Once again the Leisure Fascists™ are accusing those who admire and adopt aspects of foreign culture of the sin of “cultural appropriation.” (I use the word “sin” deliberately, for these ideologues behave much like theists.) Such people don’t seem to grasp the distinction between “appropriation” and “appreciation,” producing articles that could have appeared in The Onion. And this time it involves something dear to my heart: food!
In an Onion-esque article at Everyday Feminism called “The Feminist guide to being a foodie without being culturally appropriative“, writer Rachel Kuo is offended that Americans are appropriating not only her cuisine, but foreign cuisine in general—in particular the cuisine of minorities who aren’t white.
Here’s the first of six things Kuo scolds us about. In this whole post, Kuo’s words are indented and the headings and emphases are hers.
a. Don’t go for “fusion foods”: culturally appropriative!
Mainstream media has made a spectacle out of foods from seemingly exotic places.
I’ve also observed a lot of White chefs create “Asian-inspired” dishes. When going out to eat, I notice many “Asian-fusion” themed restaurants where chefs combine all the countries and flavors in the vast and diverse continent of Asia and throw them together on both plate and menu.
What is “Asian inspired” or “Asian-fusion?” I have a sinking suspicion it’s not like when my mom made me sushi with cucumbers, lunch meat, and eggs growing up. Or toast with mayonnaise and pork sung. People used to make fun of the food I eat, and now suddenly, stuff like spam fried rice is selling at a hip new restaurant for $16.
It’s frustrating when my culture gets consumed and appropriated as both trend and tourism.
Cry me a river! Some of the best cuisine has resulted from taking influences from diverse sources. Last night, for instance, I made chicken and rice, but put hoisin sauce, a Chinese condiment, on the chicken. That was my fusion food, and it was good. I was certainly appropriating Chinese cuisine, but was I being exploitative or somehow denigrating the Chinese, or ignoring their plights? No way! Kuo’s rationale is itself Fusion Argumentation, combining postmodernist discourse and Offense Culture:
Cultural appropriation is when members of a dominant culture adopt parts of another culture from people that they’ve also systematically oppressed. The dominant culture can try the food and love the food without ever having to experience oppression because of their consumption.
With food, it isn’t just eating food from someone else’s culture. It might not be appropriation if you’re White and you love eating dumplings and hand pulled noodles. Enjoying food from another culture is perfectly fine.
But, food is appropriated when people from the dominant culture – in the case of the US, white folks – start to fetishize or commercialize it, and when they hoard access to that particular food.
When a dominant culture reduces another community to it’s cuisine, subsumes histories and stories into menu items – when people think culture can seemingly be understood with a bite of food, that’s where it gets problematic.
Leaving aside the superfluous apostrophe (do they have editors at that site?), who on earth pretends that they can understand a culture by eating its food? And what does Kuo mean by “fetishizing or commercializing” food? Does that mean selling it? Does “fetishizing” mean, as I do, loving Chinese and Indian food and eating it frequently? One gets the impression that Kuo has no idea what she’s talking about, but something has offended her and she has to express her hurt.
Kuo then gives us a list of five other no-nos when it comes to food.
b. Seeking “authentic” or “exotic” “ethnic” food.
Often, when we talk about “ethnic” food, we’re not referring to French, German, or Italian cuisine, and definitely not those Ikea Swedish meatballs.
Usually, we re talking about Thai, Vietnamese, Indian, Ethiopian, and Mexican food –places where food is cooked by the “brownest” people.
While food can connect people together and also serve as a way to learn about cultures other than our own, what happens is that food becomes the only identifier for certain places. Japan reduced to ramen and sushi, Mexico reduced to tacos and burritos, India reduced to curry, and so on.
Entire regions become deduced to menu options and ingredients without any thought to the many different communities in these places. There’s a loss of complexity and cultures end up getting homogenized.
. . . In seeking “authentic” food, we’re hoping for a truly immersive experience into another culture.
I reject this categorically. Yes, food from cultures far removed from ours is often worth seeking out because it’s not our everyday fare, and mainly because it’s good. It’s not an immersion experience, it’s a good meal, for crying out loud! And as for looking for “authenticity”, there’s a perfectly good reason: “ethnic food” is often de-spiced, de-complexified, or sauced to death to satisfy the untutored American palate; while on its home ground, cuisines like Chinese, Indian (or, for that matter, French) have been perfected for centuries. All too often Chinese food in American restaurants is drowned in a gloppy sauce, or has added sugar (as in the dreadful “sweet and sour” concoctions) to cover up its essential blandness. The fact is that “authentic” ethnic food is often BETTER ethnic food, and that’s the reason I go to only a few Chinese restaurants in Chicago. (Because good Chinese restaurants are so rare, I cook it more often at home, having taken classes as a grad student and then cooked Szechuan food for 35 years).
c. Having your friend of color be your food expert.
Some friends have expected me to know where to get ramen, “real” Chinese food, “street-style” Thai food, Korean BBQ – and they’re disappointed when I don’t know. These are also the friends that once made fun of my food.
Don’t constantly treat your friend of color as your food tour guide. We’re happy eating our cultural foods with you, but that’s not what our entire friendship should be about.
Yes, of course it’s exploitation to use a friend only for food advice, but who does that? I tell you, though: I’ve discovered the best Chinese restaurants in Chicago by asking my Chinese-born colleagues where they like to eat. That’s not the entirety of our relationship, of course, but who would know better where to get good Chinese food than an expatriate homesick for their land? How many friendships between American and foreigners consist solely of the American using the foreigner to find good places to eat?
d. Wanting adventure points for eating food.
When people think they’re being adventurous for trying food from another culture, it’s the same thing as treating that food as bizarre or weird.
The person outside of the culture becomes the person with “insider” knowledge about this exotic, other culture. The theme of “Westerner as cultural connoisseur” is rooted in imperialist ideas about discovering another culture and then making oneself the main character in the exchange. “I was transformed by my trip to [fill in the blank].”
Some folks want to be applauded for trying chicken feet, fermented bean curd, or just for eating with chopsticks. It’s disconcerting to eat with folks who are going to giggle about ingredients make comments like, “Oh my god, this is so weird! This is gross!” and run back to tell all their other friends about trying it and how “awesome” that experience was.
. . . By making a big deal out of someone’s culture and food, it reminds them that they’re [sic; where’s the editor?] culture is abnormal and doesn’t quite belong in this world.
I remember the first time I tried chicken feet. They were served at dim sum, and cooked in soy sauce and ginger. I loved them: the texture was unusual and the meat tasty. I didn’t expect to be praised for doing that: I wanted to see why so many Chinese people were eating them. Many people bridle at the thought of such a dish, and I won’t criticize them for it. But nor do I criticize people who try “weird” foods and wind up liking them and being pleased about that. That is indeed being adventurous, and being rewarded for being adventurous. So yes, maybe we should urge people to be adventurous when trying new foods. I don’t see that as implying in any way that such food “doesn’t belong in this world”.
e. Loving the food, not the people.
When food gets disconnected from the communities and places its from, people can easily start forgetting and ignoring historical and ongoing oppression faced by those communities.
America has corporatized “Middle Eastern food” like hummus and falafel, and some people might live by halal food carts, but not understand or address the ongoing Islamophobia in the US.
Folks might love Mexican food, but not care about different issues such as labor equity and immigration policy that impact members from that community.
I don’t think eating hummus makes us forget the tumult or injustices in the Middle East. It may in fact remind us of them, but I again reject the notion that seeking out the good parts of a culture somehow inures us to the bad or hurtful parts, or the oppression experienced by its members. Does Kuo really think that we should harangue someone who buys a taco because it makes them forget the poverty of many Mexicans? By all means we should be aware of this issue, and of the plight of immigrant labor, but that’s not going to stop me from eating Mexican food, appreciating Mexican writers, or loving the paintings of Frida Kahlo. For if we eat a taco without thinking of labor equity, then it’s equally bad to appreciate literature, art, music, and clothing without thinking of labor equity.
f. Profiting from oppression.
More and more now, part of chefs’ culinary training also involves travel in order to learn about different cooking techniques and ingredients, and they’re opening up fancy restaurants that repurpose “cheap” eats from working class and poor communities that rely on affordable, local products and ingredients.
