In any perceptible power differential, greater power (real or assumed) works to assimilate and/or render irrelevant lesser power. Sometimes in the same breath. I don't know why humans work that way, and obviously neither do they, but it's at the root of many problems. This human tendency is, in fact, a shark.
It is a shark because it is unacknowledged. It is a shark, even when acknowledged, because it sets egalitarian values at null, because it's only about power. It is a shark because, whether it's allowed for or not, it's chewing up every effort to move toward situations that are not only about power.
Really. In fact, I can trot out a (relatively) neutral example.
When was the last time you had a meal composed entirely of what your ancestors ate two thousand years ago? (And if you're not Ethiopian, coffee counts against you.)
And if you did, are you presently living within 50 miles of where your ancestors lived?
New World foodstuffs, cooking advances, and movements of people, voluntary and forced, mean that my ancestors would not recognize pizza, would wonder why I was fixing tempeh, mushrooms, bell peppers, and pasta, might admire the Chinese food, and would be appalled that I had milk in coffee. I tend not to think of the American tendency to adopt any cuisine that doesn't run screaming as cultural appropriation, but actually, it is. It's a relatively benign example, since its genesis was in immigrants and others opening restaurants to survive, which is in fact a power thing--restaurants employed fellow "folks" of varying skills who could not get jobs in "the mainstream." It also meant fellow "ethnics" could get "home cooking." "The mainstream" slowly got past its xenophobia because it's tasty food.
What does happen, however, with American versions of foreign cooking, is that the food gets blanded down. Because everyone else's cuisine is "too spicy." And eventually people forget how x was supposed to taste. Or they add salt. Hello, hypertension! And complaining about the blandness brings "Well, people prefer it our way." Or no actual answer.
And that's just food.
Because when what you can do about getting more mouths around food (so the restaurant will stay in business and maybe pass to the next generation if they don't get into MIT or State) is to cater to folks whose taste buds were, to paraphrase Tom Lehrer, sawed off in school cafeterias (I still can't think of tuna noodle casserole without a reflexive shudder), that's a power relationship. That's a sample of the process of erasure. Don't get me started on peas and carrots in fried rice.
This looks like it's turning into a rant.
(I was saved from a life of bland food by a couple of lucky chances; one is that when my mother went back to work, she was able to afford cookable spaghetti instead of the canned stuff; the other was discovering that a rinsed-off but raw green string bean was tasty and crunchy and good. Depression children, as we will relearn, like their vegetables dead.)
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