Inaugural Post: Blog Scope and Structure

Christopher Lew
Aug 2, 2015
2 min read

As the (overly academic and systematic) title suggests, and because redundancy is not yet a felony, this will serve as the first post of the Eating Complexity blog. The title of this blog is dervived from the motto of Water Dragons Consulting, which is sponsoring this effort (in case you haven't already noticed). It is also the result of my attempt to be clever and it's probably a case of trying too hard or something sounding better in my head than in real life, but what's the Internet without a little bit of awkward self-righteousness?

Anyway, the focus of this blog will be on "Food Communities" in Maryland. The luxury of being an academic is that I can just put quotes or capitalize something and then make it a thing. So there you have it - Food Community is a thing.I 'm defining Food Communities as a cusine which:

has traditional roots in another part of the world;
has been adapted to suit the palate of a new region (e.g. ingrediants, flavor, presentation, etc.);
is associated with a defined group of people who reside in the area of focus; and
is the featured food in a significant number of restaurants or eateries.

In this way, I will not be including cusines in which there might be restaurants but not an actual community. Japanese food fits into this category as there are numerous sushi or hibachi restaurants but no definable Japanese community in Maryland. This does not rule out the possibility exploring this cusine in the future, but not in the context of a Food Communities.

I have chosen Maryland for three reasons in ascending order of relevance. First, the state is home to many diverse Food Communities, many of which are unknown outside of the region. Second, it is necessary to focus the efforts of this blog to a managable level, so choosing a single state or city was critical. Third, I was born here and still live here, so it's convenient and I'm fairly lazy.

And, if you don't believe me about Maryland food being world famous, here's an advertisement from a food court in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia depicting world-famous Maryland Chicken Chop (only 19.30 Malaysian Ringits). Yeah, I don't recognize it either, but I didn't make it it up - honestly.

Generally speaking, each Food Community we discuss on the blog will be broken up into three categories:

History: food culture from the home country;
Transition: impact of immigration to the United States; and
Present: snapshots of current restaurants, food festivals, and other food related events.