that is a v good article, thanks neb. thinking about quite a few things in it.

The section that starts with this paragraph is especially good:

"Less important than ascribing a strict lineage, or, worse, the retrogressive idea of cultural ownership, is the question of whether, say, a person of color could have also made a stew featuring chickpeas and turmeric go viral. Aren't both the perceived novelty and the recipe's virality tied to the whiteness of its creator?"

particularly the comments about s nosrat's ability to be not white and break through and how that happened(s) and doesn't for different varieties of not white in the (east) bay chi chi food scene i grew up in as a food worker. and how the (not) happening is entwined in details of immigration that are both enormously complicated and unconsciously explicable so that they come under the heading of "of course" plus the more usually considered out loud gender dimension.

It's a good piece, and treads gently around some difficult thoughts.

So that's what it takes to get suspended by the Times.

Is this also the general white ladies thread?

Unless they are writing not-quite-gay porn.

I hadn't heard of Roman before this. I had heard of Teigen, because she insults people on the internet.

I have no idea why anyone would waste their time on this article and the non important opinions of those mentioned.

It's a good article, thanks for the link.

9: because the issues around food, ethnicity, and legitimacy have all sorts of real world impacts.

To take one example, which isn't directly connected to the issues the article is talking about, but is timely and not entirely disconnected either -- 59 percent of independent Chinese restaurants in the US have ceased operating currently, far more than other takeout friendly cuisines.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/21/business/coronavirus-chinese-restaurants/index.html

We only order from the ROC Chinese restaurant.

10: The real world impact of Chinese restaurants running a whole 1 percent higher business closure rate than sandwich and deli shops.

https://www.womply.com/blog/the-types-of-restaurants-most-impacted-by-covid-19/

Fucking Moby, I googled Teigen thinking I'd missed something. Nope, a swimsuit model married to a musician. Pass.

10.3 From the article NickS linked:
Prior to the coronavirus outbreak, 270 restaurants operated in New York's Chinatown, according to Wellington Chen, executive director of Manhattan's Chinatown Partnership Local Development Corporation. Only 40 remain open, Chen told CNN Business on Friday.

The article was published on April 21st. I wonder how many of those 40 are still open. NYC's Chinatown without Chinese restaurants. Fucking hell.

10 From the article gswift linked:
As you can see, all of the types of restaurants in this group have fared better than restaurants as a whole with one exception: Chinese food restaurants.

By the end of March, over half of Chinese food restaurants, who might otherwise be perfectly suited to thrive in a "takeout only" environment, stopped transacting entirely. No other type of restaurant in this group even comes close.

While any percentage of restaurant being forced to close its doors is a sad statistic, it's clear that Chinese food restaurants are facing an unfair backlash during this pandemic.

Surely the anti-Chinese thing -- which I can well believe -- is a consequence of the virus and nothing to do with wider issues of skin colour among influencers? Tell me I'm wrong, but I'd assume that food bloggers/writers/instagrammers are a middle class thing but Chinese takeout is a working class one. That's certainly the case in this country. So a backlash against specifically Chinese takeaway is a form of xenophobia as much as it is racism.

But it is hard to take seriously people agonising over whether any particular branch of the advertising industry (and food fashion is that) turns out to be exclusionary and elitist. Of course it is. That's its nature. It wouldn't be fashion if anyone could play -- and of course it will skew towards the demographic that has the disposable income.

The idea of cultural appropriation with regard to food makes me crazy but I promise to read this article less blearily tomorrow. Mostly the whole thing is a reminder of how much I can't stand twitter and lament its ubiquity in any online conversation.

I guess I'm not super open to the whole topic as I think her cookbooks are great and find her remarks lightly regrettable in a way I am literally certain literally everyone dunking on her has done, too, but they're just a teeming faceless dogpile so they don't have to worry about it.

I'm guessing that "these people clearly have far too much time on their hands" is an appropriate response to the article, as it is to so many others of its type. ("Silly person says silly thing on Twitter, other silly people angry" would do as well. I wonder if the Guardian has reported on it yet, using of course the word "fury" in the headline?)

I got as far as the weird, unsettling exoticness of turmeric (turmeric ffs, my grandmother used turmeric) and a discussion of whether learning to cook can ever be anything other than white, then gave up.

The idea of cultural appropriation with regard to food makes me crazy

Same here.

REPOSSESS THE PIZZA PROFITS!

THE KETCHUP PROFITS!

ALL OF THE PROFITS!

19 Hit the Irish up first why don't ya

Sorry that was the Inca, get in line Opinionated Mayans.

16.1 gets it exactly right, as they said in the dark ages. Let's tell the Indians they can't use chillis because American.

The article is quite clear that the writer isn't opposed to any one using any ingredients, regardless of their ethnicity. I admit that I'm less clear on what she does think is a problem, or what she thinks should happen specifically. What I got mostly was that in food writing like everything else, it's easier and more likely in the US for white people to be successful. Which is true and important and worth paying attention to and trying to counteract, but if there was much more to the specifics of what the writer was saying, it got past me.

goddamnit, I'm confusing shallots and scallops again.

I don't know what to do with the concept of cultural appropriation, but surely it's not meaningfully different in food media than any other media. (I don't think anybody is saying that you're appropriating a culture by eating tacos. I think people are saying that you can appropriate culture by selling a cookbook.)

I don't think I know how to separate cultural appropriation from any other white privilege, except that by its nature, it's highly visible. Who am I to tell Alison Roman that she can't make a buck when, in a better world, that money might have gone to somebody else?

What do you do with Elvis? I mean, yes, Big Mama Thornton should have been the one to make money from Hound Dog, but that wasn't one of the choices on offer. The choices were: Some white guy brings this to white people, or nobody does.

So I guess the concept of cultural appropriation makes sense to me when it's about widening opportunities for people, but as a consumer, I'm not always sure how to act on that.

