What even is food authenticity? Why we guard carbonara, and flatten chicken rice
There is a peculiar theater to the internet’s culinary landscape, and if you spend enough time observing it, you will inevitably stumble into a warzone over authenticity. For example, no action incites internet fury faster than recipes of spaghetti carbonara that includes a splash of cream (or, god forbid, garlic ). The discourse inevitably devolves into discussion about the ‘authentic’ way to cook something, with self-appointed gate-keepers stating (if they are feeling generous) “this looks delicious, but you can’t call this carbonara”.
But food authenticity, as we so rigidly police it today, is largely a modern illusion — and if you think even more deeply about it, doesn’t even make sense . Why do we decry home cooks for adapting a Roman pasta with French ingredients (sparking international incidents such as ‘carbonara-gate’ ), while simultaneously lauding fusion creations such as udon carbonara ?
More glaringly, why do we apply these rules so unevenly across the map? Step into the realm of Asian cuisine, and you often see the exact opposite phenomenon. A content creator will be widely celebrated for an authentic Hainanese chicken rice recipe that, while undeniably delicious looking on camera, fundamentally ignores the key regional flavors that make the Singaporean dish what it actually is 1 . We demand absolute historical fidelity from a bowl of Italian pasta, yet happily accept an aesthetic homogenization of Asian food.
Why are we shouting about authenticity without pausing to consider a dish’s history, its cultural context, or its natural evolution? When we yell about cream on the internet (or lambast the substitution of bacon for guanciale) we are rarely protecting an ancient, unbroken culinary lineage.
More often than not, we are simply fetishizing a recent consensus.
The most famous example of this phenomena is certainly the aforementioned carbonara — so well known that it has become a meme beyond food media ( ‘if my grandmother has wheels she would have been a bike!’ ).