Food culture gets re-colonized by chefs seeking to make that “authentic” street food they tried more elegant. Often, these restaurants are inaccessible to the communities they’re appropriating from.
This is different from when members from that community repurpose their own traditional foods.
This is food gentrification, where communities can no longer afford their own cuisines and sustain their traditions.
Chicago is one of the best eating towns in the U.S., especially when it comes to foreign food. We have huge Indian, Thai, Asian, Hispanic, and Polish communities (not to mention non-“foreign” African-American communities) all with a panoply of good restaurants. And those restaurants are full of the locals. In what respect has “food gentrification” made these people unable to afford their own food? Yes, Rick Bayless has opened a high-end, expensive Mexican restaurant, Topolobampo, where I’ve been twice (I didn’t much care for it: give me a good meal of goat in a cheap birreria!). And I don’t see any group having a problem “sustaining its traditions” because there are some high-end “ethnic” restaurants. What Kuo has created here is a non-problem.
I’m looking very hard to see if there are any valid points in Kuo’s entire article, but, try as I might, I can’t. Her point seems to be that if you eat the cuisine of oppressed minorities, you’re helping oppress them, or at least are skimming the cream of their culture and forgetting the oppression. But I don’t think that’s true. Eating a taco doesn’t make you any less cognizant of the problems of Mexican immigrants than if you eschewed that taco. Indeed, patronizing “ethnic” restaurants is a way of supporting the local culture, helping perpetuate culinary traditions, and physically interacting with the locals who are also out to eat their own food. I can’t see a downside.
Why do I spend so much time on such a journalistic trifle? Because Kuo’s article is the harbinger of a generation who wants us to keep our hands off the things we like about foreign cultures, and the trend is growing quickly. Yet what she wants us to forego is the very basis of America’s “melting pot” ethos, which forged a hybrid nation with a hybrid culture. So I’ll continue to eat the local barbecue (a black cuisine), Chinese food, Indian food, and Mexican food, and I and my tummy will give thanks to the people who created these delights.
Ye gods, self-refuting or what?
Seems especially odd from someone who has culturally appropriated the name “Rachel”.
“Ye gods,” indeed — took the words right out of my fingers.
I just happen right now to be in a position to note some striking parallels between Yiddish and Japanese culture. When I made kasha varnishkes for my friend the other night and she really appreciated the new take on buckwheat that she described as, “very Asian,” was she appropriating my culture? We have plans to go to her favorite by-reservation-only Japanese restaurant; will I then be appropriating her culture? When we had dinner at a local Lebanese restaurant and had moussaka and tiramisu, whose culture was appropriated by whom? And I’ve got some ideas for sushi-like presentation of Mexican foods…what sort of appropriation is that going to be?
…and when the Tokyo Symphony plays Brahms’s Hungarian Rhapsody or Opera Hong Kong does Verdi’s Aida, again, who’s appropriating whom?
To all the hells with such nonsense. Beauty is meant to be shared, embraced, luxuriated in. I’m not going to let my light complexion keep me from immersing myself in beauty wherever I find it. Not only do I not care if that beauty is unfamiliar or foreign, I want to seek out new beauty everywhere. Why should we even think to put up walls to keep people away from beauty? I think the culture I grew up with is beautiful and I hope others discover and luxuriate in its beauty, and I can’t understand the mindset of somebody who wouldn’t feel like that.
Come to think of it, that’s pretty much the only culture I don’t want to appropriate and hope nobody else will: the culture of non-appropriation.
To the anti-appropriationists, go stick your head in a pig; to everybody else, share and enjoy!
b&
Word to the wise: you do not want to culturally appropriate vegemite.
If you must, spread it extremely thin. Even the natives do not gloop it on toast the way Americans do peanut butter.
Yes, if you want to appropriate Australian culture I suggest meat pies or pavlova. Vegemite is an acquired taste.
But isn’t vegemite just the Aussie version of Marmite which you culturally appropriated from us Brits? 🙂
Didn’t we Brits culturally appropriate Australia? Well, OK drop “culturally”
Well the brand is owned by Kraft now, so you can blame the Americans these days. 😉
Glooping is far and away the best mode of peanut butter application.
maybe next to eating it straight out of the jar with a spoon – or finger
Just between you and me…I’ve been know to do that. Don’t tell anyone!
So I’ve been urged for many years by my breakfast Daimons, Slathery and Mr. Scarf. Overspread the toast in breaking waves of peanut butter, topped by tart Michigan preserves; then eat fast and in large messy bites.
CHERRY preserves, of course.
Nailed it on the “Rachel” name. We know numerous Asian women who have lovely first names that they have given up for some generic American-sounding name. It’s unlikely that Ms. Kuo knows the story of Rachel in the Hebrew bible, but it seems that one cannot post any comments or suggestions on the Everyday Feminism web site.
That website is really something!
Ms. Kuo is actually working on a doctorate ( in some BS) at NYU.
It disturbs me that she’s doing a PhD in communications when she has such bad ideas.
Next, Anonymous is going to be Rick rolling her!
And Kuo… with a name like that, should her mum (unless her maiden name was Japanese) have been making sushi for her?)
If Americans eat only American food, we’ll all get fat and fat-shame each other!
Hilarious!
I wonder how the owners of Indian and Vietnamese restaurants feel about this. 🙂
And Thai… (thinking especially of peanut sauce-based stuff).
Let’s see… pineapple in Hawaii? Nope. Appropriated from East Asia. That goes for nearly all tropical fruits we think of as “Hawaiian.” Papaya is from Mexico. Mangos… southern India. Star fruit… far eastern Asia. Coconut? Who knows. We should banish that one.
Oops. Pineapple = South America.
And peanut also.
Go back far enough and not even pigs are Hawaiian. They were ‘appropriated’ from the east around AD 400. Give up on the luaus, you obscene cultural imperialists!
Some Native Hawaiians (uh, whoops… that’s “locals” when you are over there) have gotten extremely incensed over conservation biologists doing sweeps of various areas — to keep the native plants found nowhere else in the world from getting wiped out. Some locals (the ones getting pissed off) are maintaining these wild pig culls are a direct attack on their culture.
The Thais heartlessly stole the peanut from the pre-Columbian societies in Mesoamerica. Shame on them. Shame.
And here I thought the peanut was from Africa, like us.
Peanuts must have come from Africa, otherwise what did our ancestor monkeys eat?
You’re thinking of elephants. But otherwise the argument is airtight.
Nick Cohen ftw, on the regressive lefts attempts to silence others:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/22/progressive-liberalism-enemy-of-tolerance
I had snitzel on spagetti Bolognese for lunch at a French supermarket in Budapest. Can any sensitive person tell me when, as an Englishman, I can show my face in public again?
You get extra points if you washed it down with a US-version-Budweiser.
One of my favourite dishes both to cook and eat is adapted from an Indian recipe, as described in this long ago blog post: https://aspiblog.wordpress.com/2011/05/10/aspiblog/
To adapt a discovery from elsewhere to suit one’s own needs is not appropriation in any way – as the famous quote has it “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”
I think Ms Kou should learn something about the history of cooking and cuisine before spouting off on a subject she obviously knows nothing about. For example large parts of Indian cuisine, on which I grew up, were appropriated from Persia. The tomato and the chilli pepper, both staples of the modern Indian diet, only entered Indian cuisine after Europeans had brought them from America, post 1492. I could make similar comments about almost every ethnic cuisine that exists in the world today. People have been borrowing and assimilating each others eating habits since humankind first crept out of the primordial soup, if I’m allowed to make to make an incorrect evolutionary comment on this blog. ;))
Do you have a recipe for that primordial soup?
Personally, I generally go with mirepoix, chicken, salt and pepper, dill, parsley, a generous splash of sherry or wine, water to cover, cooked in a pressure cooker for half an hour under pressure. Considering how many different things I wind up doing with the leftovers, it’s about as primordial as it gets….
b&
Google is my friend.
According to Brtain’s “leading nutrition expert”, it is perfect for your 9-day “detox” regimen. Heh heh. Heh heh. Detox… heh heh. Maybe I can make some primordial soup and rid myself of all the residual gluten I’ve been accumulating.
Mix water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen; boil with a thunderbolt; let the mixture cool, then boil again; repeat for several million years.
