Abstract
A characteristically satiric (and food-centric) T. C. Boyle short story, “The Five-Pound Burrito” (2017) represents the meteoric rise and fall of a Mexican-American restaurant owner who “sells out” when he begins marketing a five-pound burrito to the foodie masses. The story is clearly intended as a morality tale: Salvador begins as a hard-working but “authentic” purveyor of “traditional” Mexican food to a largely neighborhood clientele, and the popularity of the gargantuan burrito only brings him (in Boyle’s critical lens, at least) negative consequences: increasing labor and isolation; severance from his ethnic roots, foodways, and local customers; and a mental and physical decline that leads to a series of hallucinations in which visitors to the restaurant appear as chickens, pigs, and, finally, aliens. A vision of his father restores Sal; he discontinues the five–pound burrito and he is returned to his original conditions. My reading of this tale interrogates the privileged position from which Boyle—a wealthy, white, hip SoCal transplant—critiques Sal’s purported failure in the role of ethnic, neighborhood restaurateur, a role, I argue, largely constructed by white consumers and critics like Boyle. My paper thereby engages the story with the current operations of ethnic foodways and chefs as hipster fetishes, and moves, conclusively, to de-center both whiteness and class privilege from the dominant constructions of such foundational (and often critically weaponized) terms like “authenticity,” “tradition,” and sustainability.”
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Foodways and Ethnicity, Ethnicity and Class, Literature and Food
