In a recently surfaced video, Zohran Mamdani inverted established American political campaign traditions. In a 2023 clip produced by Uncivilized Media, the current Democratic presidential candidate for the mayor of New York was seen sitting on a park bench, dipping all of his five fingers into a container of rice-based takeout and plunging the drippy nosh into his mouth while discussing third world politics.
The interviewer prompted:
So the third holy grail of taboos in American politics, you have socialism, you have Islam and you have Palestine. And you are really going for the trifecta.
To which the New York assemblyman responded:
When you grow up as someone especially in the Third World you have a very different understanding of the Palestinian struggle.
The two might have been quite pleased with their self-styled radicalism but, in reality, their “holy grail of taboos” is the dominant trend in contemporary American institutions. Mamdani, being the son of a Columbia professor and a celebrated filmmaker, the son who, thanks to being born into enormous wealth, didn’t have to work a day in his life, is a typical purveyor of these elitist attitudes.
Regardless, it’s not the soundtrack that made the video go viral; it’s the visuals, for starters, the image of gobbling restaurant food on a park bench. Savage eating is a theme for Mamdani. In March, the politician posted a photo of himself getting ready to demolish a burrito — with a knife and a fork, mind you — on the Q train. Food consumption is typically prohibited on transportation because it’s tied to rat infestation — as if New York City does not have enough of that.
Above all, it was the fact that the grinning Democratic Socialist shoved his fingers into his mouth before returning them to the bowl that elicited the fiercest reaction.
To be sure, Americans love their finger foods — something that, by the way, often strikes Europeans as uncouth. However, we also have very strict taboos against double-dipping and touching shared plates and Mamdani violated these taboos. That’s why social media erupted — it was intense, gut level repulsion. Every society forms dietary prohibitions; they are learned at an early age and they dictate how to treat oneself and others, how to establish personal boundaries, convey respect and keep a community healthy.
Performative bread breaking with the hoi polloi is believed to be a key to a successful political campaign. Every four years, the media trails presidential candidates from a county fair hot dog stand to a diner — either to show that he knows how to order and how to eat with the masses or to catch him making an error. Fluency in foodways demonstrates belonging.
In 2008, Hillary Clinton wandered into a bar in Indiana and downed a shot of cheap whiskey. Inauthentic? Sure. But my husband says that was the single most humanizing thing she’s ever done. If you are what you eat, eating and drinking with the American people makes you American.
Mamdani is doing the opposite. Instead of performative belonging he filmed performative intimidation — he violated one of our strongest prohibitions surrounding consumption of food. The message delivered was that he is not one of us.
What he happens to be is unclear. Indian Americans say he did eating with his fingers all wrong. Mamdani, who claimed to be an African American when he applied to the Ivy League, does not appear to be fluent in that culture either. That makes sense considering Mamdani’s family social standing — he was probably brought up to feel comfortable at a royal soirée using a good dozen forks and spoons.
A recent Wall Street Journal editorial argued — or attempted to argue, rather — that Mamdani’s style projects “sober professionalism, not radical chic.” Although it’s true that the candidate dons a suit and tie on occasion, he often puts out videos of himself in a mosque wearing ethnic garb. His mannerisms, the over-gesticulation, the exaggerated and often inappropriate laughter, feels alien. But he’s been in the U.S. since childhood — long enough to lose it. All of it is staged, just like his rice-eating video — and the spectacle is radical chic.
He’s not pioneering hand-eating in the U.S. either. Your average red-blooded American may find Mamdani’s habits disgusting, but as far back as the 1990s there were not one, not two, but three Ethiopian restaurants on Telegraph Avenue in the Berkeley-Oakland area. They offer the food on a common platter and don’t furnish utensils.
That said, their customers eat with pancakes — eliminating the possibility of double-dipping and/or touching communal meals directly. Technically — if only technically — they violate no American taboos. But even with that in mind, and even in Berkeley, this kind of cuisine was not for everyone. It required a degree of commitment to radical chic or, at the very least, an overpowering interest in gimmicks.
Mamdani’s video is intended to elicit revulsion from everyday Americans, but it enables his core constituents — the wealthy Manhattanites — to feel affinity with the exotic downtrodden. They don’t want to watch their candidates eat a fancy dinner — these kind of events don’t titillate them.
Tom Wolfe’s defining radical chic event was a Manhattan socialite dinner at Leonard Bernstein’s where all the servers were Latinos who, back in the 60s, were considered white. These types sneer at their own rednecks and their conventions.
They feel delightfully transgressive watching a brown man ridicule the restrictions we put on something as foundational as food consumption while pushing the received institutional wisdom — on economy, religious dominance, and especially Jews.
Despite its ascendancy, his outlook is new in America and goes against our cherished traditions. Nor do Mamdanistas have the numbers. Yet they wield considerable power and they taunt us with it.
You think civilized people use utensils? Don’t want to wake up to the Islamic call for prayer every morning? Don’t dream of merging into the Third World? What are you going to do about it when the dual Ugandan citizen rules New York? It’s not that Mamdani’s saliva touched his fingers or the dish — he spits at your Judeo-Christian heritage.
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