Flavors of Empire Food and the Making of Thai America [Hardcover]

With a uniquely balanced combination of salty, sweet, sour, and spicy flavors, Thai food burst onto Los Angeles’s and America’s culinary scene in the 1980s.Flavors of Empireexamines the rise of Thai food and the way it shaped the racial and ethnic contours of Thai American identity and community. Full of vivid oral histories and new archival material, this book explores the factors that made foodways central to the Thai American experience. Starting with American Cold War intervention in Thailand, Mark Padoongpatt traces how informal empire allowed U.S. citizens to discover Thai cuisine abroad and introduce it inside the United States. When Thais arrived in Los Angeles, they reinvented and repackaged Thai food in various ways to meet the rising popularity of the cuisine in urban and suburban spaces. Padoongpatt opens up the history and politics of Thai food for the first time, all while demonstrating how race emerges in seemingly mundane and unexpected places.

Mark Padoongpattis Assistant Professor of Asian and Asian American Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.  
 

"This is not your typical book on Thai culture and cuisine, in fact, there has never been a book like this! Padoongpatt is a pioneer that's finally telling the definitive story of the history of Thai people in America. You will learn how Thai food brought us together."—Jet Tila, celebrity chef, restaurateur, and author of101 Asian Dishes You Need to Cook Before You Die: Discover a New World of Flavors in Authentic Recipes

"Employing a transnational lens, Padoongpatt dissects the Cold War racial liberalism through which Americans acquired Thai people and culture by consuming Thai food."—Madeline Y. Hsu, author ofThe Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority

"Flavors of Empiremakes significant, original, and generative contriblö