According to Mintz, the Colombian Exchange was the first time food truly traveled worldwide to be experienced by other people. He brings about an important point that we also visited on Friday which was the preparation of Maize. (517) While the physical food did travel from the New World to Europe, the techniques to prepare it as well as its history did not. Due to this, many Europeans had trouble eating the Maize because did they not know to prepare it with lime nor did they understand why.

When looking at Glady’s, a Brooklyn restaurant with Jamaican fare, it is important to understand the story behind the cuisine as well as how the restaurant came to be. It started off with the creators of the restaurant traveling to Jamaica on a vacation and then finding a man serving jerk chicken on the beach. They prolonged their stay and decided to learn the man’s recipes. They then took these recipes back to the states to open Glady’s. The problem with this scenario, much like the maize in Mintz’s piece, is that while the food being transported is the same, the history and understanding of it gets left behind.

While observing this we can see that the owners tried to achieve a cultural pass, so to speak, from the West Indian food industry. They would not be able to achieve this because as we can see from Mintz’s piece, people need to become citizens of a society so that their cultural identities can change. The owners truly have no part in the Jamaican culture and thus cannot bring this connection back to Brooklyn. In addition to this, I do not find their food to be authentic because their cooking styles are different than those growing up in the food culture in Jamaica. To me, “authentic” food is only authentic if it was created by someone who was immersed in the food culture of a certain place and understood the history and importance of the dish itself.