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Kiki Aranita: Remember Your History. Cook Your Spam. Keep On Moving.
64 Plays1 year ago
How do we reconcile the rosy bits of history with the uncomfortable parts? How do we embrace it and learn not to repeat it at the same time? How can the food industry become a more just place for people of color?
Food writer, chef, and Poi Dog owner Kiki Aranita gets deep into her Chinese roots, her profound love of Spam, classic literature, her love of fiber arts, and what life is like for a food entrepreneur — after the restaurant closes.
And always, COOK. THE. SPAM.
CONTENT WARNING: Trauma, historical violence, anti-asian racism, explicit language
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This program is produced in south west philadelphia, in the unceded neighborhood of the black bottom community and on the ancestral land of the Lenape nation, who remain here in the era of the fourth crow and fight for official recognition by the commonwealth of Pennsylvania to this day. You can find out more about the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania and how you can support the revitalization of their culture by going to https://lenape-nation.org.
Visit this video’s sponsor, BVP Coffee, roasting high quality coffee that benefits HBCU students:
https://bvp.coffee/uncommongoodpod
Visit this video’s sponsor, Poi Dog, chef Kiki Aranita creating sauces inspired by Hawaiian Cuisine: https://poidogphilly.com
we chat to ordinary people doing uncommon good in service of our common humanity.
we are creating community that builds relationships across difference by inviting dialogue about the squishy and vulnerable bits of life.
(un)common good with pauli reese is an uncommon good media production, where we make spirituality accessible to everyone and put content on the internet to help people stop hating each other.
thanks for joining us on the journey of (un)common good!
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Transcript
Waking Up to the Familiar Unknown
00:00:00
Speaker
I feel like I wake up a lot and I don't recognize the world that I'm in. And then at the same time, everything feels the same. I feel like I have made some dent in food media on, for example, one of my main goals to honestly represent Hawaii's food. Our voices are not loud enough. I'm happy to be part of this movement. I feel like we go a few steps forward and then the world is burning again in a different way that I never would have expected. But I'm still very caught up in it feels like the world is burning.
00:00:29
Speaker
How do you have a legacy when it's just gonna be set fire too?
Who is Chef Kiki Aronita?
00:00:42
Speaker
This is Uncommon Good, the podcast where we chat to ordinary people doing uncommon good in service of our common humanity. My name is Paul E. Rees. Fam, I am delighted to bring to you today James Beard Award-nominated chef Kiki Aronita, whose Hawaiian sauce company, Poi Dog, has been seen on Good Morning America, NBC News, and more. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, she owned a catering business and restaurant in Philly,
00:01:11
Speaker
also called Poi Dong. A content wording off the top, we talk about war and historical violence, trauma, anti-Asian racism, and there is some explicit language in this episode. So as always, if these things are not right for you to listen to, feel free to switch this one off and we'll catch you in the next one. We talk about why Asian cultures love spam and how we cook it deliciously.
00:01:35
Speaker
the challenges of closing a restaurant and transitioning to a sauce making company, how Kiki stays grounded as her star continues its meteoric rise, her love of fiber arts, equity and justice in the food entrepreneurship industry, and so much more. This was an incredible delight and a privilege to chat to Kiki. Please enjoy our conversation.
What is the Local Beer Cocktail Scene?
00:02:06
Speaker
So first and foremost, I don't normally drink on the show, but in honor of the continued launching of your line, I have a beer cocktail that has the chili pepper water and it has the lavender ponzu in it. And it's awesome. What kind of beer are you drinking?
00:02:26
Speaker
So it's also local to Philly. We're sitting in Philly today. My favorite spot is Wissahick and Brewing Company up in East Falls. And it is their version of a Mexican lager. Like it's that sort of light, very low ABV. It's called their sunny side lager, but chef's kiss. The sauces, a little bit of Worcestershire, a little bit of like soy, the tomato juice, the lime zest, the tajin, the seasoning.
00:02:55
Speaker
That sounds really refreshing. Given that you are now in the CPG market, the consumer packaged goods market, I'll send you the recipe because it's like virtually formulaic. So what is your dog's name?
00:03:09
Speaker
Her name is Coconut, and she has a cousin, my sister's dog, who I believe you've also met, and his name is Macadamia Nut. So they both go by Nut Arranita.
How Does Branding Reflect Childhood Memories?
00:03:21
Speaker
So talking about hooli hooli, yeah, I'm going to get into branding real, real early, like right off the top, but I don't care because the lines are awesome.
00:03:31
Speaker
So I had the privilege of sampling the sauces at a craft fair locally here in Philly. And what, what, what, what an absolute delight, like a delicious marinade, a wonderful flavoring agent for some sort of like aioli based sauce, at least I would love to have that
00:03:54
Speaker
I'm an aioli on French fries person, so I would love to have that equal parts, like huli huli and mayo, and have that be my French fry dipping sauce. Oh, I haven't tried that. I've done that with the other sauces. Chili pepper water mayo was recently on one of the menus that I've done recently, and the lavender ponzu works really, really well with mayo, but we are retiring it because the
00:04:19
Speaker
many of the ingredients come from Japan and it costs way too much money to produce. So that said, not everything about that is sad because I've launched the hooli hooli sauce and that really, really does speak to my childhood. And it's super savory. And although it's designed to make hooli hooli chicken, which has this beautiful char to it. Yes.
00:04:44
Speaker
It works really well on other proteins as well. When I first launched it at the Cherry Bomb Jubilee, we used oyster mushrooms to, like, we basically roasted the oyster mushroom once in hooli hooli sauce, served it over hummus that my husband Ari made, and it was so delicious. I, like, still get messages from people who were at the Jubilee asking me for that recipe, and I'm like, it's literally just the sauce. Just buy the sauce and put it in the mushrooms and put it in the oven, and that's all you have to do.
00:05:12
Speaker
Exactly. You don't even have to make it at home yourself. You have spent countless hours in the food labs figuring out what the finished version of it is. It's there to enjoy. It's there for people to just pick up, have it in its finished form as you have intended it to be.
Why Choose Artisanal Over Industrial Ketchup?
00:05:38
Speaker
It's there.
00:05:39
Speaker
It's very versatile too. Yeah. Oh, you're welcome. I mean, I used to make like a version of the sauce whenever we did hooli hooli chicken on the barbecue, on the grill at home and like, you know, you're like obviously making a sauce from scratch. So you're getting the pineapples, mixing them up with soy sauce and everything else and mirin. So this was also like a selfish shortcut for me to have hooli hooli more often.
00:06:04
Speaker
But it was a ketchup too like I so I hate ketchup I hate I think it's so disgusting like ketchup to me just tastes like high fructose corn syrup Yes, and it's just and like food dye I think it's disgusting and I think I really recently read an article where somebody was saying like the artisanal ketchup that scene is dead It just never took off because everything loves industrial ketchup. Everybody's wrong So I think it's gross
00:06:31
Speaker
yes yeah and so like there's just there you have better options you can have guava katsu you can have muli muli sauce and they both like work really beautifully as ketchup that don't taste like high fructose cornstarch
00:06:42
Speaker
a couple of things. I grew up with parents, I grew up with depression-era grandparents, and one of them made their own homemade tomato ketchup. And exactly the same thing is true. Nobody wants to have a tomato ketchup that actually tastes like tomato. They want to have
00:07:03
Speaker
or has the color of tomatoes. They wanna have that, I'm sorry, mom. So my mother is a native Pittsburghian. They wanna have that perfect sort of, what is that xanthan gum consistency? Heinz Red Sauce. Please don't sue us, Heinz Food Corp.