Potatoes would be another example: they come from the new world, so any appearance of them in European or Asian dishes is a cultural appropriation of native Andean and central American indigenous culture that occurred after 1492.
Brits…no chips for you!
No chips… or carrots, cabbage, beat root, cherries, garlic, rye, lettuce, cucumber, parsnip, radish, and many others introduced by the Romans.
And apples were introduce into North America by the Europeans – so no more “Mom’s apple pie” for you Yanks. Take that!
And tempura was introduced into Japan by Portuguese and Spanish missionaries (the very name comes from ‘quattuor tempora’, the holy days when Catholics ate fish instead of meat). So if a Spaniard eats tempura in Japan who is appropriating who?
O great Flying Spaghetti Monster, where will it all end?
You couldn’t make this stuff up.
Heavens to Murgatroyd! Next we will I’ve to stop speaking English because it appropriates words from other languages.
OMG that’s sooooo true! Imagine how the French feel when we mangle so many of their words. “Merde!”.
Back to pre-invasion English!
The US will have to change the names of most of its states!
English has not so much “appropriated” words from other languages as “chased other languages into dark alleys, beaten them senseless and strip-searched them for words”.
Is Kuo going to seek out guidance and approval from the deathly pale before eating European foods? Not that she or anyone else has to, but if it’s good for the goose it’s good for the gander is it not?
No, that’s OK because she’s lunching up.
I say! Good one, Barn!
I’m engaging in some cultural appropriation myself this week, having all kinds of food adventures in Japan. No one here seems too bothered about it, and in fact people have been extraordinarily kind and welcoming, especially regarding food. And there is no way in hell that I, a tall gaijin whose hair has gone completely rogue because of the water or humidity, can blend in. Grumpy Ramen Dude in Asakusa was grumpy even to his apparently regular patrons, not just to us, and we still got a great bowl of ramen.
Well, since I’ve lived in Japan for 42 years now, I think I have the right to say that the Japanese are great appropriators of other people’s cuisines (and probably greater than the races or nations that Rachel Kuo is complaining of in her shallow, callow way), and good for them – and for everybody!
Yes, the chicken curry I had last night in Ginza pretty much blew my mind. If that’s an example of Japanese cultural appropriation, I’m all for it.
I genuinely LOLd at this one, hilarious.
Ha!
literally LOL!
We should’ve thought of that one! 🙂
That article may have been annoying but it sure did spawn some lolzy comments!
There is a CBC radio show that pretends to be a news show and the things it reports on are only slightly weird so you have a hard time telling if they are for real. One episode was about Montreal requiring dogs to understand commands in English and French in dog parks. It took me a minute to realize it wasn’t serious because the interviews were pretty realistic.
That’s hilarious!
LOL again. Who knew this thread would be so much fun?
There was actually a young blind girl in our neighborhood a few years ago who was training her guide dog in both French and English. I think the dog had come from a francophone family so it understood the French better.
Asseyez-vous. Ne poopez (merder?) pas…
We’re definitely off our stride! 😀
This is really over the top. How did this person ever get such an article published in the first place? Were the great french chefs of the 19th century accused of cultural appropriation of spices from Asia? In every country I have visited, I think, I have found pizzerias. And in Lyon, one street has three tex-mex restaurants in a row. Yikes, my first country is being culturally appropriated by my second one. Whom should I sue?
Really laughable. Or sick…
Getting it published easy. All it takes is to set up a blog.
19th century? Ha, how about the 15th century, when the “Age of Discovery” had European ships bringing in valuable, culturally appropriated, spice from all around the world.
It’s time to expunge your pantry of the spoils white imperialism. You must rid yourself of black pepper, cinnamon and nutmeg, not to mention turmeric and saffron, and, well, pretty much *all* of your spices. You can keep your salt, maybe, if it isn’t exotic sea salt.
Bah! That’s my pink Himalayan sea salt in the bin then.
Spices in the West: It goes much further back in time than the 19th Century when Portugal and Spain plied the seas. Spices of the East were a valued luxury commodity. A few centuries back eastern spices were so fashionable they featured much more in European cuisine than they do now. Once the spices were more commonplace tastes changed. The chefs of French Royalty led a new style where a herbs and spices subtly complemented a food’s primary substrate flavor, in contrast to Indian cuisine where spices were used to construct the dominant flavor and deliberately used to mask the astringency or fleshiness of the primary ingredient.
Things are always in flux. The food in an Indian restaurant is usually North Indian and inflected with Mughal cooking styles. A small slice of Indians consume such food in their homes on a daily basis. Mughlai cuisine itself from Turkic speaking Mongols of Central Asia. Many dishes became richer and spicier over time. Mughals often looked up to Persian fashions. This also influenced Mughal cuisine, among other things. So even amongst the “Brownies” things were always in flux.
I’m not sure what to make of this bizarre dichotomy of brownies vs non-brownies. WTF. The whole cultural appropriation notion is downright ridiculous. It’s like the good subjects of cultural sensitivity and world cuisines got hijacked by a dingbat like Vani Hari. It was intolerable. Kuo ought to be strapped to a chair, then have Vogon poetry read to her.
Pizzerias in Asian countries – cultural invasion. Asian restaurants in Western countries – cultural appropriation. I guess it is how the logic goes.
Getting this published must have been quite easy. “Cultural appropriation” is a hot topic in some circles…
I am in full agreement with you Jerry on the first few points (well, all of them but the first few especially). Ms. Kuo needs to take a clue from Freud’s “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Sometimes (most of the time) we just eat foreign food for the taste. Not to fetishize it and not to truncate the culture down to its menu, but just because we want a good meal and that’s it. Not because we want to be perceived as daring or adventurous, but because we want to expand our palate for our own enjoyment and betterment.
As for the last point about food gentrification, I find that very recently the opposite has been true. Food trucks have exploded in popularity in my area, leading to a huge variety in the types of food available literally ‘on the street’, most of it of much higher quality in terms of both ingredients and preparation than ye olde hot dog stand of yore. Yes there are high-end Asian, Indian, Mexican etc. restaurants. There are also high-end steak places and I’m sure I could find a $20 peanut butter and jelly sandwich if you really pushed me to try. The fact that there exists a high end market for various foods has in no way eliminated the presence of good food from many cultures available at reasonable prices.
On further thought d and e strike me as particularly ironic. She basically encapsulates the recent far-left trends of ‘wanting liberal points for complaining’ and ‘loving the complaint, not the society the complaint is supposed to help.’
Another ironic aspect is that the end result of her advice — “stick to your own culture” — is one of the time-honored trends of far-RIGHT thinking. Don’t let that taco stand or Chinese restaurant take the place of good ol’ red-white-and-blue American food! Run them foreigners outta town!
Rather than run the ‘foreign’ restaurants out of town, I think she would want it to become culturally offensive/a social faux pax for white people (the ‘dominant culture’) to frequent that Chinese restaurant of your example. As one of the other posters pointed out, I wonder what the owners and operators of ethnic food restaurants would have to say about that.
Multiculturalism is a means to an end not an end. Humans naturally adopt elements from other cultures they come into contact with. This is because we are so much alike and the perceived differences between cultures are entirely based on geographic isolation not on actual differences in personality and tastes between cultural groups.
In short it’s a melting pot not a mosaic. Pushers of the mosaic are racist.
Tribalist at least. Humans are naturally very tribalistic, dividing the world into a “good” in-group, and “scary/hostile” out-group of everyone else. The mosaic vision reinforces this nasty aspect of human psychology, saying that what is most important is not the “human” circle (to use Singer’s imagery), but all of these little tribal circles. It overtly pits each little tribe, each “identity” against the other. It is “American liberal”, but it is starkly against what globally is called “liberalism”, which some call “Enlightenment values”.
Indeed, tribalism. Suppressing out-group xenophobia is near impossible but the good news is that we are fully capable of seeing ourselves as one giant in-group.
This is a reply both to Matt and Gluonspring–indeed, to all who have posted to this fascinating sub-thread! My preferred metaphor for U. S. diversity is the patch-work quilt, the making of which not only involves but requires patches from all the groups that make up our nation. Thus the quilt will probably never be seamed at its perimeters; yet it will be a whole that colorfully, creatively, imaginatively shows its parts.
