Noodles and Swastikas: The thorny subject of cultural appropriation in the modern age
social justice activists often misuse the term but there are some examples of actual cultural appropriation out there
I’ve long been critical of people who bandy about the term “cultural appropriation” as though it’s some horrible atrocity that white people engage in that robs non-white people of their food, art and customs. It’s a patronizing and impractical stance that does little beyond puffing up the accusers and making the world that much less pleasant in the process.'
I often turn to this story of two Portland women who were forced to shut down their burrito cart after they revealed they’d learned how to make tortillas from Mexican tortilla ladies in Puerto Nuevo, Mexico. Liz “LC” Connelly and Kali Wilgus took a trip south to learn how to make better Mexican food—a pretty reasonable idea for people who want to start a burrito cart.
“I picked the brains of every tortilla lady there in the worst broken Spanish ever, and they showed me a little of what they did,” Connelly told the Willamette Week. “They told us the basic ingredients, and we saw them moving and stretching the dough similar to how pizza makers do before rolling it out with rolling pins.”
Not everyone saw this as a pragmatic approach to learning how to cook. Mic.com writer Jamilah King decided that this was tantamount to “stealing recipes from Mexico to start a Portland business.”
The article sparked outrage, lots of angry reviews on Yelp, and the cart shut down as quick as it had popped up.
This is, quite frankly, preposterous. Gustavo Arellano wrote at the time:
What these culture warriors who proclaim to defend Mexicans don't realize is that we're talking about the food industry, one of the most rapacious businesses ever created. It's the human condition at its most Darwinian, where everyone rips everyone off. The only limit to an entrepreneur's chicanery isn't resources, race or class status, but how fast can you rip someone off, how smart you can be to spot trends years before anyone else, and how much money you can make before you have to rip off another idea again.
And no one rips off food like Mexicans.
The Mexican restaurant world is a delicious defense of cultural appropriation—that's what the culinary manifestation of mestizaje is, ain't it? The Spaniards didn't know how to make corn tortillas in the North, so they decided to make them from flour. Mexicans didn't care much for Spanish dessert breads, so we ripped off most pan dulces from the French (not to mention waltzes and mariachi). We didn't care much for wine, so we embraced the beers that German, Czech and Polish immigrants brought to Mexico. And what is al pastor if not Mexicans taking shawarma from the Lebanese, adding pork and making it something as quintessentially Mexican as a corrupt PRI?
Don't cry for ripped-off Mexican chefs—they're too busy ripping each other off.
[…]
To suggest—as SJWs always do—that Mexicans and other minority entrepreneurs can't possibly engage in cultural appropriation because they're people of color, and that we're always the victims, is ignorant and patronizing and robs us of agency. We're no one's victims, and who says we can't beat the wasichu at their game?
There’s more to that post and you should read the whole thing—it even details the origin of Taco Bell—but this is a great point in and of itself. The food business is all about stealing, and outside of that people just like variety. It is, as they say, the spice of life. We’re drawn toward other cultures because they enrich the human experience.
I bring all this up after reading Freddie’s post on the “inevitability” of cultural appropriation. His post was sparked by the below tweet that smacks very much of the Mic article or any other countless absurd accusations of cultural appropriation:
Perhaps the “white woman” knew a great deal about noodles and dumplings and thought it would be cool to share that with others? Also, just imagine a white person tweeting this about an Asian woman who wrote a cookbook about cheeseburgers or something.
One of my favorite cookbooks that we own is Marcus Off Duty by Marcus Samuellson. One reason this book and its recipes appeal to me so much is because of Samuellson’s diverse background—half-Ethiopian, half-Swedish, raised largely in Europe but living now in New York City, Samuelsson has such a wide array of cultural influences to draw from it really makes his recipes interesting (and tasty). We should embrace a mix of cultures, the constant blurring of the lines, and celebrate that variety—not shame people into submission because they want to write a cookbook about noodles and dumplings.
Rosyln Talusan has now protected her Twitter account after presumably a great deal of backlash (which she has apparently described as harassment from “Nazis” ignoring the fact that her original tweet almost certainly led to some harassment of the cookbook author as well).
It is, in fact, quite racist to suggest that we limit ourselves to only the foods of our racial/cultural ancestry. Beyond the glaring racism of such a claim, it’s also a pretty terrifying thought experiment: Imagine if we lived in a world where we could only prepare food from our own culture. What does that even mean anymore?
Writes Freddie:
No one knows what cultural growth without cultural exchange looks like. There is no such thing as an originator of noodles and dumplings and no version of noodles and dumplings that has not been contaminated by the influence of “outside cultures,” even if we were to pretend that there was any such coherent thing as inside or outside.
This mutual cultural enrichment isn’t a violation of anyone’s sovereignty, but the best, most optimistic element of living in a multiracial and multicultural society. In an era where racial pessimism is enforced from above by those who profit from it, the continuing day-by-day reality of mutually-beneficial cultural exchange and artistic influence is our most consistent and universally beneficial symbol of the possibilities of radically diverse community. There are some woke arguments I take seriously and some aspects of that political tradition that have value. “Cultural appropriation” is not among them.
My grandpa rented out his basement for years and for a long time he rented to some Chinese people. They taught him how to cook Chinese food. My grandpa’s Chinese food was more authentic than most of the deeply Americanized Chinese restaurants I’ve ever been to. Had he opened a Chinese restaurant it would have been absolutely incredible, and far less Americanized than most. That’s not cultural appropriation, that’s the free and peaceful and beautiful exchange of culture that takes place on a daily basis across the globe. Everything is influenced by everything else, as it should be.