00:07:24
Speaker
But it's absolutely that. I worry sometimes that things that started out as more reasonably flavorful and less exotic things like sriracha are going to become the same way. But thank you again for huli huli and guavacatsu. And thank you for making a space for that, for people to have things like that excessively.
00:07:53
Speaker
I mean, I hope he becomes more accessible in a multitude of ways.
What is the Impact of Big Corporations on Small Businesses?
00:07:57
Speaker
So, okay. Are you on TikTok? Yes.
00:08:00
Speaker
Okay, so I don't really post on TikTok, but I might get really avid spoiler. And there's an account that I'm definitely going to misquote because I don't pay close enough attention to TikTok. Yeah. So it's like, cancel like the clothesline or cancel something. But basically, it's somebody who's like going through all the shelves at the grocery store and like saying like, all right, even though there are always different brands, like all this different variety, like
00:08:29
Speaker
these all belong to the same few corporations, the same investment funds. Everything belongs to Vanguard and BlackRock. So it doesn't matter whether you're buying Hidden Valley or whatever. So the aisles are colored in on the TikToks, and if it's orange or red, then it belongs to a fund. I want to get my sources to the point where
00:08:55
Speaker
They aren't as expensive, but so I wanted them to be more accessible that way. I don't know when that's going to happen because I am literally the only person running this company. Yes.
00:09:05
Speaker
I'm the opposite of every other product that you'll see at the Acme, for example. So in that sense, but like I'm working on distribution, I'm working on greater distribution as well, but I'm still at the very beginning stages of things. So I don't know, maybe we'll revisit this interview years on and more people will actually realistically have access to these flavors and sauces.
How Does the Environment Affect Consumer Goods?
00:09:30
Speaker
So yeah, I'm working on it. Give me some time.
00:09:32
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah. It's like, it's really, really disappointing. Um, but also elucidating to like watch these videos and be like, wow, like we really don't have all the choices that we, that we think we do. It's true. And it's not like you're choosing between on that aisle. It's not like you're choosing between a hundred delicious things that all are in the supply chain reasonably sourced. You've spoken about this at length before.
00:10:00
Speaker
You're choosing between lots of different options, all of which have an incredible level of human cost that even though it's not passed on to us as the consumer are questioning, are not just somewhere in the supply chain, whether it's the producer, whether it's the factory workers who are producing it, there is a human cost that we don't see.
00:10:27
Speaker
in an environmental class. And I don't know how to fix this problem. I know in some ways, if you're a CPG company, no matter what your packaging is, you're going to add to our land shells.
Can We Avoid Single-Use Plastics in Food Service?
00:10:41
Speaker
You're going to add to the problem. But I think the idea of starting a small business and continuing to support other small businesses is that if you can shift the money away from these large corporations and shift
00:10:54
Speaker
Funds away from the people who are greenwashing things then yes at the end of the day we're going to be better But like we're not nobody's perfect if you open a CB if you have a CPG company you're packaging things you're shipping things like all of this comes as at an environmental cost and these things weigh on me constantly as well there was recently a New York Times article that
00:11:16
Speaker
about the author tried to go through a day without touching plastic, and I thought it was the most fascinating thing because in food service, even if you're doing the best job possible, you're going to be touching with single-use plastics. You're drinking, filling up a dumpster. My husband, Ari, is pretty much
00:11:37
Speaker
for many years was on the forefront of operating outside of the industrial food chain, and he's extreme. Not just thinking in terms of food sourcing, working with very specific farmers and working with very specific vinegar producers. All of his linens were sowed by one person. His aprons were sowed from used burlap sacks. And I tried to help with the sourcing of these materials as well. And you should really look into Heidi Barr.
00:12:06
Speaker
She sews aprons and these amazing linen coffee filters and purchases linen from either Pennsylvania Mills or from Lithuanian Mills for very specific purposes. I tapped my cousin who's the master roaster at a pizza coffee in California and I was physically flying back on these coffee sacks that were otherwise going to be just shredded and-
00:12:36
Speaker
into the landfill and they were gorgeous like these sacks were like they coffee sacks are beautiful especially if they're being sourced from like places like Yemen and look all over the Middle East like there's like gorgeously painted and they were just getting thrown out so I think I flew back like maybe 200 pounds of
00:12:54
Speaker
Coffee sacks for her like one time I was out there for a for a family wedding But like you go down this route and it's very hard to like get off of this route but Ari is like like he didn't want to use any product that came from a clear industrial source like
00:13:11
Speaker
Yes. All the sunflower oil, sorry, all the canola oils, even that was local. And I don't know anybody else who's buying that much bulk local oil. It just doesn't happen. All this meats came from Primal Supply Meats, RIP, recently closed. And
00:13:29
Speaker
Like he was just so intense about this with his restaurant, Lucy, but he still used cling wrap. Like there's just, there's no other option. Like there's nothing, there's like no real alternative and you still need to like follow the health code. And like, there's only so much you can do. And whenever you're using like plastic wrap or cling wrap and things like that, like you're, you're, you're adding to our problem. Yeah. So anyway, I think this is like the stuff that I think about like Aldi.
00:13:57
Speaker
Yes, and so one, I wanna say thank you for continuing to wrestle with it. One of the things that I wish we had more space in media to talk about is that these sorts of things where there is no clean answer to them, like how do we make things better? Like we can say, how do we make things better at least for today?
00:14:25
Speaker
what is the best, most human and environmentally dignified thing, decision we can make today, based on whatever information we have, and then when tomorrow comes, we'll make another decision tomorrow.
00:14:42
Speaker
And it's, I mean, it's just a funny thing. Okay, so I'm half Chinese. Like I mentioned, I grew up in Hong Kong and I, oh my gosh, whenever I say I'm Chinese, it's a whole thing because I don't feel any ties to mainland China and there's a, my family was originally from Nanjing and you tell anybody that you're from, that your roots are in Nanjing as I was states and chances are they know about the rape of Nanjing and then they're like, ooh.
00:15:06
Speaker
So yes, my family escaped that, so I actually have quite an ugly family history. But through that ugly family history as something that's in common with many other Chinese families, you are taught a certain type of frugality. Everybody I know, no matter how wealthy at this point in their lives are, they understand
00:15:28
Speaker
If we just talk about how trauma works and how healing of trauma works, not even saying that these are necessarily already bad things, universally bad things. We just judge them as bad. But these things, they are a part of who we are. And these are things that get passed down in our genes to us.
00:15:49
Speaker
whether they're great things like resilience or strength or determination or whether they're less helpful things like actual like physical trauma, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, like actual like medical disease, et cetera.
