What’s the Deal with Food Cultural Appropriation?
Of all online debates on cultural appropriation the topic of food is probably the most contentious. For one, food culture and recipes are not exclusively held intellectual property and “ownership” is both broad and vague: do you only have the rights to cook and eat gyoza because your grandma taught you? Or could you have lived in China for one summer and came back to share your new found passion for xiao long bao? As well, a lot of Asian foods like egg tarts can be understood as a process of transculturation, in which so many elements of multiple cultures have been mixed together that identification to a single originating culture isn’t really possible. Making it even tougher to determine where cultural appropriation starts and ends.
Anyways, as long as it's delicious, good food is good food and good food will be loved anywhere, right!… Except, that isn’t quite the issue. Food culture is tasty, fun, and important, but for Asian immigrants, it is also an important livelihood and one of the primary ways that newcomers make money and find a place in North American cities (Ray, 2014). As such, cultural appropriation becomes a more important discussion when a cuisine is monetized and non-Asian restaurateurs are receiving disproportionate benefits.
Examples of food cultural appropriation
In 2016, Bon Appétit, a popular food magazine uploaded a video titled "PSA: This is How You Should be Eating Pho” (now removed) in which they announced that “pho was the new ramen”. In response, tons of articles were released, pointing out two major appropriation problems:
1) That calling “pho the new ramen” and framing a food that always existed as a trend trivialized the dish and its long history in Vietnam. This act of claiming to “discover” a food is informally known as “Columbusing”- drawing on connections to Christopher Columbus’ notion that he had discovered a nation when it had already been inhabited by Indigenous people.
Food is one of the most important ways we express our identity and culture. And to conclude that an Asian dish is a “trend” especially affects the many Asian-Americans who have grown up with shame for their ethnic lunches only to see them embraced by white chefs looking for the next big thing.
2) Inviting a white chef to speak as an authoritative figure on pho exacerbated the issue, as pho has always been a down to earth and affordable food mostly prepared by Chinese-Vietnamese cooks and writers argued that a chef from within the culture could have spoken instead (Nguyen, 2016).
Who Benefits and Loses?
A year later, two white chefs opened a burrito truck in Portland after travelling to Mexico and “pick[ing] the brains of every tortilla lady there in the worst broken Spanish ever” for recipe ideas, sparking a new discussion about food cultural appropriation. Here, there is a clearer social dynamic of exploitation as the chefs never credited nor compensated the Mexican tortilla makers for their recipes. This incident is just one example of a greater relationship between white American-born restauranteurs who profit off of ethnic cuisines that immigrants have long been making a living through. While American-born chefs are much more likely to have connections to investors, media attention, and access to loans to start a restaurant, Kim (2017) explains that her Asian immigrant parents had to “scrape together enough cash over decades or borrow from family, religious or ethnic networks to buy a small business” (Godoy & Chow, 2016). Furthermore, expectations that ethnic foods should be sold for cheaper further places them at a disadvantage (Kim, 2017). Food cultural appropriation thus occurs through the intersections of white privilege, giving access to white American-born chefs to succeed in the food industry, and an ongoing history of discrimination of Asian-Americans and migrants of colour.
THE VERDICT… Transculturation of recipes and flavours is fine but the real problem is when you monetize that food by starting a business, writing cookbooks and so on. We placed some examples like pho/sushi burritos higher on the amusing and superficial dimensions as they mostly only draw upon the surface of the culture. However, more exploitative examples such as the white Portland food truck benefit through the historical conditions and social dynamics that have disadvantaged migrants of colour in North America.