There's a funny damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't aspect of at least some of the issues raised. Like, should Roman be calling her chickpea dish a stew when it's clearly a curry? The dish doesn't seem from the article to be a recognizable version of any particular dish -- it's something that from clicking through the links might be South Asian or might be Caribbean, so, not a specific pre-existing dish at all. At that point, I can't see how she could have identified it as anything in particular without having been ignorantly wrong about the dish she was describing it as a version of -- if she called it a 'curry', isn't the natural response 'that's not the right way to make a curry'?

Also "stew" seems much less automatically white than other choices of what to call it, like "casserole". Now that would be amazing, if she popularized the Tater-tot Casserole.

I mean, yes, Big Mama Thornton should have been the one to make money from Hound Dog, but that wasn't one of the choices on offer.

I think part of the answer is that it was a choice on offer for the record labels, and they should have been less racist about who they paid. And the same dynamic here -- it shouldn't be harder for non-white food writers to succeed than for white food writers. But I think you're right that there was nothing wrong with Elvis having some kind of musical career, it just shouldn't have been at the expense of or in the place of equal or superior black musicians. Eminem is not a problem, because black rappers have not been driven out of the industry.

Well, Eminem's not a problem for that particular reason.

My response to this article and others like it is (1)What a ridiculous bunch of people. (2) Fuck twitter for making the rest of us aware that they exist.

I admittedly don't know shit about either Eminem or the rap industry.

I find it pretty clear from the collective writings on appropriation and food is that people who think this is a problem would like PoC to be able to make money off of food they originated, and to be represented in the media when food that comes from or is influenced by their culture is celebrated and disseminated.

You can shrug and say elites gonna elite all you want but in observable fact people up and down the spectrum of the power care about how their groups are represented in elite spaces so it's pretty much a white person copout.

What one could do as a consumer is patronize restaurants owned by people of color, buy cookbooks written by people of color, etc.

Presumably what Alison Roman could have done (or maybe did do -- I literally hadn't heard of her till this post) is lift up the people who influenced her cooking, tell the NY Times she'd be cooking columnist but 1 in 4 columns she'd want to let out her inches to a food writer of color who would educate about the origins of the food, etc. The article in OP linked to an article that I liked that now I can't find because there are so many links in the article, but it said at the end something like, she would like to not just be thrown a bone occasionally, but to get a substantial amount more, more representation, more space.

In general, it's pretty self serving to say, this issue over there that I feel like I can adequately divest myself of responsibility for is a real problem; this one over here that might implicate me I am comfortable calling trivial.

Sure. But white people do go to restaurants owned and staffed by people of color; they do buy cookbooks written by people of color; there are people of color working and writing for, e.g., Bon Appetit, as a trendy, hip food-writing outlet that gets cited in the article. The question is whether they get enough of a fair share of the money and fame. And I'm sure they don't, but that gets really hard to quantify with specifics. Everyone in a position of power should be doing more, but it seems wrong to treat Alison Roman as a particular face of the problem.

To make it concrete, why would you talk about Alison Roman giving up a week every month of her column, rather than talking about the editors of the Times making sure that writers of color are appropriately represented in their pages?

Some white people do those things some of the time but white people still make more of the money and get more of the visibility, even from aspects of culture they didn't originate, so that's why the answer is "more than this".

But yeah, I don't think Alison Roman is a particular villain here. But then again, if we're making fun of things as not being particular world historical tragedies, elite white woman gets suspended from NYT column isn't one either. If NYT cooking uses this kerfuffle as a reason to consider elevating another food writer of color, maybe it's for the better.

On preview, I am making that point right now. My first comment wasn't meant to be a comprehensive list of what everyone could have done, it was meant to be an illustration that there is something everyone up and down the ladder can do.

The thing about Alison Roman is that it's not that anything happening to her is a world historical tragedy, lousy things happen all the time to everyone, a lousy thing happening to a privileged white person isn't important. But if you're trying to get people to take right action, using Alison Roman as a hook is confusing and offputting, because as far as I can tell her career isn't particularly problematic, and having her particularly shut up and fall off the face of the earth wouldn't improve anything for anyone, there'd be another charismatic white writer to take her place.

If the problem is insufficient success and attention for writers and cooks of color, and it is, I think that to get support for that goal you're making a much clearer argument if you're making it positively about the writers and cooks of color. Which, to be clear, I think you are, but I think the article in the post isn't doing well.

insufficient success and attention for writers and cooks of color

Maybe in the world of celebrity cookbooks, but anywhere I've ever lived or even visited the most popular ethnic restaurants are invariably owned by people from the same culture.

(I just went over to my shelves of cookbooks, which represent my and my roommate's acquisitions. Most of them I bought when I was in my big cooking phase in grad school. There are 31 ish books (don't care to recount) and 5 books by three authors of color. Madhur Jaffrey is represented three times. I have a book by someone named David Thompson on Thai and a Rick Bayless Mexican book. I'm woker now, but past me's shopping behavior illustrates the problem.)

I'm also uncomfortable with charges of cultural appropriation, generally, especially with things like food and music.

With food, there's a lot of ways in which the individual cooks and cookery writers might be the villains in this picture.

1) If they consistently misrepresent or get deeply wrong the food and culture that they are writing about.
2) If they pass themselves off as experts in something they know very little about
3) If they are straight up nakedly ripping off other people's stuff and presenting it as their own
4) If their food is just not very good

But, otherwise, the finger of blame shouldn't be pointing at them. It's publishers, advertisers, and consumers that are at fault, surely?

Lots of cooks are deeply knowledgeable about other food cultures. Lots of them will explicit credit expert cooks or people who have inspired them. Many will admit when their recipe is inspired by something, but is not 'authentic', or where they've deliberately done something with the dish that a traditional cook from that culture would not do.

What else are they supposed to do?

If it was me, write only about haggis, neeps and cranachan? If it's a white American only write about weird glutinous semi-savoury shit made from canned goods and industrial by-products?

39 - where I live, the most expensive and famous ethnic restaurant is owned by a white guy whose brother works for ESPN. I take this to be the general case everywhere.

I'm reminded of when the Spanish press lost their shit because Jamie Oliver put some chorizo in a recipe for paella. Fuck off. I've eaten in Spain, and seen the abominations served up as versions of Asian or northern European food.

