I get upset when a rich white person from a wealthy suburb goes to my favorite taqueria and then complains about it on Yelp for dumb reasons. Only time I use Yelp: to counter fools and their dumb reviews. It isn’t always someone from a wealthy town, but it is always someone with hundreds of reviews. Serial reviewers, if you will.
God, I hate Yelp.
I’d say you’re well out of it. 
I think it’s more that people get pissed when a wealthy white person opens a taqueria. Charging twice what a Latino owned taqueria could get. Takes credit for making Mexican food “high end”. And turns up on TV lecturing people about “authentic” Mexican food.
Happens a lot unfortunately. In the US ethnic food = cheap food with a poor reputation. And it’s often white already successful restaurateurs who become the “expert” or get credit for popularising them and lifting them out of the cheap eats section.
But I have noticed a few people. Often white people. Scattered about who can’t quite tell where the problem in that is. So they claim eating ethnic foods, cooking them, discussing them, or repurposing ingredients from them is cultural appropriation. Goes hand in hand on rigid obsession with authenticity, to the point of dismissing regional variations as in authentic. Some of these people are dim and social signalling. Some of them are on an authenticity nut they leads them into an intellectual culdesac. Some of them are straight driving trollies.
I did encounter someone in a college humanities class a couple years ago who did not seem able to distinguish between cultural appropriation and cultural exchange, and I’ve seen similar soapboxes online. Some of these seem to imply to me that we’re all to just stay in neat little boxes and never stray outside our own.
To me it seems humans have been exchanging each others ideas, food, art and music about as long as there’s been distinctly different neighboring tribes. I don’t see the issue if I were to attempt to make curry or patronize the local Hispanic-owned taqueria.
I do see the problem if I marched in there and told them ‘No, you’re not making it right!’ or claim I’ve made authentic curry when I’ve no personal connection to their original cultures.
It’s curious how that wound it’s self round to the same practical result as the white supremacists are arguing for. No cultural/race mixing.
For my part the appropriation starts where there is erasure or out and out denial of a cultures contribution or origination of something.
Robert moss did an excellent run of articles on southern food that does a lot to deflate a lot of weird suppositions. Especially by repeatedly pointing out how foundational blacks were to the whole thing.
The other end of appropriation is the adoption of stereotype in place of a genuine understanding of a given culture. Think of the trend for “indian” costume as fashion at music festivals. There’s no genuine recourse, understanding, or root in any native American culture. Just the replication of an old stereotypical image as a cultural trend.
Good read I came across recently:
https://www.theawl.com/2017/06/all-spicy-food-is-from-latin-america/
Tomatoes and hot peppers are owed to the Americas, and its interesting to see how they’re now so fundamental to cuisines world wide. What’s more Italian than a good tomato sauce? Or what’s more Indian than a spicy hot curry? One could say it’s appropriation but knowledge wants to be shared, and this goes doubly for food. I would definitely want to pay respects for the history of ingredients and recipes, but no one inherently owns the concept of food. The beauty of food is that its a deeply individual and personal thing, so yeah chilis came from the Americas but that doesn’t deny that Asian countries have embraced it.
I do find the history of these things really fascinating. There’s a neat book called The Devil’s Cup that talks about the history of coffee, and it does delve into a lot of speculation and guesses as to what historical events coffee might’ve had a role in but overall its a really good read.
Thank you for teaching me about imperative vs statement sentence structure.
FUCK OREGANO!
Pickles on the other hand are fucking fantastic.
Amen.
This guy is from my region.
Nice guy, fantastic barbecue, those trophies are ones he’s won at competition, but none of it is particularly cheap and despite his home turf having a long barbecue history, not one barbecue restaurant in that town is run by a black man. Nor do I think I’ve seen a single black employee there. Maybe they’re out back. I don’t know.
And that’s the thing that bothers me about it. I saw a highly popular Reddit comment, posted by a Puerto Rican New Yorker about eating cheap. You know what they were talking about? Pork shoulder! Shoulders, ribs, chicken wings, they’re the undesirable, inconvenient parts. The dry rub on a pork shoulder and long cooking time is a necessity to have tender pork shoulder. It’s fibrous, it’s tough, it’s chewy, unless you salt it and cook it low and slow. It’s part of the reason I make my own dry rub and cook it on one of these.
Look up the “snake method”, it’s basically just a method of having the charcoal around the edge of the grill, and lighting one end. Some folks soak applewood chips and put them on top of the charcoal. The last time I did it, I got six hours @ 250°F. Shoulder is cheaper than chicken, and sooooooo delicious when done right. Just keep in mind that it’s a “sometimes” food.