As for tribalism in the U. S., it has been disastrous in terms of ‘many-into-one’ but, alas, necessary to the survival of some of the ‘tribes.’ Irish-Americans, for example. ‘No Irish need apply.’ Dirtiest, lowest-paying work when work could be found. Severe discrimination on the part of the dominant WASP culture. So, in defense, a turning inward–encouraged by the Roman Catholic church–to their rather ghetto-like neighborhoods, the Knights of Columbus, fetishization of the ‘Old Sod,’ etc., and worst of all the growth of a by-now deeply ingrained racism against blacks and Chinese (even lower on the food-chain but ready to compete with the Irish for those miserable jobs at miserable wages). What was done to them, they would do to those below. And they did.
Actually, as someone else has pointed out, it’s not a melting pot — an image from metallurgy, I think — but a stew — an image from what we are talking about — with a piece of potato here, a piece of meat over there, and a piece of carrot somewhere else. And all making something better than the sum of the parts.
Please excuse my optimism.
I think the melting pot works better and is equally optimistic. I think the stew is more analogous to the mosaic with separate parts in the same bowl. You can still see the division between the carrots and the potatoes. With humans cultures, the divisions disappear as the ingredients blend together. More like a batter than a stew.
We will all eventually be one colour and there will eventually be one global human culture with very minor regional flavours that have no connection to ethnicity or heritage. IMO
At least in a stew there is no way to pretend that the potatoes should be kept separate from the beef. That defeats the whole purpose of a stew. I can live with stew.
I’m not sure about your prediction of homogenization of culture. I do think it is likely that culture will decouple from ethnicity or region, but I am less sure that it will become homogenized. Take just American culture. Is it more or less homogenized since, say, 1960? Clearly less. Culture used to be either a local culture or a lowest-common-denominator mass culture (which was WASP culture). Now you have atheist groups, and furries, and transgender groups. There is a substantial steam punk sub-culture, and a hacker culture, a wikkan culture, and all sorts of gun and sports sub-cultures, etc. It’s not obvious to me what would reverse this Balkanization of expressed tastes and lifestyles that is enabled by 1) being allowed to express different preferences and 2) being able to find others who share your preferences. Now maybe all of these preferences might seem superficial compared to national or racial identity, and maybe they are less fraught with danger, but I think people from a wide variety of these groups are no more likely to mix than any current ethnic divide.
And usually people are honoured when you are interested in and want to try their food. I’ve never had anyone yell at me as a white devil for doing so and it is immediately something both of us can understand.
Her whole article seems hateful. None of my non white friends would agree with her or eat with her.
The clue is her remark that some friends made fun of her food. That has no doubt led to this whole diatribe. But it is too absurd for words. Like: “I’m Italian, so you aren’t allowed to eat pizza!”
Sadly, the Italians would have to make their pizza without tomatoes to get it past the Cultural Appropriations Police. The opposition to fusion is that bad an idea.
Yes and she mentions that more than once. I too suspect she is angry at mean white kids who mocked her lunches in school.
Some adults never seem to grok that if the kids had not mocked them for X, they would’ve mocked them for Y instead, because social dominance competition is just something most young humans engage in. Content is almost irrelevant; if there is nothing about you that stands out as unusual or mock-worthy, they’ll just make something up and mock you for that. I’m not condoning it – its often cruel and largely pointless – however a reasonable adult should be able to look back and understand that the behavior really wasn’t “about” the lunch box (or accent, or feature, or whatever), and so changing people’s attitudes towards lunch boxes isn’t going to eliminate that negative experience for anyone else.
This is the end result of decades of leftist indoctrination at US colleges. The moron writing that feminist blog didnt have any issues with the Vietnamese ‘appropriating’ French baguettes for Bahn Mi sandwiches, or Turks in Germany making “curry wurst” or some other delicious combination of ethnic confusion.
What fucking idiots. Dear liberals, this one falls squarely in your camp.
It is nonsense but it is harmless nonsense that we laugh off. Compare that to conservatives denying evolution, climate change, the efficacy of immunization,….
If I may: it’s gone far beyond harmless nonsense and is now being implemented into official policies, from a Yoga class in Canada being cancelled because of ‘cultural sensitivities’ to a 9/11 remembrance cancelled for the same reason to some crackpots getting to speak at the UN about online harassment.
It’s as dangerous and fucked up as the conservative push.
I agree that it’s starting to go beyond harmless. It’s definitely at the “needs pushback” stage.
its definitely not harmless. Its already spreading to on-campus leftist fascism. Check out the Smith college post from today.
Good one.
And I thought the regressive left couldn’t get any stupider.
Ms Kuo clearly has a major chip on her shoulder, and imo needs to either grow up a bit or seek some form of counselling.
I hope she doesn’t plan to ever get a paying job outside The Bubble, because this article will put prospective employers off forever.
If she has a chip on her shoulder, she must have misappropriated it from us Brits.
🙂
Or the Belgians or the French, one of which is supposedly the inventor of fries/chips. And they got potatoes from South America, so…
For a while there, our (US) fries supposedly came from “Freedom.”
I’m trying to forget that episode in US history.
All food dishes come from fusions over time and space, and much of what we think of as “traditional” for a given place isn’t even that old. Anyone who doesn’t realize this is completely ignorant of food history. It’s like trying to keep a language “pure”, an act that betrays a complete lack of understanding of where languages come from.
The same is true, also, of all other aspects of culture, from language, to dress, to customs, to holidays, to religion. What is Mexican culture that I can appropriate it? There was no such culture before the 1600’s when Spaniards came in and forced their culture on the Aztecs, and eventually what came out was neither Aztec nor Spanish but what we now call Mexican (the name Mexico is an Aztec name). Sure, the Spanish were the aggressors and it’s right to condemn their invasion and forced cultural conversion (even as it is right also to condemn the barbarity of the Aztec culture), but that doesn’t make subsequent generations of Mexicans guilty of some crime for liking the things they like just because some of those things happen to trace back to the Aztecs. Like chocolate, anyone? What are you, a genocidal apologist?
The list of worldwide foods that didn’t even exist before Europeans brought them back from the Americas is large: tomatoes, potatoes, corn, vanilla, chocolate, pumpkin, peanuts, pecan, squash, chili peppers, etc. So any dishes from anywhere that use these ingredients are appropriating from native Americans, are they not?
to add to your fantastic point, the Aztecs themselves ‘appropriated’ their cuisine and culture from tribes they conquered. They pushed out the Mixtec tribes from Tenochtitlan region merely 300 years or so before the arrival of Cortes.
As you said, language and cuisine is a never ending fusion of things. It can never be ‘pure’ or ‘authentic’.
Indeed, the very notion of cultural purity is as bizarre and offensive as that of racial purity. There’s one race, one culture: human. With as many themes as there are regions and variations as there are individuals, of course — but that’s what makes it so much fun.
b&
One of the guys who came out to the rig with me on Friday had some undeniably “authentic” “exotic” “indigenous” food on Thursday night.
The doctor took him off the drip today. It doesn’t look as if we’ll send him back to shore and to hospital tomorrow. But it hasn’t been a fun experience for him. Or the guy who empties the bucket.
Authenticity – you’re welcome to it.
The cultural appropriations nuts can go eat their hearts out. Next week I’m going to eat
menudo at a Mexican restaurant and smack my chops appropriately while I am doing it.
Has anyone yet come up with a neat phrase for this “I can take offence at more things than you” race?
Sort of offence-mongering crossed with the Gish gallop.
Offence-oneupmanship describes it pretty well, but it isn’t very mellifluous.
Yes, it seems many leftist humanities academics are engaged in a contest to “discover” societal ills that have shamefully gone unchallenged so far. I think they are trying to establish that they are unusually sensitive and perceptive (and therefore deserve recognition/jobs/etc), but as others have pointed out, their invented and not-thought-through “ill” often backfires by reinforcing real ills, like tribalism, etc.
I think it’s like how when your immune system has nothing to do, it attacks itself and gives you allergies. These liberals look for racists, imperialists and fascists and when they don’t find them, they turn on their fellow liberals.
Like the Birchers looking for a commie behind every bush.
Describing Ma, or the completely defenceless bean curds, as “Pock-Marked” is completely insensitive and inappropriate.
The “dofu” is the bean curds. “Pock-marked Ma” was the inventor in Chengdu, apparently scarred from smallpox.
I should have added a smiley face.