The only problematic recipe book I have is "Lobscouse and Spotted Dog" in which two white Americans try to make money by appropriating the cuisine of Regency Britain. All the others are keeping well in their lanes as far as the Group Areas Cooking Act is concerned.

Maybe in the world of celebrity cookbooks, but anywhere I've ever lived or even visited the most popular ethnic restaurants are invariably owned by people from the same culture.

I mean, yes. This is the classic new-immigrant business model, isn't it? Mum and Granny in the kitchen, Dad front of house, teenage kids serving the customers?

Exactly so.

39: Right I can't claim any self-righteous virtue from the fact that I eat at ethnic restaurants that are owned by people of the relevant ethnicity. And I don't suppose I'd even know if a French guy owns the Irish pub down the street.

I think 39 is true for most reasonably high quality local restaurants, but there are plenty of food trucks or crappy mall-type chain ethnic restaurants with no connection between the owners and the culture of the food.
I had a number of really bad Asian meals in Spain. Cheap sushi was quite a mistake. But I have found a few good ones in larger cities. I think the place I lived just didn't have the critical mass of either knowledgeable customers or skilled cooks to reach a reasonable quality. And that was even when the Chinese restaurant owner/chefs were Chinese- I think they just weren't good at it.
I've personally been interested in cooking foreign food since I got into cooking in middle school. I wrote a report in 9th grade about Chinese cooking based on a cookbook I received as a gift and I'm sure it had cringe-worthy moments. I never thought I was appropriating anything, I just wanted to make stuff that tasted good and had variety. I've tried to expand out to other types of food but never had much interest in deep exploration of my own cultural food aside from a couple things my parents or grandparents routinely made. My grandparents were the primary kosher caterers for a medium size city but it never really interested me to make the stuff myself.

There was an odd Chinese owned taco chain called Fresh Tortillas -- the one near me closed, but I don't know if they're around elsewhere. Absolutely terrible.

Elvis had amazing talent, he wasn't some middle class white dude, his parents were share-croppers who worked alongside African-American sharecroppers, he loved and respected African-American culture, African-American musicians like Little Richard, James Brown, and many others adored him.

Almost nobody else could wear a jump suit the way he could.

40. But could you actually buy a Thai cookery book by a Thai or a Mexican one by a Mexican at that date? Things have moved on very fast in the last 10-15 years. Also, there's a third category which is books by anglophone authors who are students of or married to chefs from the culture in question; I would give those a pass, assuming they acknowledge the debt.

I suspect that many of the Greek restaurants in America are actually run by people with ancestors from Lebanon, but I'm too polite to ask.

hmmm interesting that i read the article linked in the op from perspective of having worked for quite some time in the local branch of the industry that generates a not small # of tomorrow's tv & publishing stars so brought to it experiences & thoughts about how those kitchens are structured racially classly & genderly that are not widely shared here. not sure if will have time to reread article or comment more today or ever!

WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU GONNA DO WITH IRISH? EAT THEM? REPOSSESS THE MASALA PROFITS!

I thought I could add nothing to the absurdity of this thread but I was wrong.

There are only two questions relevant to judging a cookbook. Are the recipes any good? and Does the writer make you want to cook them?

52 If they have some old fading photo of the owner's father/grandfather with Telly Savalas you know it's authentically Greek.

I also think that many of the Chinese restaurants in Lincoln are run by people of Vietnamese ancestry getting revenge on China by dumping sugar on chicken and blaming China.

I would appreciate 53 if rendered in parsable sentences!

55: You also need to account for the reader's baseline cannibalism.

Parseable?

51: If that's true, it only makes my point more strongly. The way that changed is that food writers and cooks/chefs of color fought for more representation and some white people listened and made some space.

61: Oh, is that how it commercial publishing works?

If there was somehow not a market, and all of a sudden there magically was, you actually do have to invoke some kind of ideological change w.r.t. food and who gets to talk about it to explain that.

58, 60: I read the article linked in the original possst with the persssssssspective provided by my experiensssssse working in a part of the food sssservice indussssstry that produssssses the ssssort of televisssssion and publishing sssstars under discussssssion here. My experiensssess provide me with a viewpoint that is not widely shared here regarding the racial, classsssss and gender isssssuesssss in food ssssservice. I may look at the article again and comment further.

How'ssss that?

(Also, I have a very close friend who runs her own commercial publishing house who is so far from immune to questions of representation that she considers publishing books by women, queer people, and people of color part of her core mission.)

Very niccccccce.

I mean the fact that the NYT suspended Roman shows that a commercial publisher makes commercial decisions as a result of ideological pressure. It certainly may be that this case is an overcorrection but it makes the point nicely.

There are only two questions relevant to judging a cookbook. Are the recipes any good? and Does the writer make you want to cook them?

You may think so, but it's clear that cookbooks function to communicate much more that that. I think about a memorable quote that is one of the reader testimonials on the back of my copy of Joy Of Cooking

From a bride of less than a year, living away from home and in a position of entertaining business as well as social guests, I express my deep appreciation for sharing the priceless knowledge through your book.

That's a great example of how cookbooks communicate something about, "what should one know to fit into one's class" (for lack of a better term. It offers information and, necessarily, also offers some signals about, "if you don't know this other thing, that's okay, you still know enough that you shouldn't feel foolish."

I don't want to overstate it; cookbooks are hardly the most important way in which those messages are communicated, but I always remember that quote and there's a reason it sticks in my head (and I'm not just being critical; it's memorable because it's clear just how valuable that guidance is).

29: Oh my God, I turned on the TV and watched a few minutes of a show about midwestern cooking. The popcorn salad with vegetables and a sweetened mayonnaise dressing was not something that I could ever have imagined to be real. My own culture (New England Yankee) has weird food ways - brown bread, sweet baked beans -- but watching this show, I thought it was a joke. Turns out it's a real dish.

I mean, yes. This is the classic new-immigrant business model, isn't it? Mum and Granny in the kitchen, Dad front of house, teenage kids serving the customers?