00:16:04
Speaker
I hear you on that piece. I mean, I'm Korean, but I'm a Korean adoptee. I'm 100% Korean, but I lived in Korea three months before I was adopted and grew up here with white parents in the States. So there is this sense of where do we actually belong? What identities can we claim? Like, am I Korean enough? Am I Asian enough?
00:16:31
Speaker
and who determines what that is. And also, does any of that matter? I mean, it matters. And I think the conversations that we're having out of the ugly histories of our ancestors, like, we should just continue to have them. I feel like in America, a lot of history gets unintentionally erased. Like, we have such short memories.
00:16:53
Speaker
right now. I happen to be in Philly right now, and I feel like we've had three apocalyptic events in the last month. I remember, and I was telling somebody that one of the last times I spent a full week here was for the James Beard Taste America event.
00:17:11
Speaker
It's on that, by the way. Thanks, but it meant I had to... And it was a blast. It was incredible. I absolutely loved this event, but I was in the basement of the Philadelphia Museum of Art prepping, and I had to prep 400 portions of fish, which is a massive amount of fish.
What Recent Crises Has Philadelphia Faced?
00:17:28
Speaker
Aria and I were elbow deep in... That's thousands of dollars of fish. ...during the water crisis. We're like, Aria, how do we clean things? Aria, what do we drink?
00:17:38
Speaker
So for people who need a little bit of updating about the context of what we're talking about in the recent history of Philly, we had a crisis up in Northeast Philly where a certain industrial plant
00:17:54
Speaker
had a spill where a bunch of chemicals were likely to have been leached into the water. It would later be determined that there was no level of risk to any of the population of Philadelphia in a way that was going to cause a crisis of public health. But at the same time, if the PR had been handled well, it could have been much less of a crisis than what it was, number one.
00:18:22
Speaker
Number two, we're taping in mid-June, so there is an incredible sort of fallout from the Canadian, the Canadian, good job, Paulie, the Canada.
00:18:35
Speaker
forest fires again anybody who lives in a place like California where there is that level of risk can say that yes it is it's not good to be breathing it to be breathing in that level of smoke but also there was a level of panic that was brought on by the city that I think some would say created an unreasonable level at least I would say
00:18:58
Speaker
created a level of panic that was unreasonable given that that smoke lasted for like 72 hours. Then there is the ever-present sort of looming existential threat and fatigue of the unreasonable
00:19:19
Speaker
just terrifying amount of gun violence in the city because of all of the guns that have been trafficked into town. There's the continuing, again, existential threat, but also very real threat of the opioid abuse. We're in the middle of a mayoral race where
00:19:41
Speaker
all of the language of the posturing has been about how do we make Philly safer and cleaner at the same time while dealing with all of these other unanticipated, crazy environmental issues. Please continue. Including the I-95 collapse. But yes. Well, no of the environmental impact of that yet. I have whiplash from all of these events that are happening. I only brought up the water crisis because I was telling somebody
00:20:10
Speaker
who is from Philadelphia and was there for the water crisis in, I guess, April. I was just, oh my gosh, I prepped all that fish during the water crisis. And they're like, what water crisis? I'm like, this was literally four weeks ago. What do you mean what water crisis? I'm like, remember the water crisis? And took some watery memory jogging. But yeah, so collective memory can be very long, but it can also be short term. And sometimes short term collective memory is legitimately terrible.
00:20:40
Speaker
That said, that's not intentional. That's not malicious. That's not like a malicious forgetting or an erasure of the past. It's something that unfortunately happens when there is a large great succession of terrible things that happen. But I'm also from a place where the media that I consumed was extremely censored.
00:21:05
Speaker
Our textbooks were censored. So like this is like Hong Kong was like the last remaining place is the last remaining place where the Tiananmen massacre is commemorated.
00:21:17
Speaker
You don't even see that in Chinese textbooks, I believe, anymore. And Japanese textbooks have, to my knowledge, pretty much erased much of the Japanese Imperial Army's atrocities throughout southeastern China. Nobody teaches the rape of Nanking anymore. And we talk to younger students nowadays, and they're being taught a very different history than the one that
00:21:43
Speaker
you're learning at home. So going back to the thought that, does this even matter? Yes, it matters. Otherwise, we erase the past, whether unintentionally or intentionally. For listeners who are a little less aware of their Southeast Asian history, can you tell us the Cliff Notes version of what happened in Inc.
00:22:09
Speaker
So rather than walk you through the entire thing, I will maybe try to focus you on two things so that listeners can go and maybe read up on this because I'm definitely not an expert in Chinese history. And I know this through a very, very personal perspective of my own family having fled. So December 7th, 1941, we all know that that is a day that will live in infamy because of the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
How Did Kiki's Family Survive Historical Turmoil?
00:22:38
Speaker
Now within the same day, but technically the following day because Hong Kong the time zone is ahead of Hawaii, the Japanese also attacked the harbor of Hong Kong. So both of my home islands were attacked within the same like 12 hours and this is something that
00:22:58
Speaker
Like, please meditate on this. This is ridiculous. Like, this is... Can you imagine? Like, we think of Japan as a very different entity nowadays. And I knew it was painful for my grandmother, my Chinese grandmother, to see me and my cousins, like, absolutely nuts about Sanrio and Hello Kitty and all the very successful, soft power that Japan brought to the rest of the world during my generation.
00:23:27
Speaker
like us eating sushi. I remember my mother telling me, so my mother learned Japanese and could speak it pretty well. Tokyo was always a stop for us to fly between Hawaii and Hong Kong. Flying lighted back in the 90s, you couldn't fly that whole entire route. You always stopped at Narita Airport and my mom took an interest to learning Japanese and loves Japanese handicrafts.
00:23:56
Speaker
She was trained in fine art, she had an MFA, and she would always have to remind me, she's like, the Japanese killed her entire family. We have no relations because we only have the, my Chinese side, I only know my mother's brother and sister, brothers and sisters. They grew up with no cousins, no aunt, no uncles, because everybody was killed by the Japanese during the massacre of Nanking. So it was a very, very ugly time in history, and I hope that
00:24:25
Speaker
you all get to maybe, I don't know, just look it up on Wikipedia. There are many stories that are pretty awful that came out of this time. There is not a very clear tallying of casualties, the numbers that you'll find very, very widely, but there was a mass exodus from Nanjing, especially if you were wealthy, then you could leave. And
00:24:50
Speaker
many people returned after the war, but then you had communism take hold, which was also not a very calm time in Chinese history. So my grandparents fled from Nanjing to Taipei, and then they settle with their first-born sons in Taipei. And at this point, my elder uncles are quite
00:25:18
Speaker
are older so they stay in Taipei and then they flee with the rest of the family to Hong Kong and then my mother and her twin are born in Hong Kong in 1951. So within the space of like 1940 and 1951 they're basically on the move like
00:25:38
Speaker
going throughout southeastern China, leaving everything behind. My grandfather never returned to mainland China ever. He vowed never to return. He left his family behind, never saw them again. It was only after he passed away that my grandmother felt like she could
00:25:57
Speaker
see her homeland one more time before she passed away. So she was accompanied by a few of her daughters there. And I remember them coming back. And my grandmother's telling us that the house that she grew up in was still standing, but it had been converted into a museum. And the mirror that was on the wall was still exactly there. It just wasn't their house anymore. And this wasn't that long ago.
