I used to work with a woman whose family ran a Chinese restaurant in a small town in North Dakota. They’re everywhere!
Opinion and personal experience lead me to believe that the fine line between ethnocentralism and racism is more of an illusion in many cases, if you say one food is inferior because it’s foreign and another is superior because it’s yours (for whatever that means in American food), that’s going to fall to racism in my book. Your experience may be different.
Anecdotally, growing up as a teen in the 80s, I was weird for hating pizza. I had a bad stomach flu when I was 3ish, right after a pizza dinner. Going forward, the smell triggered nausea for me (well all probably have a food like that). So when I got together with friends and we needed food, 80% of them would say order a pizza, and I’d want to do take out or delivery pizza. My friends not being total pricks (I kid, I kid), I got my way about 25% of the time, which was fair, but I did have one friend who decidedly looked down on Chinese food as inferior in every way - it was strange foreign food with weird ingredients, not American like pizza. 
He also looked down on Mexican food which was decidedly strange, as we were living in Las Cruces, NM. Even for a gringo in the 80s, you would be looked askance for that in the region. And his response was largely the same for both, Un-American, strange ingredients, and that the places were ‘dirty’ and ‘who knows what went on in the back.’
So yeah, I think there definitely was a large component of fear (and thus loathing) of the strange, that is part of the concerns about MSG. Currently in 2020 (thank god for not much longer) it’s probably a much smaller component, at least among younger people. I honestly think that people who are vocal about opposing MSG are the same people who avoid Gluten - they have no medical need to, but it makes them look smart, elite, and healthy. When of course, except for a vanishing small percentage of individuals with a medical need, it makes them look silly.
Opinion and personal experience lead me to believe that the fine line between ethnocentralism and racism is more of an illusion in many cases, if you say one food is inferior because it’s foreign and another is superior because it’s yours (for whatever that means in American food), that’s going to fall to racism in my book. Your experience may be different
You are entitled to your own opinions but not your own definitions. It isn’t a matter of experience or your personal “book”. Words have meanings.
If an English guy doesn’t like his Scottish grandparents’ haggis because it’s foreign, and he considers toad-in-the-hole superior because it’s English “that’s going to fall to racism”? Horseshit. That just isn’t what racism means.
Yes, that isnt racism at all.
It could be chauvinism.
Dictionary prescriptivists might not like it, but the the everyday usage of the term ‘racism’ has broadened to include prejudice and hate toward groupings of people that might not technically be ‘race’. No individual decided this would happen. Language evolves, sometimes in ways that don’t really make technical sense.
If one or two people use the word to mean something it never meant to anyone else, they haven’t “broadened the usage” of the word; they’ve just used it incorrectly.
If everyone uses a word to mean something it didn’t use to mean, and everyone understands and accepts that new meaning, then the usage has indeed been broadened.
We are somewhere between the first of these and the second, but I don’t know exactly where. Has this usage really become wide enough that it has crossed over from “incorrect” (or at least “imprecise”) to generally accepted and understood?
I, personally, would resist using “racism” to mean any and all xenophobia or ethnocentricity—because I value precision in language, and because it is a serious charge to call someone a racist.
I don’t disagree with that view, but I would say in the UK, the ship has already sailed, and also, the most common context I see this argued passionately is things like “Actually, It’s not technically racist for me to have said that awful thing about group X, because they are not technically a race”
It’s more of a reversion to the mean than to “broadening”. “Race” meant any group of related animals or people until it was hijacked by the scientific racists in the 19th century to refer to only a handful of “different” “types” of people. So it’s really using it as the original definition of the word rather than the newer, more restrictive, one. The circumstances are similar enough anyway - ethnic prejudice - that it seems too far a quibble to invalidate someone’s argument due to linguistics.
For instance, prejudice against Latinos was not any better when they weren’t considered a “race”, and then instantly became much worse when there was a mutual recognition over the past 10-25 years that they do constitute a race. I remember that even on this message board people were saying that since Latinos weren’t a race, anti-latino prejudice wasn’t racism when someone was calling it that. Which may or may not be true, but it’s irrelevant.