Yes, but most of those places don't get to charge Rick Bayless prices, and it's been observed many times before this, in many venues, that "ethnic" foods, especially authentic ethnic foods, are for the most part, when cooked by people of the cultures originating them, unable to charge higher prices, even if they wanted to, but that same food, when cooked in restaurants owned by white chefs, somehow does command higher prices. There was a good article about this playing out in some Oakland restaurants a few years ago (Ah, here it is) and more recently I recall reading something about a Thai restaurant that had difficulty raising its prices (even though Thai cooking is very labor-intensive and complicated) because the clientele just assumed Thai = cheap.

It's pretty amazing how much of this thread seems to have become about "cultural appropriation", something barely touched on in the actual article and only raised to say, basically, don't worry about it. The author isn't saying that Roman shouldn't make a chickpea stew with turmeric because turmeric isn't hers to use; she's suggesting that it would never have been so successful, so anonymous, if Roman hadn't been white, just as she suggests that only once deracinated into "turmeric latte" could that drink become ubiquitous. Not that there's anything wrong with its being ubiquitous! Coming along to say "pfft, my granny used turmeric" (an ingredient that is not described as "unsettling") "what's the big deal" is both asinine and weirdly self-centered. gswift and ajay, if you think this is so stupid an article that you can't even be bothered to figure out what it concerns (it was occasioned by, but it isn't about, any of the twitter kerfuffle, which actually started in an interview, not on twitter), you don't need to comment at all!

in many venues, that "ethnic" foods, especially authentic ethnic foods, are for the most part, when cooked by people of the cultures originating them, unable to charge higher prices

Marcus Samuelsson had a good line (probably not original to him) about how this varied for different ethnicities. Chinese food is expected to be cheap, but Japanese food can be expensive. Mexican food is expected to be cheap, but Spanish food can be expensive . . .

But, yes, the quoted statement is true and important.

The author isn't saying that Roman shouldn't make a chickpea stew with turmeric because turmeric isn't hers to use; she's suggesting that it would never have been so successful, so anonymous, if Roman hadn't been white, just as she suggests that only once deracinated into "turmeric latte" could that drink become ubiquitous. Not that there's anything wrong with its being ubiquitous!

But this does get me again to losing the point that is being made. It's not that Roman is wrongfully appropriating foods belonging to other cultures, but there is some issue linked to her whiteness about her success. I follow that if it's "Racist (not necessarily intentionally and all that) decision makers will favor a white writer/cook over a person of color who might have filled the same role, we should look for people who are being shut out and lift them up." I think that's correct and should be uncontroversial.

The article takes a different angle, though, and I don't follow the argument it does make.

58: i will try! no promises!

this is all from a particular perspective of the sf bay area, heavily drawing from a north berkely-chez panisse orbit, and also v much influenced by extremely personal experiences so thanks in advance for not being total assholes.

the piece linked in the op is talking about a v specific kind of restaurant that reliably generates cookbook writers and tv-internet stars, and those restaurants aren't family run immigrant hole in the wall joints. in california the overwhelming backbone of the kitchen staff and lower rungs of the dining room staff in these restaurants is provided by guys from mexico. and i mean guys, relatively few women from mexico work in these kitchens. on top of the sea of campesino labor floats a downwardly mobile* umc and overwhelmingly white pool of "talent" that is slightly more gender balanced.

on gender: there are more women in pastry, fewer in wine, more women at salad stations, fewer at the grill. heat and speed are so male, it is comical! but they are also the path to advancement.

i was once up for a extremely tough, busiest of the week, slot at a very hot, very fast station, as the person who usually had it was suddenly out. it was the logical progression for me to take this opportunity, given what i had been doing and training for up to that point. and holy hell there was an absurd battle as my mentors/champions (2 women, one man) had to manoeuvre around the older men to get it for me-for one fucking shift!-despite the fact that i was already demonstrably better at the task than the old dudes. we won, i worked the shift, and eventually got it as a regular rotation, partly due to my one male supporter letting drop at just the right moment that he had forgotten i lacked the one critical requirement for the task - a penis. ha ha ha! this worked bc this particular kitchen had an extremely strong, highly vocal commitment to gender equality. *even there* the degree of gender policing was fucking absurd, off the charts.** trust me, had one of my women supporters said this part out loud it would not have worked out well.

on race/ethnicity: go eat at zuni, when/if it ever reopens. sit near the kitchen. fucking marvel at how the brown people - including some women! my god! - are allowed to cook the goddamn food during the dinner service, rather than "merely" early morning prep and then endless bussing and dishes. judy rogers built that kitchen culture and damn if they haven't kept it alive, but it is *rare*. it isn't that the mexican guys don't know how to cook, in fact guess what on the menu for many a staff meal? some fucking delicious food of an amazing variety cooked by ... the mexican guys.

and who gets to be "white"? it isn't a big surprise to me that s nosrat made it, iranians are going to have an easier slide into cooking during service in these kitchens than folks who are immigrants from central america, africa or east asia. they are overwhelmingly not even going to get the garde manger lowest rung job.

*unless, of course, you catch the brass ring ....

** we once had an incident involving the failure of insulation under a walk-in oven and slow burning of a joist underneath. that was another eventful shift for me - i kept on smelling wood smoke, and there was vapor coming from the bottom of the door disconnected from when i was injecting steam. fun times ! this necessitated an emergency meeting whether to shut off the oven or not. the building was wood frame and there was an inhabited apartment above us. the white men told the white and brown women we were "hysterical," yes that word was actually used. turned out 1) the brown men were happy to be in the "hysterical" camp with us, and 2) the fire marshal was officially "hysterical" too.

right, well everyone just read neb's 79 and please neb or heebie delete my 73 and fuck you all.

oming along to say "pfft, my granny used turmeric" (an ingredient that is not described as "unsettling")

No, it's described in the article as "obscure at best and off-putting at worst", you shallow-witted, needle-nosed, marginalistic buffoon. I think "unsettling" is an acceptable synonym.

For that matter, if we're going to be all nosflow about it, at no point did I say "pfft".

right, well everyone just read neb's 79 and please neb or heebie delete my 73 and fuck you all.

Please, no. I appreciate 73. That's a helpful and interesting perspective.

Hound Dog was written by a couple of Jewish men.