00:26:24
Speaker
This was not a hundred years ago, which is not a lot of time in the history of China. No. And like sometimes I tell people to shock them. So I'll leave you with two other like Nanjing related stories, one that's personal and one that's not. My grandmother had bound feet. So she had
00:26:48
Speaker
11 children. My mother was 11. And can you imagine this woman fleeing her home multiple times, traveling and running away with basically gold bars stuffed in her jacket on bound feet that were released later on in life. But I remember on
00:27:09
Speaker
seeing her toes and when you have bound feet they it's like nowadays people think of it as like oh this is like what ancient Chinese people did like I mean I saw her feet in like the 1990s they were lotus shaped I remember her hazy toes were stretched all the way across the like the rest the flat of her her feet like her podcast go for it
00:27:34
Speaker
So her pinky toe was stretched all the way across her foot, so it still created that lotus shape. And the idea was both to have a tiny lotus-shaped foot, but also to impair the walking, the gait of a woman so that her hips swayed in seductive fashion. And this is something that rich Chinese families would inflict upon their daughters. So my grandmother,
00:28:02
Speaker
And I'm not old. Like, my grandmother had bowed feet. Like, this is kind of ridiculous. Another very famous news story from the time that the Japanese occupied Nanjing was there was this highly publicized duel between two Japanese soldiers about how many people they could murder with their swords in one go. So I can't recall the number and I realized that this is partially apocryphal.
00:28:32
Speaker
But yeah, it was this highly publicized duel between two soldiers hacking Chinese people with their swords to see how many they could kill in one day. So that's the kind of thing that my family fled. And I know that there's a lot that they haven't told me, and it's really hard to try to bring that up.
00:28:54
Speaker
Yeah. Then now, my fans are in their 80s and they're still like, oh, one day we'll tell you about these things. I'm like, what do you mean one day? It's a couple of things. First, thank you for the vulnerability of sharing that. These things, at least in my experience, there's a cost to even doing the work of telling the story. There's an emotional cost to it, so thank you.
00:29:20
Speaker
Two, you raise more good points that one, this is not history that anyone would very routinely talk about on a podcast. Two, I will acknowledge for myself, this is not history that I knew and I knew the actual cost of. I was aware of emphasize the element of the mutilation of bodies of women, that it was this thing of art and beauty.
00:29:47
Speaker
well, that might be true, but art and beauty also has a cost. And how do we, at one point, at what point, this is the question that's in my mind that I think about a lot with art is like, at what point do we reach the thing to say enough is enough? Do we stop justifying the human cost, the amount of suffering that goes into producing the art that our cultures
00:30:15
Speaker
have decided are to be crystallized or enshrined. I don't have an answer. It's one that I wrestle with. Yeah. I don't have an answer either, but let's try to avoid mutilation. Yes. Let's avoid things that have a level of cost of human body and a level of pain and mobility that, yes. Yeah.
00:30:46
Speaker
Life is painful enough. Yes. And you don't have to be a Buddhist to know that. You know, like, yes. Right. It's really sad, right? I know that, like, my grandmother's parents must have, like, done this out of love and culture, being like, well, you know, this is going to give her more opportunities in life with bound feet. That's just what's done. But, like, they made her a cripple for the rest of her life. She walked with her with a pain for the rest of her life.
00:31:13
Speaker
Yes, there was, I have a memory of reading Pearl S. Buck, of reading The Good Earth in primary school and of pain, of ongoing pain, that is the cost of bringing honor to the family. And I just, I'm tipping my hand a bit. That's the cost of, and in Korean cultures, this,
00:31:39
Speaker
For us, the cost of bringing honor and of being American for Korean adoptees is whitewashing. Being successful is the model minority, the whole trying to be as American as possible. I've talked about this with other guests.
00:31:58
Speaker
There is, I wish that for every, even just for every 10 voices that tell us that we have to grossly mutilate our bodies or our histories or our beliefs or our mental or emotional space.
00:32:15
Speaker
that there was even just one for every 10 that said, who are not Asian men, would have such a stronger chance of being well in every possible definition of the term. If we had even that one month out of 12 where our parents were like, oh, you're actually just fine how you are.
00:32:44
Speaker
If you're like me, you love it when it's easy and uncomplicated to put good out into the world.
Who is Supporting HBCU Students?
00:32:50
Speaker
And nothing helps you do those things more than a strong cup of coffee. Enter today's sponsor, BVP Coffee. BVP Coffee Company provides single origin coffee and unique blends from all around the world, all produced right here in Philadelphia.
00:33:06
Speaker
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00:33:22
Speaker
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00:33:41
Speaker
You can even use this code for recurring coffee subscriptions. So you're always saving 10% and never missing a day of delicious coffee. When you use our code, you're supporting coffee farmers, HBCU students, BVP coffee, and the podcast. That's code uncommon good pod at checkout at BVP.coffee. Now back to the program. Yeah, I am sorry. Right? I'm just sorry.
00:34:11
Speaker
Yeah, that, um, it's, it's, so it, it's, it's one of those things I like, I hope we. Yeah. I mean, I hope we have more like hind conversations and okay. So I tend to see things through like a food lens and I try not to because like, I've only really been in the food world for the last 10 years. And I think about other things, not just restaurants and chefs and CPG products and a little bit of food media that is still along and going along and trucking.
00:34:40
Speaker
Yeah, congrats on that too, by the way. Thank you. Oh no, I forgot what I was gonna say. It was good though. Oh, me and GoKaup, is it your fault? Are you two cute? Well, hooray.
00:34:50
Speaker
But it was we were we were talking about like bringing like keeping all the things that making our culture make our culture beautiful without bringing along all the stuff that hurts us that has the baggage. Yeah. And okay. So I like wrestling with this thing that because it just happened. I have a friend who has a very like significant sub stack following. Nice.
00:35:11
Speaker
She also works in the food world and has like a, anyway, she cooks and writes and does cool things. So she just featured me in a newsletter and I, so she started off the newsletter being like, hey, if you don't know Kiki Araneda, and she's just like, say that out loud, like it's a sing songy name. And I love that. I'm like, oh my gosh, like I love the idea of like my name being lyrical.
00:35:34
Speaker
And I remember seeing that line and being like, oh, thanks, sweet of you. But one of her newsletter readers emailed her and said that in calling my name Singsongi, she was actually being racist. And I was like, no, she's not. So my friend was like, she was really hurt. And so she apologizes to me. She's like, I didn't mean to do that to you. I'm like, first of all, no apology necessary. Second of all, my last name is Basque because my great grandfather was Basque.
00:36:03
Speaker
And I'm pretty sure all the Spaniards did was colonize people, spread Catholicism and syphilis, smallpox. Thank goodness, after centuries of carnage, I have a lyrical sing song alone to show for it.
00:36:19
Speaker
I don't think you can be racist against the conquerors in my family line. So you go ahead, sing songy. I feel like you could go a little bit worse than that. But that was such a strange moment for me because on the one hand, I'm like, oh, I thought that was nice.
