Unsung History9 Maj 2022

Thai Americans & the Rise of Thai Food in the United States

There are around 300,000 Thai Americans but almost 5,000 Thai restaurants in the United States. To understand how Thai restaurants became so ubiquitous in the US, we dive into the history of how Thai cuisine arrived in the US before Thai immigrants started to arrive in large numbers, and how Thai Americans capitalized on the popularity of their food to find their niche in the US economy.

I’m joined in this episode by Associate Professor of Asian and Asian American Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Dr. Mark Padoongpatt, author of Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America.

Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. Image Credit: “Thai chef Salapirom Phanita, from Pattaya Marriot hotel catering, prepares food in the forward-deployed amphibious dock landing ship USS Tortuga's (LSD 46) galley during a cooking exchange with U.S. Navy chefs as a part of exercise Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training (CARAT) Thailand 2013. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Amanda S. Kitchner/Released).”

Please consider a donation to the Thai Community Development Center.

Additional Sources:

“How Thai food took over America,” by Francis Lam, The Splendid Table, January 10, 2019.
“The Surprising Reason that There Are So Many Thai Restaurants in America,” by Myles Karp, Vice, March 29, 2018.
“Jet Tila on the Evolution of Thai Food in America,” by Gowri Chandra, Food and Wine, April 27, 2018.
“Thai Food, Constructed and Deconstructed,” by Raegen Pietrucha, UNLV News Center, September 19, 2019.
“The Decades-Long Evolution of Thai Cuisine in Los Angeles,” by Jean Trinhm KCET, December 12, 2018.
“Thai Cusine’s Right Time and Place,” by Mimi Sheraton, New York Times, May 20, 1981.
“Pad Thai Diplomacy,” by Savannah Wallace, Medium, August 9, 2020.
“You Call This Thai Food? The Robotic Taster Will Be the Judge,” by Thomas Fuller, New York Times, September 28, 2014.
“The Oddly Autocratic Roots of Pad Thai,” by Alex Mayyasi, Atlas Obscura, November 7, 2019.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(230)

Jane Addams, Hull House, and Chicago's Nineteenth Ward

In the fall of 1889, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull House on Chicago’s Near West Side, full of good intentions to help the poor people of the neighborhood. They were a force for good, p...

10 Aug 46min

Buddy Bradley

Buddy Bradley, born in the Jim Crow South in 1905, made his way to Harlem at age 16 where he learned to tap dance and became a chorus boy. He was sought out on Broadway as both teacher and choreograph...

27 Juli 50min

The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League

During World War II, afraid that major league baseball would need to pause while men were overseas fighting, Philip K. Wrigley, chewing gum mogul and owner of the Chicago Cubs, spearheaded a new profe...

13 Juli 54min

The Declaration of Independence

The Continental Congress voted to break from Great Britain on July 2, 1776, and approved the text of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, but it took weeks for the news to spread throughout the ...

29 Juni 48min

The Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building

The Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building loom large in the American imagination, symbolizing the conflicting ideas of liberty and empire; their meanings and characters have shifted over tim...

15 Juni 38min

An American History of Purses

Today the US handbag market is estimated to be nearly $12 billion, with most of the purchasing done by women, but into the early 20th Century purses hadn’t yet become the nearly-exclusive domain of wo...

1 Juni 40min

The Lady Bird Special

On the morning of Tuesday, October 6, 1964, the Lady Bird Special, a 19-car train carrying First Lady Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson, her supporters, members of the press, and a security detail, departed...

18 Maj 41min

Policing Slavery & Black Rebellion in the American South

Enslaved Africans were forcibly shipped to Virginia starting in 1619 in response to a severe labor shortage. From the beginning, enslaved laborers resisted by fleeing and through violence, and white e...

4 Maj 50min