73: That plan works if neb just reposts your long comment as comment 79, I guess. I love all your food stories. Actually not just food stories.

I get that the bottom line (...) here is "who gets to make money," but the specific focus of the article was almost completely unfamiliar stuff for me: Bon Appetit magazine, its YouTube channel, food TV programs and networks, the associated Instagram orbits. I don't consume any of that, but I don't find it remotely hard to believe that the prevailing aesthetic is targeted at UMC white lady consumers in their pretty Fixer-Upper kitchens. I defer to dq on the labor-supply questions since I really know nothing about that. (I do know about eating shit-tons of food in the Gourmet Ghetto, so thanks to you and all your colleagues for your service, lol. I'm sure you were out by 2004.)

76: concur

73 was really informative. Thanks, DQ. I'm kind of surprised that East Asians can't be "white". Our food scene isn't what the Bay Area's is, but Ming Tsai had a Chinese restaurant called Blue Ginger in the UMC white suburb of Wellesley, and he had a TV show on WGBH.

This thread is getting hangry.

I think the Bon Appetit YouTube channel is going more for a hip young audience than for adult white women in nice kitchens -- I know about it because Newt is a huge fan. And he's unusually interested in cooking, but I don't think that as an eighteen-year-old boy he's outside their likely audience. But this is sideways from the other issues under discussion.

third/fourth/whatever the appreciation of 73.

The article takes a different angle, though, and I don't follow the argument it does make.

I was re-reading it this morning, with an eye to identify the argument and, to some extent, the article is an extended sigh at how exhausting the whole conversation is -- which seems like a completely fair response.

Rather than simply having people who look like us on our screens or pages, our definition of what is shared needs to change. The polyglot culinary vocabulary that Roman and Krishna evoke must represent a genuine expansion of how we understand food and flavor and, sometimes, culture, too. More simply, real change only happens when the thing that white supremacists fear becomes true: that the mainstream increasingly becomes rather than simply appropriates the "ethnic." But to speak of a mainstream North American culture that isn't neatly "white" in both its logic and its aesthetics is to envision something that doesn't yet exist, and that we don't know how to articulate.

In the meantime, I find myself searching for food media that reflects me. . . .

The author knows that whatever happens with Roman (or the conversation around her comments) that's not going to be enough to create that future but, at the same time, it matters, and it's part of the process of envisioning a cultural alternative.

73 was good and informative on a world I have no experience in. Your writing is always appreciated, dq.

The article is quite clear that the writer isn't opposed to any one using any ingredients, regardless of their ethnicity. I admit that I'm less clear on what she does think is a problem, or what she thinks should happen specifically. What I got mostly was that in food writing like everything else, it's easier and more likely in the US for white people to be successful.

The only criticism of Alison Roman that makes sense to me is about how she talks about how fame just sort of happened for her, while critisizing others for overly merchandising themselves -- without realizing that what looks like overly merchandising oneself to her, looks to other people like the sort of hustle you have to do because your fame won't last forever. Like my fellow white PhDs who don't much care about being called "Dr." and see it as embarrassing when others insist on being called "Dr." because they feel they won't be respected without it.

Maybe in the world of celebrity cookbooks, but anywhere I've ever lived or even visited the most popular ethnic restaurants are invariably owned by people from the same culture.

What's the same culture? I feel like it's the opposite - the high-end restaurants with a story behind them (and maybe a cookbook) usually have the chef's background as part of the story, but I expect to see Thai restaurants run by Vietnamese people, Peruvian restaurants run by Mexican/central American people, etc. People like Peruvian food but how many actual Peruvian immigrants are there?

To have an Indian restaurant you have to make the basic "Indian restaurant" menu (Punjabi I think?) and then maybe have some "specials" from the region of India the owner is actually from.

This is sort of a hole with no bottom of course (e.g. Hollywood seeing it as a great step to have actual ethnic people play ethnic parts, people responding with "actually a Spanish actress with rich parents playing a Mexican working-class woman doesn't help" / "actually don't have Japanese actors play Chinese people, this is an insult because of World War II". Then general confusion over how class can possible be factored in, the occasional person pointing out that 95% of white actors anyway, and people in any creative field nowadays, come from at least the upper middle class, often the "doesn't have to work a day in his life" class, more and more pure nepotism cases, more and more people who didn't become actors at age 8 being shut out).

walk-in oven

I had to Google to prove to myself that this is, in fact, a thing.

My experience is the opposite: I've never been to a Peruvian restaurant, but in my home town the one nice Mexican restaurant was run by Peruvians who served Peruvian food in a special meal once a month, and the local Israeli restaurant was run by an Israeli who retired and was taken over by a Peruvian who had worked his way up there.

just briefly to say not trying to get sympathy just find the sneering to be exhausting and pointless, the predictableness of certain male people here repeatedly being shits for why?, so why oh why even fucking bother. i have a full day in rollicking form going already, best wishes to all with good hearts and ciao for now.

I read this last night, and am conflicted. One aside in the article that felt revealing to me was Ranveer Brar, who managed middling success with the English audience... but, oh yeah, also reached millions in the Hindi broadcast. (Which was then set aside as tangential, instead of being celebrated as a greater success than most authors will ever experience in their primary market.)

I enjoy cooking, and I'm happy to have anyone teach-- but is it surprising that appealing white people growing up with an internalized sense of what's in white people's kitchens would have a good sense of what's "a tweak" that their fans will follow and not count as overreach? My wife really enjoys the British cooking and baking competitions, and there's almost always someone from the subcontinent. They're usually great in front of the camera and make really inventive takes on whatever the baseline dish is supposed to be! But there are often asides about their heritage -- like the inevitable "our family's secret spice blend" segment. That's great... but for those of us too bland of background to have a family spice blend, what are we supposed to do with that when it comes time to season our version?

Cooking's also intimidating (with the result being public, shared, and commented on) and a risk of resources, both money and time. I don't want all cookbook authors to limit themselves to the tools in my kitchen, or the foods that grow in my area -- but I do need to know if a rolling pin can substitute for the tortilla press that their home culture assumes that you'll have on hand, when you're just beginning to cook Mexican food.