00:36:35
Speaker
And you don't need to know that I have, in my lineage, probably. I don't know a whole lot about that side of the family, but let's just assume. Because otherwise, why else would there be Spanish Catholics in Hawaii? They don't belong there. That's right. On the other hand, I don't know who this person is. And she is trying to speak for me in a way that I'm uncomfortable with.
00:37:04
Speaker
I don't think I like this. I don't think I like this part of modernity. Fuck the saviors. All of the people who want to have that justified outrage that don't know us. This is a bit of a hot take, but we're about finding the middle ground here.
00:37:25
Speaker
Everyone has to be outraged. It's a part of modernity with social media that we're expected to have a hot take. We're expected to be outraged about everything, and perhaps rightly so, of being aware of more of things that are not right and not just, and maybe that's true. But also at the same time, being outraged is exasperating. It's exhausting.
00:37:47
Speaker
And it's so hurtful to become an outrage. It's like a black hole. And it just sucks people in. And I know my friend had no bad intentions. And she wasn't speaking out of turn. And even if she was, she had no bad intentions and just wanted to celebrate. I mean, the newsletter was about the way that I like to have eggs for breakfast.
00:38:10
Speaker
It was it was really cute like awesome question and answer of like, all right Who would you serve eggs to dead or alive? Like, you know if you had the choice of like anybody in the world And like how do you like your eggs in the morning? Like what do you put on your eggs? And and then like also like, you know, it was like there was a little bit on the fiber art So I'm like, oh my gosh, like thank you so much for taking the time to like show this with you
00:38:29
Speaker
spread this with your followers. I just thought it was the sweetest thing. It was honestly, scrolling through this newsletter, I was just like, this is adorable. It was great. But for somebody to come at her and criticize her in a way that was not valid, I just feel so bad.
00:38:49
Speaker
She put work into creating this wonderful, sweet newsletter and you hear all the bits of feedback. I know that she was quite hurt by this exchange and I wish she did not have the
00:39:03
Speaker
I'm sorry to your friend. If your friend ever listens, he and I validate you and the fun that you were having. And I think it's fair to say that we want you to keep having fun. Yeah. I hope this doesn't discourage her from her delightful newsletters in future, but I feel like I expressed enough rage on my part.
00:39:30
Speaker
Look at this ridiculous comment that I think she's okay now, but yeah, it's fine. Don't be outraged. It's really okay. Especially don't be outraged if you know nothing about what you're being outraged about.
00:39:41
Speaker
Yeah, be informed. But also, I think one of the best ways to have eggs in the morning is a spam and avocado Benedict for me. A little bit of cilantro, a little bit of garlic, then a preparation of spam that I discovered that I loved.
00:40:02
Speaker
a searing with gochujang paste like instead of like your soy and and like your sugar for me it's like that sort of spicy like still very sugary very sort of fatty oily paste like
00:40:19
Speaker
How do you slice your spam? So it depends on how I'm preparing. If I'm having like a Korean stew, like if I'm having like dokbokki or a stew, I'll slice it in nine and then I'll slice the nine slices in thirds. So I have 20, 27 little sticks of delicious goodness.
00:40:37
Speaker
If it's if it's on a benedictus, it's in nine. Yeah, nine is the right answer. Oh, 100%. You have the spam slicer. I do not. I have one of those old slicers for hard cooked eggs, but I refuse to use it because it's too narrow. So I slice it by hand. Oh, wow. And are you able to get like nine even slices?
00:40:59
Speaker
Oh no, of course not. I took one culinary class at a community center and my knife skills are shit. I'm not very good. So I started watching YouTube videos to learn just enough so that I know enough to significantly decrease my chances of cutting myself.
00:41:23
Speaker
Okay, I highly recommend a spam slicer. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna actually do it like right now while we're like while we're on tape like and yes fuck you Amazon but also like please buy all of our affiliate links again the whole thing of like hating something but also appreciating its value at the same time.
Why is Spam Important in Asian Cuisine?
00:41:43
Speaker
Yeah, no, I need one. But we've talked about that component of it. I would be remiss if we didn't talk Asian to Asian about spam, if we didn't talk about how we love it and a little bit. You've talked about spam a lot. And you've talked about the Musubi from Poi Dog. You've talked about the history of how it got to the islands. We can talk about the history of World War II, et cetera, et cetera. One of the things
00:42:12
Speaker
that for me, I wish people knew is that you can do almost anything with it. You just have to cook it.
00:42:23
Speaker
Yeah, it is amazing to me that anybody would consider eating spam out of the can. And I understand that is why people think it's gross, but why would you do that? Would you take a frozen piece from a bag and eat them plain? Yes, technically you can. Yes.
00:42:42
Speaker
They're going they're not going to kill you. But why would you do that? It's like that with anything like it's an ingredient. It's you have to do something to the ingredient. Yes. I understand if like, you know, you were in a war and spam was like part of your rations.
00:42:58
Speaker
which is how it started or got kicked off. You didn't have a heating element and also like Korean spam or lunch and meat or whatever, names don't do it justice.
00:43:15
Speaker
Koreans are so far ahead of the spam game. It's ridiculous. There is like one of my best friends is Korean and she owns a business that imports specialty ingredients from Korea to the States and She would bring me like whenever she goes back to Korea She brings me back like the super fancy high-end Korean spans like the black pig spam Yes
00:43:43
Speaker
It's like the foie gras of spam. It's so, so good. And plain old regular spam is also delicious.
What is Kiki's Spam Art Project About?
00:43:52
Speaker
Let me show you what I'm working on. I would love a scoop. So I have a show coming up at the Hyatt Centric in Philly where they're giving me so much wall space.
00:44:05
Speaker
hell yeah yeah it's like entire corridor and also like shelves and like their main lobby so it's a lot of space that i have to fill so i'm like all right i guess it's time to make stuff really big so we're doing really big spam yes perfect so this is as big as i could go for this round but maybe i'll make one even bigger i have some time it doesn't open until august
00:44:26
Speaker
So audio listeners and visually challenged listeners, we've got a beautiful crocheted piece of a can of spam. It's the 25% less sodium. If you haven't seen that can, they try and make it seem healthier than it is by putting a dish with a bunch of vegetables on it. And Kiki has gone and crocheted 3D versions of all of the vegetables as well.
00:44:51
Speaker
Yeah, are they, like, broccoli's super fun to crochet. Tell me about that. Like, what, so, okay, okay, we're gonna go down a fiber arts rabbit hole. So are you a Ravelry person? Do you have a Ravelry account? No, I'm vaguely aware of what that is. Yeah, it's social media for fiber arts people. Okay, yeah, I feel like I've come across posts, but I don't know enough. Like, I feel like if I just keep, if I try to talk about Ravelry,
00:45:21
Speaker
No, fair enough. But so like it's a repository for patterns for knit crochet, loom work, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Across all different sorts of weights and fiber types and hook and needle sizes. A lot of the stuff you can get for free. A lot of people use it also to be able to trade, to be able to trade, um, fiber, uh, material stores so that they can continue in like the buy
00:45:49
Speaker
nothing left lifestyle if say like they were gifted a bunch of stuff which is which is lovely but but yeah so but but tell me about like what it is like to crochet a broccoli so first of all I need to preface this by so I crochet freehand I don't know how to read a pattern
00:46:06
Speaker
Like it's completely nonsense to me and I don't have a lot of patience and so I've never actually learned. I just kind of like figure things out and do things my own way. So for broccoli and I don't even know like the real terms for whatever you call these stitches like I just sort of make them up.
