The Art of Knowing

Having spent a lot of time overseas, I realized those cultures I’ve experienced abroad all exist right here on our soil. Yet, I’ve never felt like I’ve experienced them here in America like I did while watching “City of Gold”.

Scrolling through Netflix on a boring Friday night I stumbled across a documentary called “City of Gold”. The Rotten Tomatoes score was 91%. Having just watched the Oscars, I knew it wasn’t nominated for one. After watching it, it should have been. This movie ignited my subconscious in a way I hadn’t felt from a movie in a very long time. Filmed in Los Angeles, where I’ve never spent a lot of time, the movie told more of a story about America than it did about it’s real purpose, food. I felt re-connected with an America I learned about as a child in grade school, and from the books I read at the public library. Having spent a lot of time overseas, I realized those cultures I’ve experienced abroad all exist right here on our soil. Yet, I’ve never felt like I’ve experienced them here in America like I did while watching “City of Gold”.

The movie follows the life of LA Food Critic Jonathan Gold. His unconventional style of patronizing only small ethnic restaurants is a complete departure from the stereotypical snooty food critic who walks into a five star restaurant unannounced only to be catered to like a move star, with the power and control to crush a restaurant with a single sentence. Jonathon recognizes the flavors of food permeate each dish because of the love they have for their country, and how the recipes were passed down from generation to generation. It is food made from the soul.

Throughout America our diverse cultures are wrapped around our food, brought here by the immigrants who came here seeking a new life. Each restaurant represented a different story about a family coming to America and food being all they knew. Each one began cooking the food they loved to the delight of other people, and to keep food on their own table at home. They came from Thailand, Korea, Mexico, China, Ethiopia, El Salvador, Israel, Iran, Guatemala, and France.

Not only was their hard work evident but they spoke about starting from nothing and giving everything back to their children, giving them a better life and sending them to college. One son became a doctor, another daughter an MBA student at UCLA. Children of immigrants, whose parents poured every last nickel into their future. I was humbled. I couldn’t help but think about all I take for granted, having never experienced what they did. My great grandparents did, but I did not. Sometimes we forget that a country of immigrants doesn’t stop being one. The plight of my grandparents is the plight of new families coming to America every day, seeking the same stability my family has established over time.

Jonathon Gold breathed life into each small restaurant by going there, tasting the food, having conversations, learning about the ingredients and how the flavors added to each dish. “I started to find out things I didn’t know,” he said. Before writing a critique he had a rule to visit each restaurant at least four to five times. One restaurant he visited seventeen times before writing about it. He wanted to know that he knew enough about it to represent it fairly and accurately. Gold, an average white American man, who grew up in LA at a time when desegregation was strained and failing, he ventured out to answer the questions he had as a child that never got answered in his segregated white neighborhood. What does Korean food taste like? What is different about the food of the indigenous people of Mexico, the Oaxacans? Does Chinese food vary in flavor from one region to the next? These are things you can read about in a book to get an answer if that’s all you’re looking for. Jonathon’s trade was learned by adopting the philosophy that you have to find out about something for yourself in order to truly know it, and in order to truly know it you have to experience it. It is only then that you can say, “I know because I know.”

This is where my soul began to breathe new life. I began to melt. I thought about the condition of America and the wounds of division that seem to be getting worse and not better.

“I never pretend to have an expertise I don’t have,” he says. This is where my soul began to breathe new life. I began to melt. I thought about the condition of America and the wounds of division that seem to be getting worse and not better. I thought about the consequences of people who thought they knew what America was or what it should be and were wrong. Their premature judgments about people not like them seemed to be from a flawed process of negative imagery from media or society. I wondered if these people really know in a way that Jonathon knows when he writes about the food from each restaurant. He never knew about Korean food until he ate it over and over and over again. The flavors began to become familiar to him not after the second or third time but after the tenth or eleventh time. I wonder if anyone who feels so passionately about immigration in America knows anything about the people they pass judgment against.

I would implore anyone who thinks they knew anything about culture in America to use the Jonathon Gold method of “truly knowing”. Take something you’ve already made up your mind about, it could even be something you grew up with, and do everything you can to read about it and learn about it and then go experience it for yourself. Go and experience it as many times as you feel like you need to before you think you really “know”. When asked by someone else what your experience is with that topic and how you were able to draw your conclusion then you can say, “I know because I know.”