The real problem seems to be that success with the "white foodie" market is where the money is. If Ranveer Brar's fans were wealthier than Manhattanites, would we just be having this discussion in reverse, about how those provincial English language writers just couldn't break into the desirable Hindi market? Are we discounting cooks who are successful in their home markets because they haven't broken into white foodie culture?

Seconding 85.

Much love to you, dq!

Sorry! My "opposite" was intended to be opposite to 86, that is Peruvian restaurants are too obscure to be popular.

I'm still bitter about all the Eritreans running terrible pizza places in Aarhus and not a single Eritrean restaurant in the city.

73: Thank you for the insider perspective DQ! My friends have mostly cooked at chain restaurants, and even that is such a different world from home cooking. I'm sorry to hear that the grill is such a contested bottleneck for advancement.

There used to be a Peruvian restaurant near my office. Apparently, Peruvian food is roasted chicken and fries. It was really good, but hardly anybody ate there and it closed.

I went to a delicious Peruvian restaurant in California. Roasted chicken and delicious ceviche.

73 was good and informative on a world I have no experience in.

It has a kind of wainscot-fantasy feel to it. We can all cook, more or less, we have all been to restaurants, and yet almost none of us have a real idea what kitchen culture is like. We just see the sanitised output, as it were. I can't think of anything else that's at once so familiar and so well hidden. We know what plumbers do and how they do it because we've seen them work; we know what lawyers do because we see them on TV.

Oh wait, I did go to a Peruvian restaurant in Baltimore once! With several mathematicians named David!

I would be reluctant to order ceviche at a Pittsburgh restaurant with a $10 lunch.

The US had an ideological/aesthetic/health campaign in the 1910s/20s pushing "clean" food and against most foreign-y spices. It's where we get the image of a gleaming white plate with a serving of meat and with other sides separate from it (not very much at all like what Americans ate in the 19th century, which was eclectic). That new vision got absorbed into prevailing culture, like through home ec, and I have no idea if it has any UK counterpart. So many of our grandmothers may have been warned away from spices that their mothers could have used.

I think the Depression did more damage. At least my dad's family ate mostly beef and potatoes because that's what they had.

95: There's a pair of decent Peruvian restaurants at Union Square in Somerville, both called Machu Picchu. One is a Pollo a la brasa joint and the other is a proper restaurant. There's another in Eastie, but it's run by Colombians.

IT'S NEVER TOO LATE TO MAKE REPARATIONS.

On topic.

I guess bears won't eat an Italian because of Covid-19 fears? Maybe they think of eating humans as a part of wolf culture?

104: No, I was all set to eat him, but then I remembered my doctor lecturing me about my cholesterol levels.

Anymore I can't have burritos? MAGA.

I liked the piece better once I gave up looking for a thesis. Now I read it as a sigh about the distance between what's just beginning to seem plausible and what exists, in that way that almost being rid of something makes it harder to stand, rather than easier.

You can have a burrito but no papusa.

I don't know the people in the article, but man, the turmeric latte turned into a such a Karen thing, coinciding with the curcumin supplements and all that, too.

The cultural appropriation question is hard, because it's several different questions rolled into one, and solutions aren't terribly responsive to individual agency. (Institutions have more power.) For example, I'm skeptical that Roman has the kind of power to say that 25% of her columns are going to showcase (written by? sublet to?) people of color, but even if she did, the likely result is that now she's the cool white lady known as someone who highlights PoC chefs, which makes her extra authentic, not that they reliably get their own Instagram brands and columns and money.

I just learned what a papusa was last week. I'm allowed to eat them.

Is a turmeric soy latte a root vegetable and bean soup?

My favorite cookbook, Land of Plenty by Fuschia Dunlop, covers Chinese cuisine and was written by an Englishwoman. The recipes are genuinely better than any other source I've been able to find in twenty years.

Chinese recipe culture sucks. If you read a Chinese recipe, it will say something like, "250g Chicken, Garlic, Cooking Wine, Chilis, Step 1:Fry garlic, add an appropriate amount of salt " Dunlop has taken mainland cooking and formalized it into western style recipes without compromise.

I'm sure being a Cambridge educated white lady did nothing to impede her career, but if her recipes weren't so goddamn good I wouldn't have anything to do with her.

The new edition of LoP is out and is called The Food of Sichuan. Here's her Kung Pao. Nb always use unsalted nuts in a Gong Bao!

Sorry, it was me that introduced the phrase "cultural appropriation" after a bleary glance at half the article because I've been (no really I just this is the word for it) stewing about this whole thing as a way of not thinking about the whole THE AIR IS POISON situation. Well and perhaps also because one of the things that has provided angst-breaks has been making lots of Alison Roman recipes. There's still stuff that's puzzling to me in what I did read but I mostly was having an argument with other imaginary internet people. I will don a hair shirt and drink a turmeric latte because honestly that sounds HORRIBLE.

111 - She's the lady who fed David Chang a bunch of authentic Chinese food on an episode of Ugly Delicious, right? (Which was an interesting piece of TV - this very very English white person speaking knowledgably and introducing the Asian guy (Korean not Chinese, sure) to some foods that he wasn't really fully ready to eat.)

It's "pupusa", like PUP USA SUPERIOR ALL-AMERICAN HOTDOGS except 1,000,000 times better. Why is the air poison, Smearcase? Is anything on fire, or just the virus?

113: Yeah, that was her.

That David Chang show is really good hearted and I love his restaurants a lot, and love him extra for having dared to diss the restaurant scene in the bay area even though I generally eat better here than in NYC--I think he was talking about the Mortgage Dining scene.

Also once I asked around elsewhere on the internet about how one ought to dress as a middle aged bear and someone linked a picture of David Chang about whom I had not thought a lot beyond "I love the duck dinner at Ssam Bar" and I was like "oh wait, he's actually pretty cute." Five dollars, blah blah.

Like Hagrid?

So here's a hopefully non culture war-ish question about recipes.

I'v been cooking a lot more since the lock down, and I've noticed that sometime between now and the last time I read recipes online regularly it's become obligatory to write a whole rambling personal essay instead of just giving the damn recipe. When did this become a thing and who thought it was a good idea?