00:46:23
Speaker
Sure, sure. In my brain, I can only explain to you that I crochet a tube and then I do a bobble stitch all over. It looks like broccoli and it's so satisfying because it looks so much like broccoli. Oh, it's incredible.
00:46:38
Speaker
And then it also makes you think about packaging in a really detailed way. Who knew that there was this much cauliflower on the 25% less sodium spam? You look at packaging and you're just like, all right, that looks familiar. I'm going to grab that off the shelf. But if you're going to crochet the package, you learn so much about the decisions behind the photography. Yes. There's just so much broccoli on this, the misleading broccoli, I would say, on this spam cam.
00:47:07
Speaker
I'm going to step off camera and grab one of my current projects. I'll be here in a sec. Okay, we're back. Headphones on so I can hear you. You just sort of figure things out because of the work. This was one of those things about learning to read patterns that I just sort of figured out. So I'm working on this wall hanging that will be
00:47:27
Speaker
Again, the colors of the media company, but I found this sort of pattern which creates this nice sort of like checkered lovely sort of Almost granny square ish looking thing. And so I knit the segments to it. So there's there's a lime green Component there is this incredible sort of golden rod yellow. It's gorgeous
00:47:52
Speaker
Thank you. Then there's the wonderful sort of grape, almost burgundy purple that we've got here. But eventually what will happen is it'll get stitched together and then it'll be, yeah, it'll hang here in the set as the part of our branding because we're, I don't know what your PR people tell you, but we're always all about like. Send me a photo once you're done.
00:48:21
Speaker
love to. Given our proclivities towards if I have enough scraps left over, I might just make you a scaled version for it to have at home and then oh no, we'll have to tape another one where we both have them in shot. Oh no, whatever shall we do? We'll have to talk some more.
00:48:38
Speaker
Yeah, this is fun. But it can't be underestimated. Yes, in spite of Spam's troubled history, as Asians, we just have this deep, profound love for it at the same time. And it's okay to have both feelings at the same time.
00:48:55
Speaker
I know. They don't cancel each other out. Yes. I obviously talk a lot about sustainability and honestly most of that is tied in with guilt of exacerbating existing problems. It doesn't
00:49:12
Speaker
stop me from eating spam. I eat spam consciously, and I hope everybody that eats spam has its way on them, that they are giving money to multinational corporations and eating something that's ultra-highly processed. That is not the most helpful thing that you could put in your body. I hope everybody realizes this, but life isn't always about making good choices.
00:49:36
Speaker
Sometimes you make bad choices and those bad choices make you feel good or they make you think about things in your childhood that were great. The other side of my family is from Hawaii and it's a very, very nostalgic place.
00:49:52
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like they like colonize spam in a way, you know, it's not good for you. Like you have like multiple health problems that like, you know, that are existent in this community because you guys we eat too much spam. OK, so maybe it's like don't eat as much, but also like it's OK to take ownership of this thing because it was imposed upon you. Yes, it's like you don't need to eat the entire can in one meal between two people. You really don't.
00:50:18
Speaker
You can just have a slice and then put the rest in the freezer. The thing is going to last forever. It's going to be fine. Cut it, open the can, cut it into nice slices. Take one slice out and then put the rest, the other eight into the freezer, which is how we do it here because I don't actually eat that much spam. I love it, but do I want that much sodium even if it's 25% less? In my body, no.
00:50:45
Speaker
And all the meats I buy are from the farmer's market. So it's anyway. There's also an idea of balance that I think is very, very Chinese. Whenever we ate junk growing up, if I wanted to have a bag of Doritos, I was required to eat a banana afterwards. And I understand these things don't cancel each other out, but they kind of do.
00:51:11
Speaker
So if we were going to frame it a different way and tell me if I'm 100% off base, but one of the things that I wish when we were talking about like being whole people, being well people, I wish we didn't talk just about like our physical body. I wish we included in that sort of set of ratios and calculations and stories. I wish we talked about our mental health, our emotional wellness.
00:51:37
Speaker
the sort of valuesy things in the space of like philosophy, ethics, existentialism, spirituality, maybe even, like if you're conventionally spiritual, you might call it faith or religion, but like whatever it is, it is we're not just only like husks of people, we are not only our physical bodies, we are all of these other things too.
00:52:02
Speaker
and you can have a technically very healthy physical body while also like having awful things happening like in the brain. Although if awful things are happening in the brain or in the emotion or the mental space, chances are awful things will start happening in the physical body as well and vice versa. Yes. So I have, okay, so I have an internet friend, her name's Daphne, and she's based on the West Coast and she's like a butter mochi queen. Shout out to butter mochi. Shout out to Daphne. Yeah.
00:52:31
Speaker
So Daphne is the Barabochi queen. So I interviewed her for an article and first of all, she's super, super smart and just wonderful and supportive. And also, I think she's friends with or actually related to my cousin's cousin. So we're somehow connected.
00:52:53
Speaker
awesome on the family side. I'm not sure how I can't remember. We like we had to do a deep dive, but like very, very large families anyway. So the thing is, she had a really great like sum up of her relationship
00:53:08
Speaker
to spam for me. And she had like gone to, had done like a master's in nutrition. Like she was like, was the raw vegan for years. So I was not eating spam. She, and I remember her saying that she wasn't like the healthiest when she was following this specific diet and she's no longer, she doesn't eat like that anymore. And she still eats well, like, like a well-rounded diet, but like
00:53:34
Speaker
But at the beginning of the pandemic, when it felt like we were having an apocalypse, the first of multiple apocalypses, she went and ordered a case of spam. Not like a can of spam, but like a case of spam. This is somebody who hasn't eaten spam in years, is Hawaiian from Hawaii. I think she lives in Portland now, but was just like, the world is ending.
00:54:03
Speaker
what am I going to do? I'm going to order a case of Spam. So that was her reaction. And it brings her home. Just like whenever I don't eat Spam was to be for a while and then I take a bite of one and all of a sudden like I'm like instantly transported to like my childhood and feeling loved or like all the things that like good things I associate Spam was to be with. But it's such like a powerful collective memory. It's just so funny to me that somebody with a master's in nutrition and
00:54:31
Speaker
who avoided spam for years, like, all right, we're having an apocalypse. All right, everything, all my education's forgotten. Let's get the case of spam. And I'm sure that happened. Like, I'm sure she's not the only one that that did this. Like, it was like a knee jerk reaction. So you've spent a lot of time in Philly. Have you run across either of these?
00:54:49
Speaker
Yes, both. I don't eat a ton of them and I still think Spam is better. I don't disagree with you. Scrabble, I mean, for its name, surprisingly good. Right. Shocking, shockingly good. Lebanon Bologna. So I have another friend who actually works for a Lebanon Bologna company.
