MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

On June 19, 2018, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen conducts a “work dinner” at MXDC Cocina Mexicana—and ends it early as activists jeer her out of the restaurant. That she had in preceding days defended the administration’s policy to separate migrant families only sharpened the incident’s irony and would have transformed it into farce were its consequences not so tragic: thousands of migrant children separated from their parents and interned in various facilities around the US. Critics focused on the gall of the Secretary of Homeland Security dining at a Mexican restaurants and then defending a xenophobic immigration agenda targeting migrants crossing our southern border. The hypocrisy of her dining choice rankled: as Lucy Long has theorized, eating difference should open individual, visceral opportunities for self-expansion. As we understand food is politics and as Derrida has taught us that cosmopolitanism is hospitality is ethics, it would seem that Nielsen suffered an individual ethical lapse, a blind spot that put her in exactly the wrong place on exactly the wrong night. Culinary empathy, the connections of feeling and taste that bind us as we share a meal, clearly failed. However, hers is not the failure of the individual, the hypocrisy of the “bad apple.” My presentation will argue that focusing on irony and hypocrisy misses a crucial point. Aligning this incident with cookbooks and Food Network programming to chart the limits of culinary empathy, I will argue that the cultural mechanics of the encounter between eater and difference creates the conditions for Nielsen’s failure and, by extension, the conditions for the current turmoil at the US’s southern border. Rather than act as a countervailing force combating bigotry and isolationism, the packaging and managing of culture via the culinary is perfectly commensurable with the managing and imprisonment of immigrant bodies.