I suppose if you are going to be a true snob, you have to also be a food snob. Would it offend anyone to eat a peanut butter and jelly?
Yes, since peanuts originally come from South America, you horrible appropriator, you. Don’t know about jelly, but give me some time to Google a bit and I’ll find something to be offended by.
stooooopid!
Obviously copyrighting and patenting culinary tradition must not stop at country borders but continue into every kitchen of each family partaking in that culture. Recognition of authenticity must be applied to the last drop of Aunt Kanokwan’s Nam pla and not just to all Nam pla. Ditto to the mole sauce of her brother-in-law, Arturo. Urgent attention is required for the cuisine of Veracruz as it is a mix of of indigenous, Afro-Mexican and Spanish. The shame! Everyone in Veracruz, put down that spoonful of huachinango a la veracruzana right now!
I will riff off the astute stance of Kavin Senapathy’s, and conclude that
Rachel Kuo is misappropriating her own cultural cuisine.
http://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2015/11/05/activist-vandana-shiva-misappropriates-indian-culture-promoting-anti-gmo-agenda/
Stale cake, soaked in gelatine boiled out of bones after the mechanically-recovered meat has been mechanically recovered. With a small amount of flavouring which is unlikely to have ever been anywhere near the alleged fruit in it’s description. And capped with a curdles mixture of eggs and milk – Oh, I see where the journalism comes in – you milk the journalists for every penny they’re worth.
Sounds a delightful dessert. I’ll have the fruit bowl or the cheese board, I think. One man’s cheese is another mans rotten milk.
Fusion food is verboten huh? She better tell chef Roy Choi of the Kogi trucks to stop putting Korean bbq in tacos. Or is that somehow Ok?
What about TexMex? :-0
Hell, modern *burritos* are fusion food.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrito
Years ago I read something written by someone who had done a study on what second, third, and fourth generation Americans kept from their original countries of origin. It pretty much ended up being food, music, art, and similar matters of taste. It’s possible then that Kuo is also concerned about the loss of cultural identity as diverse people intermarry and blend into the wider American mainstream. Despite her tone of concern, I discern a wee bit of underlying racism here, the romantic Blood and Soil idea that different people are inherently different in essential nature. If you go against your ancestors and make choices as an individual, you “betray” tradition and weaken the blood.
I don’t know. At any rate, why stop at food? Why not include music? I have a lot of ‘world fusion’ stuff by groups like the Afro Celts — and what about all my Niyaz albums? Am I being imperialist too?
This could so easily be extended.
“It’s possible then that Kuo is also concerned about the loss of cultural identity …”
I think you give her too much credit. I see her as a third-rate mind with a second-rate education desperately trying to “me too” her way to some web traffic.
She is an excellent example of the sort of person who should be served up a heaping helping of Sam Harris’ conversational intolerance. Sensible people should laugh in her face and dismiss her from the room.
Exactly!
As I mentioned above, the US would probably have to change the names of most of its states.
And for that matter, anything that starts with “New” is inappropriate; sorry New Zealand, New Guinea, New South Wales, New Brunswick…is there an “Oldfoundland?”
The name Canada is a native word so I guess we have to rename it. Maybe call it cold tundra most of us live around the southern edge good beer place.
Not bad! But can you work in hockey?
Oh, wait, better look up who invented hockey first…
It gets worse. Lacrosse is our official sport & it is aboriginal in origin.
Who knew? Well, besides you…
I gnu
I wonder if it’s about cuisine at all. I don’t even think it is about culture. I suspect it is more about identity. How dare those outsiders eat my tribe’s special meals?
See also:
How dare those outsiders wear my tribe’s special clothes?
How dare those outsiders listen my tribe’s special genre of music?
How dare those outsiders use my tribe’s special slang?
As others have pointed out above, though, her tribe’s special foods include heavy amounts of tomatoes, peanuts, and chili peppers, all of which came from the Americas and were nonexistent in China until the 1500s.
I guess that I will start faxing my genealogy chart to my favorite restaurants when I want to make a reservation.
😀
Reading this makes me want to eat fugu in a dojo wearing a kimono.
I once saw a Chinese restaurant with an Irish name. A friend and I kept coming up with possible dishes. I still think mine won: moo goo guy Patrick.
I’m such an imperialist. Even my jokes are oppressive.
That would go nicely with a bowl of Shark Finn Soup.
A pub in the metro area near where I live was called “Chang O’Hara’s”. It closed ten years ago, but it did indeed serve Irish/Asian cuisine.
“That is not only not right, it is not even wrong.” (attributed to Wolfgang Pauli)
At 2., in proof of her wonderfulness and general non-cultural appropriativeness, Ms. Kuo says “I also love helping friends with restaurant recommendations and spending a long time on Yelp! trying to find goo options for a group to go.”
Yelp!, really? – have you ever looked on Yelp! at a restaurant you know and like? full of put-downs by the entitled who didn’t get enough attention. Give me a break!
Nonsense, accompanied by spelling and grammatical errors.
Perhaps countries can patent their culturally specific foods? Every time we prepare or enjoy their patented repast, use their proprietary spices, etc., we can pay a royalty that could go to supporting specific non-offensive cultural heritage societies within those countries.
Well many countries are trying an equivalent with protected geographic indicators as in ‘Parma’ ham etc
So soon we’ll see, “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Parma!” brand ham (whatever Parma ham is).
I think the EU beat you to it. I think you aren’t allowed to call sparkling wing “champagne” unless it’s from France and I think Gouda was going the same way. Aside: my Dutch friends bemoan the English pronunciation of their native cheese and I’ve replied that they can stop thanking Canadians for liberating them in WWII if they let us pronounce the name of their cheese anyway they want.
Which reminds me that my craving for DZ licorice shad yet to be satisfied.
“Licorice shad?” Diana, I think you’re taking this fusion business too far…
😉
Yeah, I saw that typo as it posted. It was from being excited thinking about licorice.
That’ll do it every time.
Well, ‘Champagne’ is a geographically delimited region east and a little north of Paris where the grapes are grown that constitute Champagne the sparkling wine. This wine tastes like no other of its genre (and many would say BETTER than any other). Even before the EU, French Champagne makers cried foul over the expropriation of the name by such impostors as Gallo (!) and Paul Masson in the U. S. (authoritative voice and image of Orson Welles: ‘We will sell no wine before its time. . . .’)
A small percentage of consumers of foreign products do fetishize (for lack of a better word) foreign culture, but it’s not the ubiquitous phenomenon that Ms. Kuo claims it is.
Kuo is thinking of folks like the Marsha Mason character in the Bollywood movie “Bride and Prejudice” (loosely based on Jane Austen) who is from Los Angeles says
“I’ve always thought about travelling to India but with all this yoga and Deepak Chopra right here in Los Angeles, there’s really no point”.
Yes, there are people like that, but it just doesn’t extend to all foreign food consumers.
When I spent a summer in Shanghai, China, on the 4th of July all the waitresses in my hotel restaurant dressed like cowboys complete with leather boots and gun holsters. Superficial cultural appropriation? Yes. Was I offended? Not at all.
I’m actually facing a similar dilemma. Should I spend thousands of dollars and go to India for a month (largely for the food), or less money and get much more food from the best Indian restaurants in my own city (which has a large Indian population)? But I don’t think I’d be exploitative either way…
Ma Po Tofu… yum.
I’m thinking the original Lao Sze Chuan in the Chinatown Square mall is pretty good.
Love to hear about other places I could go appropriate some Ma Po – (with or without pork)!
There’s a hint of a point here. I remember reading last year or the year before that the rising First-World popularity of quinoa was making it unaffordable to the poor farmers who produce most of it and to whom it is, or used to be, a staple crop. There’s apparently some disagreement about this, however, if Wikipedia is to be believed.
I had initial qualms about the mention of quinoa, too, remembering the stories (and not being bothered to check their veracity); but then she mentioned tofu and tempeh, both of which are made from soybeans, of which the US grows a lot; and decided that it was just more sloppy thinking on her part. Besides, the last bag of quinoa I bought came from Texas.
I agree with your stance on this, Jerry, but when I read the word “commercializing”, an analogy came to my mind. What about the appropriation of indigenous knowledge on medicinal plant by western companies? This is a somehow similar issue where, I guess, many people would agree that it is a criminal practice. From there, the mental leap to seeing ethnic food as cultural appropriating might not be that far anymore.
