How to Eat Right in America

Abstract

This paper investigates the cultural politics of knowledge production regarding Hmong American food-related health issues. Textual analysis of ten research papers published in the last twenty years leads to the critique that mainstream scientific discourse, rooted in Eurocentric epistemology, has in effect constituted Hmong Americans as subjugated Others. We demonstrate how this discourse (1) demarcates between the subject and the object from a Eurocentric viewpoint; (2) associates Hmong-ness with tradition while dissociating tradition from American-ness; (3) overlooks multiple differences within Hmong American communities; and (4) keeps silent on institutional racism as a barrier to healthy living. We explicate the power relations inherent in science research regarding marginalized communities, and call for decolonizing knowledge and research.

Boiled Chicken and Pizza: The Making of Transnational Hmong American Foodways

“…While these studies reflect important advances in public health research toward cultural appropriateness, they remain rooted in a damage-centered approach legitimating professional interventions designed to "bring good food to others" (Guthman 2008). Hui Niu Wilcox and Panyia Kong (2014) write that "implicit in this narrative and the rhetoric of intervention is the notion that Hmong American food practice is not only different, but also deficient, and that Hmong Americans must have external 'help' to fix their diet." This public health approach is built on an understanding of Hmong culture as premodern and static that fails to recognize the complexities through which refugee communities and their descendants engage with their new homes, including the crafting of new translocal cultural foodways.…”

“…The little existing research conducted on Hmong foodways comes largely from nutritionists and public health researchers, who often cast their eating practices as an example of "dietary acculturation," the process by which a migrating group adopts the foods of their new environment (Satia-Abouta 2003). This previous research was motivated by concern for Hmong Americans' physical health, as evidenced by attention to rates of diet-related diseases and obesity, and often concluded by prescribing that Hmong Americans return to a traditional diet, 1 mainly rice and vegetables, with smaller portions of meat (Wilcox and Kong 2014). Problematically, this suggestion regards Hmong culture as static and unchanging, ignoring the role that migrant food practices can play in creating new notions of identity in their new homelands (Baker 2004;Hondagneu-Sotelo 2014;Garcia, DuPuis, and Mitchell 2017).…”