00:55:09
Speaker
and sent me a few rounds of sausages. What are you adding? It's usually cut into slices. And yeah, it comes in packages of a pound and they're processed plastic just like everything else. But yeah.
00:55:23
Speaker
Yeah, and I did a recipe for them. So in Hawaii, they're called UFO musubi. And the bottom of the musubi is a Gothenburg sausage. And then you sprinkle like fudakake on top, and then it looks like a UFO.
00:55:41
Speaker
What a brilliant idea. I need to get out to Reading Terminal and get some lemon and bologna today, because that is such a much more enjoyable way of eating lemon and bologna, which operates under the same principles. Why would you eat it raw? Just in a tiny little bit of oil and butter and get all of that beautiful char, maybe melt us, like what is it? There's this Korean stew that has spam and Vienna sausages in it.
00:56:10
Speaker
But you always melt over a slice of processed American cheese product. The same thing is true of like lemon and bologna. Like you just, you can fry it up like a grilled cheese sandwich and it's perfect as long as you cook it. So cook your meats, America. Cook your meats, especially, especially chicken. Yeah. Cook your meats, whether they're processed or not, like it's just, just you'll, you'll, you'll think.
00:56:33
Speaker
Yes, indeed. This has been the East Asian Pacific Hour, Lessons to Live By. I want to pivot a little bit. One of the things in the time of our taping that has started to come up for you more is
00:56:52
Speaker
Is this continuing payoff now that the world is starting to reopen? We've gotten to see a little bit more of you on TV. We've gotten to see, you did a demo with Good Morning America. I know you have some more things coming. You've done a ton of these things. You've done quite a few. And without talking about the specifics of individual producers or other specific formats, I know one of the things you said is really important to you is how younger chefs
00:57:22
Speaker
younger or at least earlier in their career experience, chefs navigate those experiences. Can you say a little more?
00:57:29
Speaker
Yeah, so I know this from like the food media side as well as like the chef side and I have been a chef mentor on and off over the years through various being on the boards of various organizations that help basically high schoolers typically find a voice through cooking, have like a viable like job skills or just like
00:57:53
Speaker
have their hands in food so that they can feed themselves when they're on their own. So that means I've talked to students and younger chefs of various skill levels and various times of their life and with various intentions of what they want to do with whatever culinary skills they're acquiring. And culinary skills are one thing. That's a very teachable thing.
00:58:18
Speaker
There's a correct way to hold a knife and there's a correct way to do things. And obviously, like, there's a health code. You follow it. And, you know, these are all very clear things to teach people. But I think there's a lot that isn't taught and they have to figure out along the way. But if anyone is looking for unsolicited advice, I think it's very important to know that you can actually affect the record.
00:58:45
Speaker
I've had instances where my name was spelled wrong, or my birthplace was wrong, or something about my biography was wrong. There are many ways to avoid this, like have a PR folder. Even if you don't have a PR team, have a folder where you have all the correct information and all the photos that you like, both of your food and of yourself stored in one place, and make it very, very easy for whoever's going to write about you or your food to get accurate information.
00:59:14
Speaker
It's not easy being a food writer. You don't get paid a lot. And you often have to deal with people who have never been interviewed in their entire lives. So then there's a little bit of media coaching along the way, but not everybody has time for that or the resources. So if somebody misrepresents you, they're not doing it out of malice.
00:59:33
Speaker
they're doing it because they're just trying to do their job and their job is not the easiest. So I try to go through life making other people's lives a little easier and to not be difficult in the process. So a PR folder.
00:59:49
Speaker
with your bio that's approved of the things that you want people to write about, with your name spelled correctly. And for some reason, if it gets through several editors and it's wrong, or they put up a horrible headline that you hate, you can talk to the writer. You can bring things up. You don't have to blast them on social media. Just raise it with the contacts that you have.
01:00:11
Speaker
I think I need younger chefs, especially ones that expect to get into some sort of media, understand that they have paths of recourse and they should take them before getting upset. I also didn't grow up in a social media generation and I also grew up in Hong Kong where we relate to all that stuff.
01:00:31
Speaker
Yeah. So like, I understand I see things a little bit differently than if I were born in 2000 and raised when Facebook was for old people, which is wild to me. But yeah, you can speak up for yourself. It's okay. You don't have to speak up to yourself and ruin somebody else's life. You can speak up, but you don't have to be a jerk about it.
01:00:57
Speaker
Yeah. When are we going to see a cookbook from you? You know what? I've had cookbook proposals float around for years since 2017. Yeah. And I keep hearing from editors that Hawaii's food is too niche and that I don't have a large enough platform. So it's not something I'm actively pursuing.
01:01:16
Speaker
I mean, I hope so. There's a piece that I wanted to lead into a bit. You touched on it already. You're a food writer. You spent a lot of time thinking about media. We've touched on social media as well. I happen to know also that you have a degree in classics. You've done a ton of reading and writing and absorption and thought work around
01:01:43
Speaker
literature. So I wonder if you can say just what is there to be gained, like if we slow down and pay attention to things like the class?
01:01:53
Speaker
Well, the classics is tricky. And in the last few years or in the last few decades, it's a discipline that has often either been forgotten or has gotten a lot of bad press, some of which is justifiable and some of which is grossly misunderstanding of the classics. So I have a degree in classics, but I also have a background in being a comparatist.
01:02:22
Speaker
So my undergraduate is in comparative literature with Italian and classics. Another master's from like en route PhD that is in comparative literature. And then I had left that program to start a PhD in classics that I also left with a master's.
01:02:38
Speaker
So I feel like as my personality, and this is unique, somewhat unique in classics. You don't typically have a stronger comparatist being in comparative literature allows you to read really, really widely and draw together things that no one's ever compared before. It's honestly very cool. Classics is the opposite. Classics is a very
01:03:02
Speaker
small field that has for the longest time been dominated by white men. There are certain things about classics that, I mean, comparative literature is a very colorful field. It's very welcoming.
01:03:18
Speaker
Not all not that many white dudes on six is is a very very different world. I get it's it's a totally different beast I like languages. I specifically really like ancient Greek learning Greek to me was like learning mathematical formulas that didn't always work but mostly worked and I mean like
01:03:36
Speaker
it's like it scratched like the part of my brain that really likes puzzles and so for me it was like it was an intellectual challenge to like get into this language and figure out how it works and and then at the end of the day you solve the puzzle and it's also a beautiful poem yeah so that like that part's really cool i also um had a fellowship in greece but i i just i loved it however like there are many things in the in american classics as a field that did
01:04:03
Speaker
I would come across things where I'm like, you're shooting yourself in the foot. Why are you saying this? Even though I specialized in literature and I only did some material culture and I observed digs in Greece, I didn't actively participate in them as part of my archaeological program.
01:04:22
Speaker
So, one of my sort of offshoot research interests was about food. The portrayal of food in epic literature, epic poetry, and also, I was very into, not very into, it sounds like I'm really into this band. No, so one of my, I studied Roman historiography, but also later Greek historiography, which is like the study of history. Sure.