I don’t think anyone views the use of effective herbal medicines by people of foreign cultures as criminal. At least I hope not – everyone should have access to effective medicine, regardless of where it comes from. The issues here stem from denying the locals an appropriate cut of the profit and/or attempting to strip the area of value and take it elsewhere for corporate monopoly.
So to the analogy of food, it is not criminal to serve spaghetti or dim sum to people of all ethnicities. It would be criminal to blow up someone else’s dim sum restaurant so that your restaurant becomes the only one in town who sells it.
The entire magazine is like a parody. There is an unfortunately named article titled:
8 Tips for Trans Women of Color Who Are Considering Suicide.
I liked: “3 Exciting Ways Witchcraft and Feminism Intersect”.
SMH. Are we sure this whole mag isn’t a Poe?
Ms. Kuo needs to lighten up a bit and be a little more charitable to her fellows.
“Fellows” is sexist.
😉
When members of another culture adopt something that is Western, it is “Westernisation” and a sign of western dominance destroying their culture.
When Westerners adopt something from another culture it is “appropriation” and a sign of western dominance and destroying the other culture.
The entire concept is, to be quite frank about it, something that people who want to whine and be offended came up with.
And it is pretty racist.
It is a form of policing the borders in which certain things are taken as belonging to one race, certain things belonging to another, and always maintaining difference.
It is the ultimate fetishisation of the foreign, in that it aims to maintain the status of things being foreign at the expense of improving things for everyone.
Instead of embracing our common humanity it promotes the apartheid of the mind that is so beloved by modern liberals.
And the reason why I say apartheid is because it is the precise reasoning the Nationalists used to promote apartheid, it is what the word apartheid means.
This is a most excellent phrase, and captures both the essential idea and what is wrong with it in one quick go.
I was just drawing this post to the attention of some of my friends in Humanities when I realised that they were even worse themselves – they are language appropriators! And worse, some of them necrophiliac language appropriators!
The first time I had Asian Fusion food I had gone out to California to meet my Taiwanese American boyfriend’s family. (Yes, it was getting serious.) His trendy foodie brother recommended it.
The people I know who are most obsessed with whether or not a place is authentic are transplants suffering from homesickness.
I know everyone is talking about coddled kids at universities, but there’s something else going on here. I don’t know what despite most of my friends being left of center because I’m too distanced from that generation. It really borders on delusional – like a collective delusion.
It’s funny, because I went through an ethnic identity period when I was in my twenties. In the end, I just wanted to be an individual.
Culinary choices are mostly about politics, status signaling and class.
Blind testing consistently shows that people can’t distinguish their favorite drink or dish from others. Even expert wine tasters can’t tell white from red wines, if the white wine is colored red, let alone expensive wines from cheap ones. Many people can’t distinguish different types of meat. Highly spiced oriental foods are particularly indistinguishable.
Foodist ideology is inconsistent. A well done steak, drenched in Ketchup or other kinds of popular barbecue sauce is considered low class. Yet it is okay when other ethnicities drown their thoroughly boiled meat in sauce.
Why are restaurants themed? What are waiters for? Why are there mono-ethnic restaurants at all? Non of this can be explained with reference to taste.
Christian Lander mocked the foodism of hipsters and upper middle class whites on his Stuff White People Like blog years ago. (Yoga is also on his list, btw.) Ethnic food is indeed about signaling how well traveled, progressive and in tune with other cultures you are and about bragging that your neighborhood is more diverse than somebody else’s.
These observations aren’t new, but were largely shrugged off, because they came from reactionaries and other out-groups. The cultural appropriation critique however comes from within the same milieu and challenges it on its own political terms.
This will be interesting to watch.
Bullshit. Citations needed.
Red wine vs. white wine experiment:
http://www.daysyn.com/Morrot.pdf
It’s about food and flavours that I love. Period.
Did you read it? The study demonstrated that, when smelling white wine colored red, students in a wine tasting program used words normally associated with red wines to describe the odor. They did not taste the wine, and they were not engaged in an a:b:x testing to distinguish one from the other.
Please elucidate the relationship between this study and your claims.
The general – but not complete – failure of wine tasters is pretty well known and documented. Here is one article on it but I’m sure you can find others if you look. Simply changing the (perceived) price on a bottle changes how people think it tastes, with more expensive wine tasting better to most people.
I’m not sure about the other claims and I doubt someone choosing to eat Chinese or Indian or whatever is always about signaling. The US is a very diverse place and most of us like to diversify our eating if not a lot, then at least occasionally. Nothing sinister is needed to explain the draw of new restaurants/cuisines, because the US is typically a faddish, ‘culture of the new’ sort of place to begin with.
I live in a middle-sized county town in the UK, and when I go out to eat I can choose between French, Italian, Spanish, Thai, Portuguese, Chinese, Indian (really Bangladeshi), Nepalese, US, Argentinian and English cuisine.
None has so far refused to accept my custom on the grounds that I might be ‘appropriating their culture’.
I agree with Ken Phelps. Most whites can be distinguished from most reds simply by aroma. The sense of smell is well understood to be more sensitive–and a necessary contributor to–the sense of taste.
“This will be interesting to watch.”
No, it won’t. It’ll be just as boring and pointless as the first time around.
I sometimes visit a Oaxacan restaurant here in Seattle. I don’t go because it’s a way to show how well traveled I am (I’ve never been to Oaxaca) or how progressive I am or how in tune with Oaxacan culture I am and I don’t give a fat rat’s posterior how diverse the neighborhood is; I don’t live in it. I go there sometimes because I love their moles.
How do they cook the moles? And where do they get them from?
Utter and complete bullshit. A sweet and sour tastes quite different to a korma, which tastes quite different to a peri peri dish, which tastes extremely different to a barbecue steak.
Wine is pretty much all fermented grape juice, the taste will always be basically that of fermented grape juice.
You cannot extend that to different foods that have completely different ingredients.
I think you go too far. Yes, I’m sure oenophiles can’t always tell the difference between two different reds, but, say, Riesling and Pinot Noir? Come on. That’s like saying root beer tastes the same as 7up.
But I agree that for many people, what they decide to “like” is a matter of signaling.
When we were in Paris a few years ago we ate at Dans Le Noir, a restaurant in which you eat in absolute darkess, served by blind wait staff.
It was damn near impossible to tell what I was eating. I could tell vegetable from meat through textural clues, but I couldn’t identify the vegetable. I knew it was chicken I was eating, but if you told me it was pork I likely would have believed you.
It left me amazed at the extent to which your enjoyment of food is contingent on several senses working in conjunction.
Oh, so you were appropriating blind culture, eh? Check your visual privilege!
“It left me amazed at the extent to which your enjoyment of food is contingent on several senses working in conjunction.”
Entirely true, but utterly unrelated to the OP’s claim that food choices are “…mostly about politics, status signaling and class.” The reality that our experience of food involves all of our senses, which the referenced tests demonstrate (and which has, in part, a physiologic basis), has no relation at all to the claim quoted above. That is pure political posturing or projection.
Yes, the mostly is where OP went off the rails. There is no doubt that a lot of food choices are about signaling, etc. At least I don’t doubt it, as I’m frequently on the receiving end of the derision of food snobs. The tip-off is the degree of attention they pay to what other people at the table (me) order… harassing you for your “low” choices, that makes it clear that they are motivated by something other than satisfying their own pallet. I think this is more of a problem in middle and upper class and highly educated circles, because when I eat with poorer people they don’t tend to give a damn what I order.
Still, though these phenomena are real, it isn’t credible that they are the driver of most food choices. The average Texan going to their favorite Mexican restaurant for some enchiladas is responding to a craving for cheese, cumin, chili, and lots of grease, not to the social status it conveys. Most such people have eaten this food since childhood too, so it’s as much their own culture as anything. The Mexican decor, if it does anything for them, is more of a Pavlovian positive association with the food than any kind of reflection, good or bad, on the underlying culture.
A lot of average Texans are Mexicans.
That too. A LOT.
I have friends in Chicago I visit occasionally. Where is this chinese restaurant with the pock-marked ma’s bean curd? Bean curd can be delicious.
and Racist if you don’t, eh?