I saw that same phenomenon in the Southwest, ages ago, when I ate there. Lots of fantastic food, so much of it so hot but so good but it sure seemed like the successful restaurants were run by white guys.
Yeah, and that’s silly. I’m hoping you’re right that some of them are just trollies. I can’t think that there are that many people out there who would say, don’t eat there, it’s cultural appropriation! I brought up “taqueria” because there’s one close-ish to me in rural Illinois. If their customer base was only Mexican, they’d go out of business. It’s family-run, and they opened the place to make money. And the food is fan-fucking-tastic. I have no idea how “authentic” it is; I just know it’s good.
Chemically speaking, I don’t think so. But I’m AFK, and can’t access ISI mobile. With garlic, I am confident that there will be research on it. =)
That’s the third time at least someone rants about Oregano in this thread.
I don’t expect to get a proper answer, but what’s the problem?
Granted, quality of the stuff you can buy at the supermarket isn’t great, and I am still a sucker for the Sicilian stuff my sister-in-law brought from their honeymoon, but Oregano isn’t a bad thing in general.
Needs to be applied with (olive) oil, though. Adding it to watery stuff just results in bitter regrets.
I get the stuff brought over from Portugal every 6 months or so (it’s still relatively bright green, but starting to dry out already), and the difference compared to the imported stuff in the shops here in London is night and day (even the slightly fancier stuff we can get from the local Greek shop). The regular stuff is still better than no Oregano though.
Oh I love that stuff (except for pickled plums umeboshi, too salty for my taste)!
But they are not seasonings. They are separate food groups altogether.
My uncle-in-law makes homemade miso on his farm in Kyoto. I am so surprised by how it never gets confiscated by Customs when I bring the stuff home. Miso is typically mixed with the usual suspects I mentioned (sugar, mirin, soup stock, soy sauce) for sauces/marinades. Homemade miso soup using miso paste is better than anything you will get in a restaurant.
When it comes to pickles, I am a philistine. I either buy them premade at a Japanese grocery or cheat by using special pickling powders/vinegar which only require: slice veggies, put in Tupperware, add pickling powder/liquid, shake for a minute leave in fridge overnight.
As for natto, that is the “Marmite” or “Hakarl” of Japan. A food that Japanese people adore but scares the bejesus out of practically everyone else. I like the stuff but I cheat with that as well. I mix it with rice so I don’t have to deal with the snot-like threads which stick to chopsticks.
Oregano is quite nice, dried or fresh, if you get it of decent quality or if you want to grow your own.
This reminds me of people’s dislike of cilantro which amuses me. Reminds me… you can get a semi-wild “variety” called Culantro. It’s not the same plant as cilantro but they are still somewhat related and can often be used interchangeably in recipes though culantro is more flavorful or pungent so a little goes a long way.
That’s what I mean. Why the hell would anyone have anything against Oregano, e.g., in a Bolognese-type dish?
The dislike for cilantro seems to have a genetic component.
I learned a couple of years ago that humans have about 23 receptors for different compounds in the spectrum of bitter tastes. If every one of those can mutate a bit, that’s quite something.
As a kid i despised cilantro but my mom figured out that she could get around it by more finely chopping it before adding it to food, and overnight i had no issues with it. I now enjoy it quite a bit but i rarely try to buy any because you can only buy fresh cilantro by what seems to be a bushel and i can never use it fast enough.
fresh coriander seeds have a great flavour, like a cross between an orange and a lemon, very fibrous though, so you have to spit them out after you get the burst of flavour. I found that after tasting them I had a new appreciation for the leaf, it was never off-putting to me before, but was able to more easily recognise that orangey flavour in the leaf where I couldn’t before. I’m dubious about the genetic thing, inasmuch as I think it could be easily gotten over by just eating more coriander.
Recipes for chicken curry can be found in many Western cookbooks. It’s essentially “make this generic dish using the basic culinary techniques and add curry powder at some point.”
Meanwhile, there are cookbooks from asia that may present dozens of curries-- and they taste deliciously different. Sure, you can get your basic tomatoey, peppery, oniony dish with a lot of cumin and coriander, and it will probably end up tasting broadly similar to that italian curry with celery and carrots. But there’s so much more, and thinking that you know how to make curry because you have “curry powder” sidelines the rest of a rich culinary culture into irrelevance.
It’s a proven and documented mutation, geneticists know exactly where to look for it and everything. That being said cilantro can still be used to add good flavor to food and then removed for those that dislike the taste the leaf itself imparts, either that or chop it as fine as possible. I know from experience 
