RecipeMuncher

“Oh I am so anxious about serving real sambar to an authentic South Indian,” a professor once told me at a grad school potluck. Nevermind that she specialized in Indian culture, nevermind that she was born and raised in India, my issue with the statement was her use of the words authentic and real. In the former, one finds the implicit belief that there is an incontrovertible actual. Everything else is measured up to the control specimen. Authentic is predicated on black and white truths (...)