Sorry AcademicLurker, there is also a culture war about that.

How dare you insult my culture.

118: The rambling essay annoys me too, but that's part of how you become a food icon, right?

That was the good thing about Alton Brown. He was tedious about only technical stuff.

119: Well fuck. There's no escape.

My immediate thought was that long essays increase available ad real estate on the page. No?

I require a good backstory before I make a noodle hot dish.

I've been told that the rambling essays are somehow required for search engine optimization. They're annoying, but you can just page down.

124, 126: Yes, the link in 119 notes that the "be an authority" as viewed google requires more content, and more content is more spaces for ad revenue on the page.

As a blogger, I figure the intros are extra content that required work. I assume that the bloggers did that extra work for a reason.

The article really did use "turmeric" in a weird rhetorical fashion. I don't get what point it was trying to make, if it wasn't saying it was somehow exotic.

I think the article also really does shade into a kind of "cultural appropriation" analysis. It's neglecting the real problem, which is not the food, but the audience. If you were black, and the world's greatest French chef, would your recipes go viral among white foodies? They would not. The fact that there's a tiny chance that you can have success by cooking the food of your own ethnicity, and zero chance if you don't, is part of the problem. It's not dissimilar to Asian actors who only get to play kung fu roles, or nerdy roles. If tomorrow French cooking became fashionable, you would see the same kinds of good-looking white women being the social media sensations.

Christ, how may times can I use the word "really"? Please replace them all with the word "turmeric". Turmeric.

I think personal essays are also getting more obligatory in printed cookbooks, along with beautiful-but-not-informative color photography. I don't like either, but forgive them as long as they don't break what could be concise one-spread recipes across several pages. My hands are busy! Get your layout designer to lock the recipes onto single-spread and flow the reminiscences around them! Do I have to come down there and LaTeX it myself? Criminy.

My cynical supposition is that personal essays are cheap inches in print because they don't require fact checkers, and also they sure tend to be full of social positioning.

I mean, I know that there was always a niche for the personal essay+recipe format. What's struck me recently is how ubiquitous it's become. I don't think I've seen an online recipe in the last 2 months that didn't follow it.

It's true that it's no big deal to scroll down, I was just wondering why it got so universal. Search engine optimization does sound like a plausible explanation.

I assume they did it for SEO and to make people look at more ads as they scroll down to get to the recipe.

(133 to 128.)

132: and in the breathless! sarcastic! Pioneer woman! style?

DQ, thank you for your long comment. It was great, and a glimpse into a world we just don't know.

Apparently the reason for these stupid personal essays os a slightly refined form of SEO. The recipe itslf may turn up identically all over the internet, so people searching for it won't lan on your page; but google will send people to popular pages, so if yous can be distinguished from al the others by a long essay about how granny used to soak her warts in goats milk before she made it into her famous turmeric yogurt then you stand a better chance of getting traffic driven there.

Bave!

107: Maybe subconsciously? Between relying overly much on Cassandane (even though her job matters more than mine), working early mornings before the kid gets up, and generally letting the kid watch more TV than usual, I've only had to take about 5 hours of PTO over the past 5 weeks since the new management, and haven't actually missed any assignments or deadlines. I can say I was glad I got passed over for a promotion. (I was thinking about workload at the time, but in hindsight I'm also glad because of some of the people I'd have to work with...)

118 et seq.: it's annoying, but most of those have a link to the recipe itself near the top, which helps. You don't have to actually read the whole thing to find the important part.

I liked dq and neB's and Cryptic Ned's comments here.

9, 13: She's a supermodel married to a musician who spent her whole life in internet forums, including moderating and she's witty and self-aware. People care about what she says because she uses the internet well to say smart things.

there is some issue linked to her whiteness about her success

Wait, that's not the only thing. The other part is that when she happened to mouth off about sell-out cooks, her only examples were Asian-Am women. Not Pioneer Woman, not that Southern person. That was what made people mad (recently), including Chrissy Teigen, who had supported her.

in california the overwhelming backbone of the kitchen staff and lower rungs of the dining room staff in these restaurants is provided by guys from mexico

I'm sure I've mentioned the time I was at the Korean restaurant in Oakland and amazed to hear the Mexican guys in the kitchen discussing the work with the owners in Korean. I mean, I shouldn't have been, and why go through English, but it had just not occurred to me until I saw it.

if you can get your hands on kitty travers book la grotta ices which you absolutely should bc she is a stone cold genius it makes an excellent read start to finish as the best recovery memoir evah. "saved" from a life of aimless druggie dissipation* by mad pure devotion to ice cream, there is no better narrative arc.

* eh not convinced druggieness was truly ever a problem in her life, although i think aimlessness was, just the references sprinkled through the book are wonderful and the whole book just beautifully evoked for me that kind of kitchen atmosphere the ups and the downs. basically am head over heels for ms travers. whatever justification there possibly could be for royalty-nobility-aristocracy-honors in the uk has no possible credibility every single day that she isn't sprinkled with whatever fairy dust is used to create a new earless or whatever the highest ranking thing is.

You have to sleep with Prince Charles for the highest ranking. Go for the next step down.

A math professor friend of mine spent a couple years deciding whether she wanted to continue as a math professor or make and sell ice cream. She took a two-week course in ice cream at some college, and had three ice-cream makers and thought that two dozen or so was the right number of pints to have in the freezer, so you could have just whatever taste interested you. (She could take a bite, be satisfied and stop.) She sold at the Berkeley Farmers' Market for a while, eventually decided math professor was a better gig.

One day, the whole bunch of us from college were hiking on a reunion, and someone asked her "what is the difference between a popsicle and ice cream?" and she immediately answered in a shocked, sweet voice, "a popsicle is a quiescently frozen dessert!" and I will never forget how she said that or that phrase.

