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      in Television

      James Corden's Food Bit Draws Ire and a Petition For It to End

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      For years, the late-night TV host has dared celebrities to eat choice foods, but an online petition is calling for it to end.For years, the late-night television host James Corden has played a food-based truth or dare with celebrities called “Spill Your Guts or Fill Your Guts.” Participants choose to either answer personal questions or take a bite of a food deemed disgusting to eat, like ghost pepper hot sauce, a sardine smoothie or dried caterpillars.“Wow, it all looks so terrible,” Jimmy Kimmel, the host of late night show “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” said as he appeared on Mr. Corden’s segment in 2016. “I know people can’t smell it, but it doesn’t smell good, either.”Mr. Corden responded, “It’s really disgusting, it’s horrific,” as he spun a table with Asian ingredients and snacks like chicken feet, balut, pig’s blood and thousand-year eggs.While the segment has received scrutiny in the past, an online petition posted this month has brought renewed criticism that its portrayal of Asian foods as disgusting is harmful. More than 46,000 people have signed the petition, asking Mr. Corden to change the food options on the segment or end its run.“Everyone is entitled to their opinion on food,” said Kim Saira, 24, a Los Angeles activist who organized the petition and set up a protest last Thursday near Mr. Corden’s studio, posing behind a sign that said “Delicious, Not Disgusting.” “My whole point is that James Corden is a white person and is actively using ingredients from Asian cultures and profiting from it and showing it in such a negative light. There’s a way to not like foods and still be respectful about it.”Ms. Saira said she was confused when she first watched the segment featuring balut about two years ago.Balut, a fertilized duck egg, is a late-night snack Ms. Saira grew up eating when she visited relatives in the Philippines every year. She has memories of sitting around a table with her family during power blackouts, which were common, eating the balut by candlelight while they told stories.“I didn’t know why they were calling a food that was so sentimental ‘disgusting,’” said Ms. Saira, who is Filipina and Chinese American.Mr. Corden has been doing the bit for years. A YouTube playlist created by his program has videos as far back as 2016. Speaking to Howard Stern on his radio show June 16, Mr. Corden addressed the controversy.“The next time we do that bit, we absolutely won’t involve or use any of those foods,” Mr. Corden said. “Our show is a show about joy and light and love. We don’t want to make a show to upset anybody.”Mr. Corden’s staff did not respond to requests for comment for this article.“We’re in a kind of cultural moment where bits like this one exist with this increasing acceptance of cultural foods,” said Alison Alkon, a professor at the University of the Pacific. “We’re kind of in this Ping-Pong dialectic.”Using food to prompt a response of disgust, for entertainment, has a long history, said Merry White, an anthropology professor at Boston University. In the United States, the game show “Fear Factor” challenged contestants to eat foods with ingredients like fish eyes, cow bile and coagulated blood paste. Reactistan, a YouTube reaction channel, has had Pakistani people try foods that were strange to them, like American hamburgers, doughnuts and candies such as Ring Pops and Airheads.Even Mr. Corden, who is British, hosted a segment using foods from his homeland, such as haggis and a smoothie with fish, chips and mushy peas.Lok Siu, an associate professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, said the practice disrespects people’s cultures. The choice of Asian foods has made Asian Americans feel more vulnerable or marginalized during a time of rising violence against them.The perception of Asians in the United States has historically been defined through food, Professor Siu said.“You use food as a metaphor to describe that distance, the kind of strangeness between a group of people that you don’t understand and their habits, the way they’re eating, the smell that comes with the spices,” she said. “There’s something around the way we discuss food, the way we think about food in our acceptance or rejection of it, it’s a rejection of a culture and the people that’s associated with it.”She added that Mr. Corden’s use of Asian foods on the segment defines which foods are considered mainstream, delicious or disgusting; food is a metaphor for what is considered 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a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“Why is this not seen as racist immediately?” Professor Siu said. “If he made fun of any other group, would there be a much more broader understanding that that’s racist? It’s not immediately thought of as being racist and damaging because it’s Asian food. There is such a denial of anti-Asian racism in the U.S., and this is a prime example of it.”In Mr. Corden’s most recent episodes, he has served up blood and pork jelly, scorpion-dusted plantains, a thousand-year egg nog (made with thousand-year eggs), cow tongue, turkey testicles, an ant-covered corn dog and a salmon, tuna and fish-eye milkshake.For some Filipino chefs, who grew up eating some of the ingredients that have been mocked on Mr. Corden’s show, the renewed focus on the segment has stirred up memories.Lou Boquila, the chef and owner of Perla, in Philadelphia, said he remembers questioning why he ate balut — which tastes of duck broth, and other ingredients like intestines, tongues or blood — when he was growing up in the United States.“It’s actually very delicious, nothing out of the ordinary for us, but it put us in a different light,” Mr. Boquila said. “If you look at all the great chefs, they use every part of the animal.”“You try American food, speak American, it made you not proud of what you ate growing up, and I was totally stupid for not standing up for it,” he added. “It steers you toward being more Americanized and turning back on your culture.”Javier Fernandez, the chef and owner at Kuya Ja’s Lechon Belly, in Rockville, Md., said “Spill Your Guts” presents an opportunity for him to educate people about Filipino food, the culture and ingredients like pig’s head and pork blood (also featured on Mr. Corden’s show).“When people talk about Filipino food or these non-American ingredients where they feel it’s gross to see, it does better for the culture,” he said. “It helps promote what the cuisine is like. My job is to promote the cuisine itself.”Follow NYT Food on Twitter and NYT Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Pinterest. Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Wolfgang’ Review: Light as a Soufflé, and About as Substantial

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      David Gelb’s biographical documentary says much about what Wolfgang Puck has done, and very little about who he is“I don’t like to think about the past too much,” Wolfgang Puck confesses early in the Disney+ documentary “Wolfgang,” a red flag that we’re not going to encounter much in the way of intense self-scrutiny in the scant 78 minutes that follow. A fairly vapid and shallow affair, even by the low standards of the celebrity bio-doc subgenre, “Wolfgang” provides copious archival montages of “the first celebrity chef” (Julia Child apparently didn’t count), but precious little understanding of what actually makes him tick.Puck’s early years are skimmed, aside from an extended anecdote about losing his first kitchen job, told in great detail and illustrated with re-enactment footage, so we fully understand this as The Story That Defines Him. The real juice here is Chef Wolfgang’s rise to fame, and much of that material is fascinating: how the open kitchen design of his Spago restaurant elevated the chef from a “blue-collar job” to a celebrity, how his staff read Hollywood trade papers to best assess who got the premium tables, how instrumental he was to the development of fusion cooking.Some much-needed tension is provided by Patrick Terrail, the owner of Ma Maison (Puck’s first kitchen of note), as he and his chef maintain conflicting accounts of how much credit Puck deserved for that restaurant’s success. But most of the picture hums along with the singularity of purpose of an infomercial, and even its coverage of Puck’s flaws — he spread himself too thin, he was an absentee father and husband — have the ring of a job applicant’s description of their biggest flaw: that they just work too hard, and care too much.“Wolfgang” is directed by David Gelb, who all but defined the celebrity chef documentary with “Jiro Dreams of Sushi.” He hits many of the same notes; the food photography is delectable, and Puck is full of bite-size wisdom like “We have to have focus in life” and “If you believe in something, you have to follow your dreams.” But “Wolfgang” ultimately plays like exactly what it is: “Jiro” Disney-fied, and thus drained of its nuance, complexity and interrogation.WolfgangNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 18 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More