Vice has made our day with the announcement of season two of their grimy, messed-up, genre-pushing, series Fresh Off The Boat With Eddie Huang.
In season two, chef and author, Eddie Huang will be trekking himself into the depths of cities across the globe that are undergoing rapid transitions. Across the season’s seven episodes Huang will shack up with a tribe of nomadic camel herders in Mongolia; witness the shattered city of Detroit through the eyes of Danny Brown; join a Pakistani Muslim cricket league in London; explore the lucrative panda export business in Chengdu, China; chill with city food cart workers in Shanghai; call out the whitewashing of Brooklyn back home in New York; and blend in with local Muscovites with help from a Russian YouTube star and community of Kyrgyzstan immigrants.
Huang uses his food knowledge and stomach of steel to gain entry into these communities and to find a commonality through the universal language of food. In doing so, he reveals the struggles, highlights the ingenuity, and documents the innovation of the people of these communities who are reinventing their ways of life in the face of global capitalism.
Huang described his vision of this season as being centred around the concept of resistance:
“Resisting the rising force of global capitalism and forcing technology, government, and soft power to work for us once again. As it stands, we live in an oppressive global feudalism where the individual creates and lays its treasures up to the 1% with no other option but to live the life of a digital peasant. Although we have the luxury of watching Breaking Bad from a couch flanked by bowls of Shin Ramyun and Black Forest Gummy Bears, the fact of the matter is that we live in a feudal global economy with slightly better soma and Heisenberg with a hundred and ninety-six faces (countries in the world)”.
Set to be released September 30, and roll out in three segments, the highly popular series will no doubt rake in those ratings and be as entertaining, if not more so, than the first season.
Jamie-Maree Shipton