Ellsworth/Fabricating Authenticity, 4. A Remembrance of Dishes Past

Furthering Ellsworth’s analysis, Brown considers how David Chang in his show Ugly Delicious not only struggles with how authenticity is deployed, but at times, effectively navigates such discourses better than some academics. Brown argues that both ethnographers and cooks are constrained by the memories of a place, time, dish—memories which are often imperfect and usually impacted by various positionalities that the ethnographer/cook brings to the process.