Our questions about "what the Dutch were like" were frequently answered
with discussions of the foods Dutch people ate. Initially, we took this "turn to
the concrete" as a retreat from judgment, a way of moving carefully onto neutral
ground. What could be less risky than to respond that the Dutch were people
who lived onpotatoes? But when Ibu Adi said "Everywhere the white Dutch
are all the same. The food is the same,"101 was she deflecting the question, or
commenting on the standardized "European" milieu that many totok Dutch so
carefully cultivated and that she-through a different lens-observed?