01:04:47
Speaker
So how is history portrayed? How is it written by certain writers? Why are these writers writing the way that they are? What sort of story are they telling? How literary is this? We probably don't know the exact facts. What devices are they using? How are they manipulating language? So I'm coming with this background and studying something like Garam. So nowadays, Garam is a phrase that's
01:05:14
Speaker
thrown around thanks to noma to mean like a fermented liquidy sauce. And it's an interesting revisiting of this term that's not exactly historically accurate, but garam essentially came in many different forms, but it was a fish sauce. And it was like the ketchup of the ancient world.
01:05:38
Speaker
There were very different types of garum, just like there are different grades of olive oil. One of the fancier types is a type called garum sokiorum, which is garum that's made with fish drowning in fish sauce. So you take the fish, the live fish, and you drown them in the fish sauce. So garum sokiorum literally means the garum of conrabs.
01:06:02
Speaker
So like you're like drowning in like the guts of like your of other fish so that was like a special type and Anyway, it all together like disappeared Through a variety of reasons sure
01:06:17
Speaker
And over the years, I would say like over the last century, most of the writers who mentioned Garam are like, it was putrid, it stank, this is disgusting, like the ancient Romans are so gross for like loving this stuff, like how could they, like it just doesn't make any sense. This shows how different like the ancients are from the waters, but they were classicists.
01:06:41
Speaker
They are the people studying this ancient civilization, telling us that the food that they had in this ancient civilization was disgusting. There's no way it was disgusting. Think about the fish sauce we have today. All the fish sauces that come out of the Philippines, Vietnam, they're delicious. Yes. They're fishy. They're briny. Yes.
01:07:03
Speaker
And people like this stuff in the modern day. But you have the old white dude saying, oh, no, this is gross. Nobody wants to eat fish guts. Whereas you have an entire continent that's just like, no, the fermented fish guts are actually delicious. And so that's what I mean by classes just shooting themselves in the foot. They're like, all right, cool. We have this civilization that we're obsessed with. We're studying. But part of what they did was utterly ridiculous and invalid and gross. Why would you do that?
01:07:30
Speaker
So anyway, so it was something that I had a pet project of trying to save Garam's reputation. And anyway, so back to overarching classics and the value of it. It's a tricky thing because classics has not been very friendly to people of color.
01:07:48
Speaker
Yes. For a long time. Yeah. And in more recent years, certain texts have been incorrectly co-opted by right wing groups to supplement their ideas in incorrect ways. You mean they were doing that before Ayn Rand?
01:08:05
Speaker
or actually after. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's like right wing for some reason, like, and I haven't looked into this too much because it's first of all, it's not really my area. Sure. Sure. Googling like right wing stuff.
01:08:20
Speaker
Yeah, you don't need that search engine optimization. Yeah, no, I don't. But yeah, there's a few books about it recently. Actually, Donna Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg's sister has published about the right wing, the alt-right co-opting classics on the internet. I read part of the book. I didn't read all of it. You need a strong stomach.
01:08:41
Speaker
Yeah, you do. So we're reaching close to the end of our time. And there's a piece that you've touched on in other interviews that I want to lean into a little bit more. And that is this sense of identity that you've started to explore.
What is Kiki's Legacy in Hawaiian Food?
01:09:02
Speaker
You've talked about labels of what makes a chef. You've talked about identity of
01:09:08
Speaker
what we've talked here, what it means to be in diaspora of having two homes and having things from those homes and the reminders of home with the example of your friend Daphne, but also not being geographically there.
01:09:26
Speaker
And we don't always necessarily have the levels of connection that we wish that we had. Some of those connections are lost, forgotten. We have our stories. This you've talked about in other interviews, the work of figuring things out and you and your sister doing the work of effectively parenting yourselves.
01:09:50
Speaker
the fortitude, the resilience of that, and making one's self. How do we keep going? Where does the wellspring of grit, determination, scrappiness, perhaps? What keeps refilling that?
01:10:11
Speaker
I mean, I don't know. I wish I had an answer. I don't even feel like it's just to make something up on the spot, because it's a big question. It's a good question. I tend not to dwell on these things. Rolling Stone gathers no moss, something like that. Something like that. We're reaching the end of our time, and there's nothing more that I would love right now than to be sitting on a beach with a can of Maui brewing and
01:10:38
Speaker
enjoying the, well, I guess right now it's about noon, enjoying the noon day sun. Well, no, this is still in the morning, enjoying the sunrise. So maybe someday, but until the next time that we chat, we have just one last question for you. It's a little bit about impact and legacy. And it's the same question that we ask everyone as we're closing out our time. And that is, what do you want the world to look like when you're done with it?
01:11:04
Speaker
Oof, I mean, we've had four-ish apocalyptic events in our region that extended to way beyond our region in the last couple years. I don't know. I feel like I wake up a lot and I don't recognize the world that I'm in. Yeah.
01:11:23
Speaker
And then at the same time, everything feels the same. To be honest, I don't think too much about legacy. I feel like I work really hard on, and I feel like I have made some dent in food media on, for example, one of my main goals to honestly represent Hawaii's food. And I see the impact.
01:11:45
Speaker
of that work that is done by me, other people who are writing about Hawaii. Our voices are not loud enough. And of course chefs in Hawaii that are doing really special things with Hawaii's actual resources. Like I'm happy to be like part of this movement. But I don't know about legacy. Like I feel like I go a few, I mean, this is quite dismal. Like I feel like we go a few steps forward and then the world is burning again in like a different way that I never would have expected. I know I have a lot of
01:12:15
Speaker
I've had a lot of very interesting, good opportunities, and I'm extremely grateful for them and future ones, but I'm still very caught up and it feels like the world is burning. Yeah. Well, it is. How do you have a legacy when it's just going to be set fire to? I don't know. Keep thinking about it, I guess.
01:12:37
Speaker
My thanks to Chef Kiki Aranita. You can check out a show of her fiber arts currently on display through the end of the summer at The Bobblehouse NYC. You can buy her sauces and merch at poidogphilly.com. You can follow her on Instagram at Kiki Aranita and see her recent Good Morning America TV experience at the links in the episode description below. Thank you so much for tuning in to Uncommon Good with Paulie Rees.
01:13:04
Speaker
This program is produced in southwest Philadelphia on the unceded neighborhood of the Black Bottom community and on the ancestral land of the Lenape Nation, who remain here in the era of the Fourth Crow and fight for official recognition by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to this day. You can find out more about the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania and how you can support the revitalization of their culture by going to Lenape-Nation.org.
01:13:26
Speaker
Our associate producers are Willa Jaffe and Kia Watkins. If you enjoyed listening to the show, please support the show by leaving us a five-star review and a comment and subscribing wherever you listen to podcasts. It really does help people find this. Uncommon Good is also available on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram at uncommongoodpod. Follow us there for closed caption video content and more goodies. We love questions and feedback. You can send us a DM on social media or an email at uncommongoodpod at gmail.com. Thank you so much for listening.
01:13:53
Speaker
Until next time, wishing you every uncommon good to do your uncommon good to be the uncommon good.
01:15:20
Speaker
you