the specific cultural culinary makeup of those masses, long ago descendents of their French, Irish, English and Scottish forebears? Their culinary masterpieces did not descend from a revolving stick but rather were usually potted under various forms of duress-hot water or scalding oil. Think lobster in a pot, or a handful of shrimp, or shrimplike components, fried and disguised.
My ongoing interest in the gyro no doubt has been fortuitously directed by the various exposure to my husband's Mediterranean cultural heritage. (I hope no one notices how I have just conflated several distinct regions and countries into one orientalized category). Today the modest Panhandle gyro I experienced as a teenager has metamorphosized into the perfect exquisitely stuffed gyro to be found at Gyros on the Go. Their speciality, however, is souvlakis. The gyro and the souvlaki are two separate entities of course; one is prepared with processed meat sliced from a gyroscope while the other is its more Royal cousin, made with cubed and grilled meat, clearly and discernibly traced to its original source. If the average panhandle tourist had issues with the gyro in the seventies can you imagine what they might have thought about the souvlaki? We Southerners embrace our marginalities, our differences, our collective idiosyncracies.
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