On September 11, 1936, readers of The China Press opened and found southern chicken recipes. The China Press was an English-language daily published in Shanghai. Its food column promised to settle arguments about Maryland fried chicken and claimed a mail bag full of requests as the reason. The column tells us how a cuisine travels and who collects the credit when it lands. The cooks who developed the recipes are not given credit. Arjun Appadurai gives us a name for what is happening. Gastro-politics asks who holds power over what a community grows, cooks, sells, and eats — and who holds power over the story told about that food afterward. Isabel Wilkerson supplies the machinery underneath: a caste system hands one group the labor and another group the byline. A newspaper column that harvests a cuisine while erasing its makers is a small, ordinary working of that system. John Egerton complained that scholars long treated southern cooks as gifted but voiceless, so the full history of those culinary artists went unwritten. Here are some takeaway questions: When a recipe crosses an ocean without its cook, what exactly got exported? And who profits when a community’s hard-won knowledge circulates for free?