I’m personally fine with calling any anti-ethnic prejudice “racism”. It’s a much shorter phrase than “anti-ethnic prejudice”, and they both mean the same thing anyway. To deny that they mean the same thing is giving the scientific racists who believe that the races exist too much power, and that races are much stronger and more concrete than non-racial ethnicities.
That said, it doesn’t have to be an -ism against a people if you hate foreign food but just because it is exotic and not because you dislike the people. I have no urgent need to try deep fried candy bars and that is a homegrown new food.
It hasnt broadened so far as to include “I dont like poutine or vinegar on my fries” as a racist expression. 
I have a friend who is such a picky eater he doesnt like any 'foreign" food (even pizza) and not that much American food either (he likes his burgers plain- no condiments, veggies or even cheese). By this reckoning he’d be a racist on the level of a KKK Grand Wizard!
But no, he is just a weird picky eater.
Agreed, it has not. There probably are ways that people could express their distaste for foreign food, as a thin veil for actual distaste for the people who eat it, that would though
Which is why I specified in my post that he was critical not just of the food (tastes vary after all), strange ingredients (same), dirty (no evidence, and why just there?) but also of ‘who knows what went on in the back’ as his criticisms. I may not be giving him the benefit of the doubt, but that last one feels very telling to me.
If he didn’t like specifically because it was “foreign”? I would consider that xenophobia, the idea that something foreign (not from my country, nation, etc) is bad. This would be a subset of thinking things from any particular country is bad, and I am unaware of any other term for that besides “racism.” There isn’t something like “country-ism” as far as I know. There is nationalism, but that’s something different.
Now, if he tasted it and just didn’t like the taste, there’s nothing wrong with that at all. And that stands even if the reason for his taste is that he didn’t grow up with it and thus never acquired the taste.
I am, of course, assuming the “from somewhere else” definition of foreign, no the “unknown” definition. If the guy just has never tasted haggis, but says he doesn’t like it, that’s a completely different flaw. (And I’m actually drawing a blank on what to call it. I just know that I don’t like people who say they don’t like something they’ve never tried.)
Yes, especially because “race” itself has widely varied in meaning over the centuries and is hard to pin down. There are historical (and not so historical) uses of “race” to distinguish groups that might be called nationalities or ethnicities. Insisting that “race” can only mean skin-color based groupings doesn’t really hold much water, especially given that there’s no consistent way of identifying what the races are.
There are people scared of the health effects of MSG in my native UK too, and they don’t call it “Chinese Food Syndrome” or whatever, so I don’t think it’s really a racism thing. I think it’s just because of the scary sciencey name.
In Mandarin, MSG is a single syllable, old word, like salt. Accordingly, in China, there’s little awareness even of the idea that MSG is potentially harmful.
The problem is that the use of the term “racism” to mean almost any kind of dislike or prejudice is that it’s not useful. It obscures rather than enlightens.
No one has demonstrated that such obscurantism takes place or how it matters.
Insofar as we might consider the definition of racism to be part of a set of rules for acceptable/unacceptable behaviour, it’s going to suffer the same problem as any such set of rules:
- If you define them very precisely, you just highlight the gaps between them, for people game those rules, then escape on a technicality, despite having done something that everyone else feels was unfair.
- If you try to close those gaps with even more detailed and precise definitions, you create an unenforceable mess, and you just create even more boundaries
- If instead you define them more broadly, you get arguments that their application is arbitrary and that the rules are obscure.
I think what some people can’t get over is that while all racism is bad, some racism matters more than others. So while we need as a society to do something about racism against black people, no one needs to get worked up over finding instances of what might be called racism between different kinds of white people.
Being too precise also sets up silly arguments like “Muslims aren’t a race” or “Hispanics aren’t a race.” It doesn’t matter. The phenomenon is the same and its causes and remedies are the same.
Concur - I think a lot of that has to be based in pragmatism about the effect (or risk of effect) to the victims. Whilst they may all be repellent in nature, some categories of prejudice are more likely to spark violence, or create/perpetuate tangible disadvantage than others.
That said, I see no problem in challenging the less-obvious forms when they occur, because they are all part of a general topic which people need to confront - and a rising tide lifts all boats.