Yes, Culinary Appropriation Is Real
But you don't have to be part of the problem.
Last week Tieghan Gerard, creator of the popular food blog Half-Baked Harvest, posted a Reel for her 5.2 million Instagram followers, making a recipe she called "25 Minute Ginger Sesame Banh Mi Rice Bowls." The recipe has no discernible connection to the Vietnamese sandwich it references1, includes a mish-mash of ingredients from various Asian cultures that are not traditionally used in Vietnamese cooking, and in the video Gerard mispronounces the name as "bon my." Despite the swift and fierce reactions in the comments, and negative press coverage from NBC News, the Reel remains up, unchanged, its BON MY a clamorous bell you can't unring.
Does it matter? Or is this commenter on the recipe page right?
One would have to be pretty insecure in their cultural identity (and general identity, period) to feel threatened and offended by a f#cking bowl of rice. Five stars to HBH simply for generating this level of indignant and overblown butt-hurt in thin-skinned, fragile, hyper-dramatic people who seem to have zero grasp of what constitutes an actual problem worth getting upset about.2
Food has been a site of innovation and cross-cultural exchange since the beginning of time. There are probably a lot of Vietnamese chefs out there making unusual, unexpected combinations with traditionally Western ingredients, and maybe mispronouncing them in the process. Does it matter?
When I talk to people about culinary appropriation, there is a tightness I have come to recognize in the reactions of some people, who are almost always white. There is a discomfort. When you are used to seeing the whole wide-open world as your playing field, it can feel wrong to hear that actually there are invisible lines you cannot cross without care. When you are used to zooming around wildly, your tastes and desires your only guide, it's difficult to be told to slow down, to be quiet, to listen.
But it matters.
In her excellent article What Does Cultural Appropriation Really Mean?, Ligaya Mishan references a perhaps more accurate term, one that gets to the heart of why recipes and restaurants that thoughtlessly rely on other culture's cuisine actually can cause harm:
The American cultural theorist Minh-Ha T. Pham has proposed a stronger term, “racial plagiarism,” zeroing in on how “racialized groups’ resources of knowledge, labor and cultural heritage are exploited for the benefit of dominant groups and in ways that maintain dominant socioeconomic relationships.” This is twofold: Not only does the group already in power reap a reward with no corresponding improvement in status for the group copied from; in doing so, they sustain, however inadvertently, inequity.
It is not just about hurt feelings; it comes down to power and money. Half-Baked Harvest features a lot of recipes that clumsily appropriate dishes and ingredients from Asian cuisines — for example, this noodle recipe that misspells Sichuan/Szechuan throughout, and quite a few "healthier" and "better than takeout" takes on popular Asian dishes — and she makes money on them through her blog advertisers and her cookbooks. She does not use her platform to point toward other recipe developers with a more direct connection to the cultures she references in her recipe titles, or even as an invitation for her readers to learn more about the culture, to buy ingredients from Asian food purveyors, or otherwise disrupt the usual socioeconomic relationships in the food space, which privilege white creators and food producers.
These socioeconomic relationships exist elsewhere in the food world. Access to capital is a huge barrier to BIPOC food entrepreneurs, chefs, and restaurateurs. Borrowing money requires a strong credit score, but systemic racism makes it less likely that Black borrowers will qualify for loans. Assets, a long relationship with a bank, and familiarity with Western financial systems are less available to immigrant and refugee entrepreneurs. To find investors requires being plugged into networks of people who have a lot of money to spend, a class of disproportionately white people. But a 2013 study found that white people's social networks are often racially homogenous, with around 80 percent of white people living in the Midwest, East and South reporting their social networks were entirely white. (For white people in the West, it's a little lower at 68 percent.)
If you want to finance a birria taco restaurant to capitalize on the latest dining trend, it's so much easier to invest in your friend's son who went to culinary school and traveled through Mexico that one summer than it is to seek out a chef from a different culture, and perhaps a different class and native language from your own. Maybe you'll read about someone? But whose pop-ups and restaurants does the media cover most often?
And who has the freedom to cook whatever type of food they want, and not be pigeonholed by their race? In Notes From a Young Black Chef, Kwame Onwuachi writes about the first offer he received to helm his own fine-dining restaurant, a dream come true after working in fine-dining restaurants like Per Se and Eleven Madison Park. But the funders wanted the restaurant to serve southern comfort food.
Ugh, I thought, of course. The idea of doing upscale riffs on mac and cheese, fried chicken, and collards was not only a played-out concept, it was a step backward for me. More than one step. The belief that African American cuisine couldn't rise above the Mason-Dixon line was exactly the sort of stereotype I wanted to destroy. Though southern cooking had played a huge part in my own upbringing, it wasn't the entire story. To emphasize only that aspect would mean becoming an actor in the long and ugly play of degrading black culture for the benefit of white people.
We all want the freedom to cook the food we love — and we can have it, if we approach the food of other cultures with care and respect, which includes a commitment to equity. If you're making tacos, support the family-owned tortilla shop that's been serving your now-gentrifying neighborhood for years.3 When you travel to New Orleans, seek out a restaurant on Where Black NOLA Eats instead of going wherever Bon Appetit says to go. Follow BIPOC food writers. Buy their cookbooks. It's all just a little bit harder…but it's really not that hard.
(More on this topic in
's guest post below.)
If you create recipes for a living, I have some additional tips. In January I attended a webinar called Best Practices for Culturally Sensitive Content Development, led by Tessa Nguyen and Breana Lai Killeen and learned a lot, especially in Breana's presentation focused on creating recipes that present dishes or ingredients from other cultures in a respectful, non-appropriating way.
Breana is a dietitian, former test kitchen and editorial operations manager at EatingWell, farmer at Killeen Crossroads Farm in Vermont, and fellow half-Asian person who is passionate about making food media more equitable. I asked her about the Half-Baked Harvest recipe and she pointed out that SEO-driven profits might be behind the inappropriate name. She told me:
I’m looking at the ingredients and the recipe sounds like it probably tastes great, but why call it something it’s not? It’s called "Banh Mi," but there is no bread. Maple syrup? Avocado? Persian cucumbers? Um…let’s please just call it something different, but that’s where SEO profits come into play.
Food is a proxy for how people of color have been treated for centuries. Choosing to pick and choose the aspects of a cuisine that allow you to capitalize and profit off the culture is a metaphor for the same treatment that’s been occurring to ethnic, non-white cultures for a long time. Media, and specifically food media, has long been dominated by white editors “discovering” new cuisines. (Are you feeling the Columbus overtone?)
So how do you not Columbus a culture's food when writing a recipe for a dish or with ingredients from a cuisine that is not your own? Here are some of the key takeaways from Breana's presentation on the topic.