Spicy Cowboy Chicken Taco Soup

You probably know the stereotype of “white people's food:" bland, pale, unseasoned stuff, so flavorless it could make you cry. This cliché has been widely embraced as a joke, a meme, a jab that even white people throw at themselves with a self-deprecating chuckle. Anemic-looking meat and potatoes garnished with a single speck of salt, almost anything with excess mayonnaise—this fare is commonly greeted on social media with “Where’s the seasoning?” or some harsh variation of “white people colonized half the world for spices and still don’t even use them.”

I grew up on very very bland food. My mom can’t eat anything spicier than ketchup. There really was not much variety in my mom’s cooking. Truth be told, she was better at making reservations than meals. I recall a few years ago on Thanksgiving, she made a comment on my cooking concerning my use of different herbs and spices. She said, "You're not putting grass in the stuffing are you?" Yet somehow even without turning on the stove, my mom made a foodie out of me.

White people’s bland food isn’t just an internet meme. It’s a centuries-long obsession.

Humans love flavor. For almost as long as we’ve been cooking, we’ve been adding ingredients to our pots that contribute flavor, not just calories. Salt, herbs, and strongly scented seeds all have nutritious properties, but if you consider the time it would take to gather the seeds from garlic mustard plants when you could be digging tubers or fishing, then it’s clear that the drive for deliciousness is ingrained and powerful.

So why does bland food exist? Why, indeed, is there a whole group of people known for their love of underseasoned potato salad, passion for plain chicken breasts, and adoration of mayonnaise?

I’m talking about white people. More specifically, white Americans, though Europeans are also complicit in the rise of blanditude.

If you are white, as I am, you may be rebelling against this idea in your head, and thinking about all the spicy, richly complex dishes you enjoy all the time. That’s fine—I am too. I don’t want to be associated with mac and cheese from a box or Taylor Swift’s cover of Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September” any more than you do. This is not about creating a taxonomy of who eats what and how. It’s about unpacking why anyone, ever, would make the culinary choice to embrace less, not more, deliciousness.

White people and bland food is not just a current meme. It’s a trope with a long and storied history. You may not agree with the characterization, but when white girl potato salad is a punchline on Saturday Night Live, comparing a white performer’s cover of a classic R&B tune to a chicken breast is a sick burn on Twitter, and calling someone “white bread” an insult, there’s definitely something there to unpack—and douse with hot sauce.

There’s no denying it: The food of white America, whether you’re talking poached halibut on massaged kale or Kraft singles on Wonder bread, is bland compared with South Asian curries, Korean kimchi, or African peanut stews. If you can have any food, and in modern America, many of us can have pretty much any food we choose, why does blandness ever win?

There’s safety in blandness. The twentieth century brought social and food system upheaval, from the mechanization of food production, to the privations of the Great Depression, to the intense demand for new, shelf-stable foods to feed the armies of World Wars I and II. These developments stirred a lot of pots, almost none of which were delicious.

The relative social equality of the postwar era in the US, as well as the memories of military food and Depression meals, served to homogenize various white ethnic groups into Americans. They may have still eaten garlicky greens, stuffed cabbage, and bright hasenpfeffer at home, but at school and other institutional settings, American food was coalescing into a middlebrow mess of perfect squares of white bread fried in margarine with melty processed cheese inside, instant potatoes, casseroles, and fish sticks. Baked chicken nuggets, weren’t far behind.

Of course, despite the mockery that the internet has loaded upon white people and their unseasoned food lately, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with eating unseasoned food. I just thankfully consider myself not one of them.

A growing backlash to the “where’s the seasoning?” jokes—or at least acknowledgment of how conversations about food and identity have become so extreme—suggests that I’m not the only one finding this essentialist divide a little tired. “Y’all don’t need to mix creole seasoning, Cajun seasoning, blackening seasoning, Tony’s seasoning, slap ya mama seasoning, lemon pepper, old bay, and Lawrys to the same dish,” suggests one recent tweet, while others have come to the defense of chefs who rely on fresh herbs and aromatics rather than visible heaps of dried seasonings.

So perhaps it’s time to lay this binary of taste to rest, to find some new jokes about food. I’ll be over here with my liberal dustings of salt, pepper, garlic and onion powders, and red pepper flakes, but you do you. After all, there is no one right way to cook, just as there is no one right way to be a color.