(for non-Canadians, that particular form of “eh” is the “am I right or what” inflection)
Did anyone else point out that Ms Kuo appropriated the English language for her diatribe?
As long she doesn’t say it Russian. Or German. Or especially Broken English. Ah Rachel, why’d ya do what ya did?
You have not experienced Kuo until you have read her in the original Klingon 🙂
There is an old Vulcan proverb – only Kuo can appropriate.
🙂
Let’s reduce this to what it’s really about: When she was young Kuo was tormented by mean contemporaries who “made fun of her food”. Now she has her revenge: no one who shares their skin-tone is allowed to eat it.
Did I miss anything?
My parents are Dutch Indonesian, and when I was a kid my mom would make me chocolate sprinkle sandwiches for lunch sometimes. (It’s a Dutch thing). Kids made fun of me, said I was eating ant sandwiches, which when you’re a kid can hurt. But at the same time I was eating chocolate sandwiches, which when you’re a kid, is kind of awesome.
Hagelslag! That’s good stuff. My dad had a lot of Dutch friends who came to Canada after the war so I learned about all those cuisines. I share the Dutch sweet tooth. I also like the honey cakes, pickled herring (I once took a whole jar of pickled herring to my Dutch uncle in California from Ontario Canada in my carry one – yuck imagine in burst?!) and of course DZ licorice. My mom also used to give me a chocolate letter (my first initial) for Xmas, which is a Dutch tradition.
I guess I’m still allowed to like those things because the Dutch are also white and white on white appropriation is ok.
Cultural appropriation!
Nah, just kidding. I love to see foreigners enjoying Dutch food.
Mmm…stroopwafels. /drool
I thought this whole thing was becoming self-parody with the yoga being “cultural appropriation”…
Trade and the exchange of culture is the cornerstone of civilisation, and has been for thousands of years. What does anyone think in 2015CE that what we need is rules on how to do that appropriately?!
Rachel (a name appropriated from Jewish culture) Kuo has so much time on her hands that she has to invent new offences to keep her SJW-ism alive. This is the height of narcissistic stupidity, to put it nicely. Pass the kimchi, please.
Did you give her rantings more attention than they deserve? I’d say she should be roundly ignored.
Authentic Mexican? Well, I’m cooking my way through Cocina Familiar en los Estados de Mexico, a 32 volume cookbook published in Mexico by Mexicans and sold in Mexico to Mexicans. The recipes it contains were submitted to a nationwide recipe competition by Mexicans, have all been prepared in Mexico by Mexicans and eaten there by (noooo!) Mexicans. Its even in Spanish. Can’t get any more authentic than that, can we?
Of course, one of the recipes, Tarta de nuez, on p. 49 of the Coahuila volume, is a very Betty Crocker pecan pie that contains maple syrup. The truth is that Mexican cuisine is so syncrectic that it contains nearly everything people eat nearly anywhere in the world.
Authentic? You have to be crazy to argue about authenticity.
Appropriation? You have to be crazier.
Wow! 32 volumes! You’re even more of a cookbook nut than I am, and I’m pretty bad:-) Btw, what time’s dinner?
I’m currently cooking my way through Ottolenghi’s 4 cookbooks, but am making a basically made-up Indian-style okra tonight. Oh, the horror for a Norwegian-English-Italian-Swiss California native living in Canuckistan🐸
Yeah, earlier this year you were raving about Ottolenghi’s Plenty More and I picked it up that day on Amazon. Every dish I’ve made has been utterly delicious- Ottolenghi is a genius. The zucchini “Baba Ghanoush” and curry-raosted root vegetables with lime leaves are 2 exceptional stand-outs, but again, all that I’ve tried are memorable and inspired. Oh yeah, I have to add the celery salad with feta and soft-boiled egg and the raw beet and herb salad.
I can’t recommend this cookbook enough, and I’ve been meaning to thank you for the tip. So THANKS Merilee! Yet another way WEIT has enhanced my life. 🙂
You’re very welcome, Mark! And the dishes you mention I haven’t even gotten to yet. I’ve made about 10 other recipes, all deelish. Just got his latest, Nopi ( named after his restaurant North of Piccadilly) and it has some Indonesian influence ( Israeli, Palestinian, Indonesian!!! – what a fusion!). Haven’t made anything from it yet. ( my cookbook shelves are full and the extras are piled about 3′ high on the kitchen “peninsula”. It’s a good thing my bf likes to eat anpdventurously and doesn’t mind doing dishes,)
We just ate, sorry. Ternera al ajo, Morelos, p. 40; Zanahorias empanizadas, Quintana Roo, p. 23; and Ensalada dde manzana, piña, y papas, Jalisco, p. 27. All as authentic as can be, all ingredients readily available, no compromises needed. All delicious. And none likely to appear on a menu in the US.
The set as I’ve translated it has 2,769 recipes, including twenty some that were dropped between the first and second editions. There are duplicates, I’d estimate that the set has between 2,400 and 2,500 unique recipes. Some can’t be prepared in the US because they use ingredients that aren’t available here and for which no good substitutes exist. Toritos (Umbonia reclivata, a treehopper), for example.
Yum!! ( I could probably live without the tree hoppers…)
Wow…it’s bizarre knowing that there are people out there who actually believe this shit to the point of spending time to write and publish it. How embarrassing for her.
One of my favorite cook books is The Slanted Door by Charles Phan. He calls his food “modern Vietnamese cuisine”. And there is a lot of fusion and he (rightly so imo) calls it modern. Some of the non-Vietnamese ingredients include chayote squash, ketchup, marinara sauce, jicama, corn, shishito peppers, and smoked bacon. He’s from Vietnam and was enriched by the cuisine of California esp. San Francisco where he emigrated to. It is genius, not appropriation, and many chefs from around the world have done this, augmenting their own cuisines with ingredients found in their new culture. To ridicule this (and it’s been happening since the beginning of civilization) is beyond naive.
I was reminded of The Slanted Door because I’m actually cooking from it for tonight’s meal: Stir-fry squid with pineapple and jalapenos, and Dungeness crab with cellophane noodles. Mmmmmm, appropriation tastes good.
And get all angry and worked up over it. Were are so many things in the world to be pissed off about and this is what they choose?
Damn! Another cookbook must have. I’ve heard that the restaurant is fantastic.
So what happens to the local Thai restaurants, for example, in a city with few Thai people? Is no white or black person an appropriate customer of such a restaurant? If so, the Thai restaurants won’t last long.
My tiny Canadian city is like 95% white, perhaps even more.
We have a Chinese place and an Indian place. Perhaps we should stop appropriating their culture then they can go out of business. No doubt they will be grateful and touched by our cultural sensitivity.
It is a ridiculous article full of ridiculous admonitions, but I think she did make one good point. I think there are people who use the consumption of what they perceive as exotic foods or the adoption of exotic practices as an easy way to signal savviness or sophistication, without actually having to do the work necessary to become savvy or sophisticated. Many Hollywood denizens would go in this category.
Good point. It’s like name-dropping only with food, countries, etc.
I got the feeling it was no longer cool to use chopsticks, though. Whew!
What about wearing chopsticks in your hair? I’ll bet that’s even worse.
‘Nother good point!
When I used to go to the SF Opera on the cheap (usually standing in the back) in the late 60s and early 70s, the main usher was a real (Caucasian) battleaxe of a certain age, with a huge shelf of a bosom and her dyed black hair in a tight bun with two chopsticks stuck in the back. An image I’ll never forget. She wasn’t as forbidding as she looked. Not sure if she was going for the Suzy Wong look only 4X bigger and older.
Are we, perhaps, “of a certain age” ourselves, now?
(sob!)
For sure, but I try to avoid rocking my inner battleaxe and always keep the chopsticks out of my hair🙀
😀
A timely piece on the BBC website about an American-style Chinese restaurant in Shanghai: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34877507
I wonder how she’d be with Conflict Kitchen, basically on the U Pittsburgh campus.
What a concept!
I think she can probably go ahead and stick a fork in it.
+1
Someone loosen this woman up with a nice plate of hagus!
Talk about an ethnocentric view point. In many cultures, white people (who made fun of her food when she was a child, thus scarring her psychologically) are the minority or hardly figure at all. Is it cultural appropriation of they eat our white people food say in China? What does she think of the videos of Koreans giggling about trying American candy – is that bad too or is it okay because white people are assholes who made fun of her food when she was a kid?