I would rather live in a world where Chinese renters taught their white landlord how to cook Chinese food, and black people could run Italian restaurants, where we share and spread our music and art and other customs freely than one in which each culture guards its every custom jealously. (Note: I’m not against cultures having their holy shrines and sacred places, but this is different than food or music; being respectful of other cultures is not mutually exclusive with sharing those cultures).
Racists and nativists lament the tides of immigrants that have flooded into Western cities like London or Paris but I’ve been to both those cities and I can only imagine how much less flavorful they’d be without the influence of Pakistani, Indian and other Asian cultures. The best food I ate in Paris was at a Thai place; in London, at an Indian restaurant. Is there much of a difference between accusations of "cultural appropriation" and calls to keep immigrants out? Both are attempts at some form of warped cultural “purity.” “This is our culture’s food, you can’t make it” isn’t all that different from “This is my culture’s home, you can’t live here.” Both seek to create dividing lines between people and both do so because of some twisted notion of preventing “harm.”
What Actual Cultural Appropriation Looks Like
But I won’t go so far as to say that cultural appropriation can’t ever be bad or shouldn’t ever be critiqued. It’s just extremely rare, and typically doesn’t have to do with food or art. At the top of this post is a picture of a swastika. The swastika is an ancient Sanskrit symbol that roughly translates to “well-being.” It was used by Hindus, Buddhists and Jains for thousands of years.
In the early 20th century, the symbol became popularized by travelers to the East who found its shape and positive message appealing. Sort of like the peace symbol today. I still recall opening an old copy of a Rudyard Kipling book to find the Swastika printed all over the inside of both covers. It was a bit of a shock, until I remembered its origin. Companies like Coca-Cola used it in their marketing. The Girls’ Club of America had a magazine called Swastika at one point. This was all fine, a positive re-using of a positive symbol that did nothing to make that symbol any less in India.
Hitler, of course, has all but ruined it. He took the swastika and transformed it into a symbol of the Third Reich and Nazism, forever transforming it from an ancient symbol for well-being into one of hate. To me, this is the clearest example of actual cultural appropriation that I can imagine. Unlike learning how to make tortillas or Chinese food, the appropriation of the swastika quite literally ruined it for the entire world.
Similarly, I come from Viking stock. My grandmother was Norwegian and came here as a little girl. She wasn’t allowed to go to school until she learned English. I have Norse heritage that’s fairly recent and, as readers know, I identify rather closely with Vikings and Viking culture even if I’m several steps removed from all that. It has occurred to me in the past that I wouldn’t mind getting some Norse runes tattooed onto my skin.
The only problem? Cops are trained to look for Norse runes and symbols. They are now markers of white supremacist gangs. Following in their ludicrous hero’s footsteps, modern-day neo-Nazis have stolen Norse heritage and transformed it into symbols of hatred and white supremacy. This, again, is cultural appropriation in the strictest sense—stealing from one culture to transform its symbols into something wholly foreign in every imaginable way. Taking something good, something holy even, and making it evil.
Noodles and dumplings are for everyone. They’re delicious. The descendants of Vikings are just as entitled to eating and cooking noodles and dumplings as the descendants of the Samurai are entitled to eating or preparing lefsa or pizza or cheeseburgers. Have all these social justice lunatics forgotten about “fusion” food?
On The Matter Of Piñatas
I’ll end with a funny story.
A friend of mine recently told me a story about his book store. Employees there, caught up in all this woke furor that young people are caught up in lately, demanded that the store stop selling miniature piñatas because they were examples of cultural appropriation.
Rather than getting in a big fight with the employees, the bookshop owners acquiesced, pulling the piñatas from the shelves. But my friend did a little digging and discovered that the piñata was actually discovered around 700 years ago in China by Marco Polo. It had been a custom there for ages, long before Polo ever set food on Chinese soil.
Polo brought the custom back to Europe where it was integrated into Lent. It became especially popular in Spain where the ‘Dance of the Piñata’ became a fiesta on the first Sunday of Lent. Eventually the custom found its way to the New World, where missionaries used the custom to attract indigenous people to their festivals. It turns out, the Aztecs had a similar custom, and the missionaries were able to blend the two (as they often did with Saints and local religions).
So the piñata came from China centuries ago.
Now let’s see if you can guess where those little piñatas in my friend’s book store were made.
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What some people like to call cultural appropriation is really just cultural appreciation. Almost everything we enjoy has a basis in someone's love and appreciation for the art, music, food, fashion, etc. of people from other cultures. We used to take pride in calling America a "melting pot", but I guess some people would prefer it to be...one of those styrofoam picnic plates with the dividers so your chicken can't touch your corn.
I do agree with the sentiment that cultural appropriation is overused, an often thrown around in ways that's simply smothering. But I also agree with the sentiment that people of color are frustrated with some white people taking from other cultures, then flipping that thing and earning a fortune off something they couldn't come up with themselves, leaving the original culture with little.
In the case of the women who went to Mexico to learn, there was no wrong done. In fact, that's the way to do it. But we've seen in music where white owned labels rip off music originally composed by black artists, and instead of promoting that, turning it into something that's closer to what their "audience" would want.
With that said, I don't think cultural appropriation is the correct term in most cases. I don't know what the alternative term would be - maybe insensitivity - but people throw out cultural appropriation because that's what it looks like.