If I’m in NZ can I got to a hangi or are pakeha not allowed?
“…a nice plate of hagus”
Is this some new exotic food unknown to Google, or are you referring to my much-maligned national dish (which, as it happens, I’m having for dinner tonight)?
At least it seldom gets appropriated, although I do a version using Italian mixed herbs and tinned tomatoes.
I’m Colombian, and actually a bit younger than Ms. Kuo, and I find this sort of thing ridiculous. Just about every type of food has some borrowing of elements from every other type, and to split it up into “pure” foods and un-PC fusion foods is plain foolish. Italian food uses tomatoes, a plant from the Caribbean, German food uses potatoes, which originated in the Andes, and even Colombian food has stuff like kibbe, which is taken directly from Lebanon (brought to Barranquilla, my mother’c hometown, by Lebanese immigrants in the mid 20th century). Cultural appropriation has always happened, and it has given rise to most of the cultural diversity we see today. It has always happen, it will always happen, and those who oppose it tend to be either ignorant, or desperate for an issue to be morally righteous at.
I think this whole article was a reaction to some bad sushi.
LOL!
Other than some of the things I’ve heard recently from various candidates for our Office of the President, that’s one of the dumbest rants I’ve heard in a long time. Jeez, I made some steak and Yorkshire Pudding the other night, and put fried jalapeño peppers on the steak because I like hot peppers — and I didn’t once think about either Great Britain or Mexico. And I agree with Daniel Villar above. I (almost) never met a food I didn’t like — I’m very glad the world is interconnected enough today that I’m not restricted to the foods I grew up with.
Can you Americans please culturally re-appropriate your MacDonalds, Kentucky fried and other junk food outlets?
Excellent. But these are the first and great ambassadors of US culture. That and pop music.
I’m pretty sure that all these people commenting on a blog about food would also be inappropriate in this person’s eyes. I hope I never have to endure eating dinner with her.
I seem to recall reading that the words “foreign” and especially “foreigner” were no longer PC. I forget the substitutes, though. Differently-nationed?
“The righteous oppressed”, perhaps?
No doubt. 🙄
You know, every so often you just have to say grow the fuck up and move on.
This’ll take her mind off it
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CUkDrlUWoAAbous.jpg:large
Restricting the food that goes in my tummy because someone claims its offensive? My kitchen must be the den of hedonism. Tonight I dine on Mexican-Italian-Chinese-American with French wine and Scotch. May all the liberal fanatics bugger off.
There is something of a legitimate concern about places turning to export-crops rather than doing sustenance agriculture, and perhaps about shipping’s environmental costs.
But cultural concerns? What?? It seems that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” applies here.
Interesting comments in response to a food Nazi. All cuisine is fusion from cultural influences inherited by the family in the places they’ve lived. My genetic background includes English, Irish, Dutch, Welsh, French, German and Danish. In the good ol’ USA, my ancestors moved from the northeast to the Carolinas, Tennessee, Missouri, Oregon and California. Mom’s main cookery was heavily southern influenced (Fried Okra, Fried Cabbage, Fried Apples, Chicken Fried Steak, Chicken and Dumplings, etc.), but also she collected recipes from all over that were wonderfully tasty. I’ve continued the tradition of collecting recipes from all over and have an extensive cookbook collection as others on this site have. As a result, I have great recipes for such foods as Armenian Stuffed Grape Leaves, Austro-Hungarian Stew, Greek Baklava, homemade Sauerkraut, Russian Pelmeni, Mexican Flan, etc. Thanks go to all my family, friends, co-workers and others who’ve shared their delicious recipes with me.
As an southeast asian guy, am I allowed to eat chinese cuisine? Or am I appropriating the culture of the Children of Han? How about sushi? Or hamburgers, pizza, and prime rib steak?
This is one of the reasons I am slowly abandoning liberalism, its unreflective political correctness. It is the kooks in our side that is pushing me to the center.
Oh, don’t do that! Remain true to your values, even if those who have historically shared them are now abandoning them. And I doubt you’ll find much in common with those halfway to Republicanism, which is where the center is.
Right now liberalism is in disarray. Some sort of fracturing is imminent, and it’s pretty much guaranteed that one splinter will be true to the roots. It might well be a minority, but all the more reason to stay with it.
b&
“Oh, don’t do that! Remain true to your values, even if those who have historically shared them are now abandoning them.” That’s pretty much how a lot of liberal republicans feel.
“…one splinter will be true to the roots.” Or at least really, really believe that it is, and call all the other splinters names.
I suppose it will only be a matter of time before marrying or dating a person of a different race will be considered cultural appropriation.
That does it. From now on, I’m making cultural appropriation one of the most important priorities in my life. Look out, culture — I’m coming to appropriate you!
b&
I taught in a small private high school with a student population that was 99.5% white in a midwestern town that was experiencing turmoil over attempts to enact city ordinances that discriminated against undocumented workers (and they eventually succeeded in passing those laws). My students had been taught by their parents that Mexicans were evil, disgusting lawbreakers. One day a student announced in my classroom that “nothing good ever came from Mexico–people or otherwise”. I said, “Really? Do you like tortillas or salsa or any other Mexican food?”. A discussion of the impact of Mexican food and culture on the U.S. followed and several kids began to look at the issues in a new way. Food can be a powerful connection for cultures.
So I brought this up on a progressive blog, and was told this in response:
And, by the way, if you’re coming from a position of privilege on the issues at stake? Your opinions are pretty much worth shit when they oppose people who are not privileged.
Yep.
So all you white people, and PCC, you are wrong to even have an opinion on this.
Terrible bad bad people.
!!!!!
Of course, telling the evil white man to shut up is not oppression.
It would seem Richard Carrier is not a fan:
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2015/11/23/now-eating-ethnic-food-is-cultural-appropriation/
The irony is that, despite your quoting Kuo’s passages in obvious formatting and responding to them directly and on point, *Carrier* accuses *you* of “failing sixth grade reading comprehension.” Stunning.
He also, in calling *you* a bigot, repeatedly attacks *your* whiteness, maleness, “white fragility”, cowardice, etc., instead of just sticking to the logic of your argument, as you did to Kuo. Again, the irony is stunning.
Everything you’ve written about Kuo’s article was based on a thorough, honest reading of its content and amounts to fair appraisal and rejection of its inanity.
Social Justice, man…it’s tearing the atheist community apart.
P.S.: sorry if this message is slightly off-topic, but, given the obvious insanity of Kuo’s article, I thought it worth drawing attention to the sad state of the atheist movement today.
I would have posted this on Carrier’s page, but I hear he censors posts (correct me if if I’m mistaken plz), making honest/fair at dialogue impossible and therefore pointless to even attempt.
If Carrier’s gonna sneer so witheringly, he should learn how not to spell it “snear”.
It’s a typical FTB SJW rant full of vitriol and ad hominem attacks. It’s a pity: Carrier seems like quite a bright chap, but when he goes off on one, this kind of crap pours out of his pen/mouth/keyboard.
I read Rachel Kuo’s piece after PCC post, and thought it was pretty daft, or else she’s got some pretty shitty friends.
I too considered commenting on his Carrier’s blog but decided it wasn’t worth the effort.
“‘Free’ Thought Blogs”!
Where comments get censored and dissenters get banned! Hooray for ‘free’ thought!
Their site is a sinking ship.
sorry, wrong link!
I meant, this one: http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/9036
It’s not your culture being appropriated, so why does your opinion matter?
Oh, I don’t know, because we don’t take ideas at face value just because an oppressed person is behind them?
But but, if someone is oppressed, they are automatically correct, and we must listen and obey. No room for critical through. None. Ideas, if they come from oppressed persons,cannot be examined.
And what if someone else from the oppressed culture disagrees, and says that you aren’t oppressing them by noshing on their noms? What then? Which oppressed person is right????
And how would a Chinese or Japanese person feel if we walked up to them and told them that we were oppressing them by enjoying their food in the wrong way because oppression only happens if the dominant culture appropriates from the oppressed? Don’t you think they’d be insulted?
Cindy, I imagine this might give KKK members an idea: walk up to a Chinese person, tell him/her: “Yesterday I ate some Chinese food, and I enjoyed it. AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT!” Then laugh maniacally, and walk away!