Chinese recipe culture sucks. If you read a Chinese recipe, it will say something like, "250g Chicken, Garlic, Cooking Wine, Chilis, Step 1:Fry garlic, add an appropriate amount of salt

One of my favorite brands of frozen jiaozi has boiling instructions that make sense to me mostly because they're close to how my family does it. Instead of boil for X minutes, it's let it boil, add some cold water, let it boil again, repeat a few times. I don't have a package to look at right now, but the instructions say something like "set stove to high until first boil, set to medium, add water, let boil again, add water, continue until third boil." Depending on how much water you add and how you adjust your stove, you can easily get under or overcooked food while faithfully following the directions.

What if you took ice cream mix and froze it without stirring?

Hey dq, for your kid and any other interested linguist, I was unaware until I followed one down a surface street that there is a car called the Velar. I didn't see it perform an ejective stop.

144: If it developed crystals during the freezing, it would not be ice cream.

wow, this thread is super white. thank you nosflow and dairy queen for providing some relief. I'll make sure not to click on unfogged food threads again.

Man, I'm a quarter Italian so back off.

I made dinner tonight. The starch was rice with salt and butter. Owning it.

I had a sausage egg and cheese kolache for breakfast and a leftover vegetarian one for lunch. To my great shame I made no attempt to verify if the owners are actually Czech.

I didn't even know savory kolache was a thing. My town had defective Eastern European people, I guess.

151: My understanding is that the fully enclosed stuffed roll style savory kolache evolved in Texas, which IIRC is where the owners of our little local chain is from.

In the coronation procession Earless ranks above noseless.

fully enclosed stuffed roll style savory
That's is a hot pocket.

https://www.toprecepty.cz/recept/52385-kynute-domaci-kolacky/

147: I have bad news for you about the whiteness of all Unfogged non-food threads.

The other part is that when she happened to mouth off about sell-out cooks, her only examples were Asian-Am women.

Chrissy Teigen is Asian-American and Marie Kondo is Japanese, definitely, but I wouldn't call either of them sell-out cooks. They're both otherwise famous people who got famous in a way unrelated to working with food, who have capitalized on that unrelated fame to sell food-related stuff. There's nothing wrong with doing that, Teigen seems nice and should make all the money she can, but I can see where Roman's snippiness about both of them came from.

Kondo is a cook? I thought she just wants you to throw out all your stuff.

She's got a housewares/kitchen stuff line now I think. Throw out your stuff and buy hers.

Like so: https://shop.konmari.com/collections/cooking-kitchen

All of my stuff sparks incalculable joy.

My milkshake sparks incalculable joy.

Chrissy Teigen is Asian-American and Marie Kondo is Japanese, definitely

Nicely-done correction.

My milkshake brings all the incalculable joys round to my yard.

here's who grows, harvests, transports, stocks, cooks and delivers your food in the western us https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/28/sobering-finding-covid19-struck-mostly-low-wage-essential-workers-san-francisco/

156 : isn't a key part of the issue that snappiness being coupled by a) a lack of awareness (or acknowledgement ) of the role her race etc. Has played in her own success, and b) her choice to make her point using two minority women, in an industry rich with far more deserving targets?

Which industry are you talking about? Food writing, or non-food-industry celebrities using their fame to sell housewares? She shouldn't have been bitchy about it, and there probably are good non-Asian examples that are current who she should have brought up instead (I'm not coming up with names, but I'm bad at both celebrities and food writers), but Teigen and Kondo's careers aren't about how hard it is for people of color to make it in the food industry, they're about celebrities monetizing themselves.

It's not a wrong thing to do, people should make their money however they like, but it makes sense to me that Roman would differentiate herself from them for non-race-related reasons.

And to be clear, it's because the interview is talking about her developing herself as a brand more than she had in the past. So she was being snippy not precisely about marketing yourself, but about the position from which the marketing happens.

It was not a terrific look, and she apologized, but the issue the article in the OP is about has pretty much nothing to do with Teigen or Kondo.

152: bourekas exist, my dudes. And so, so, so many more equivalents.

I thought the article was good. It's hard to have discussions about culture here. People get awfully defensive, and are quick to dismiss criticisms of the disproportionate power wielded by white Americans in matters of culture as just brainless bemoaning of "cultural appropriation". I admit I don't know who Alison Roman is, and on reading about this controversy I don't think what she did was so bad.* But it's depressing and aggravating that white people wield so much more authority in matters of culture than POC do, even when -- and especially when -- the culture in question is a POC culture.

*Except this line from the interview, apparently imitating Marie Kondo -- "For the low, low price of $19.99, please to buy my cutting board!" -- which is super fucked up, but doesn't seem to be the main focus of the uproar.

106 and 147 pretty much sum it up for me.

She should charge $40 and say that the cutting board brings her joy.

Or that $40 brings her joy, I guess.

It's not reliable, obviously, as a denial, but for what it's worth the interviewer denies that Roman was doing an Asian accent, and reports Roman saying that it was a habitual joke of hers based on a cookbook called Please To The Table. There's a note at the end of the interview: https://newconsumer.com/2020/05/alison-roman-interview/

If your double post doesn't bring you joy, get rid of it.

Was coming here to say 173. I don't think infinitive for imperative is a typical thing one would use to make fun of Asian non-native speakers of English and I also don't get the feeling AR, whatever you may think of the politics of what she said, is dumb enough to do something unambiguously offensive like that. Her explanation is pretty specific and I assume twitter, as a hive, doesn't buy it, because there's a thing where internet hiveminds declare someone anathema that requires that they then be presumed guilty of every possible offense.

It really sucks how defensive and shitty some people here get about race issues (and some other identity stuff), and while I don't feel well equipped to be all, here's how this reads to non-white people, if I try the analogy approach, where people act this way about gender stuff and there isn't a critical mass of people like me to push back, of course I check out. It's awful to be all, haha Unfogged so white I've got news for you when you are (as far as I can tell) so likely perpetuating that in your own behavior. I mean, there's not a ton of inflow to the blog now, and I don't think it's that likely to get fixed. But it's still such a bad look to be so indifferent to your effect on whether this is a welcoming place.

I was just reflecting earlier today that IRL in my home in NYC if I see an environment that's upwards of 90% white I think, "Something went wrong here and I don't want to stay where I am." It even makes me feel less safe and comfortable. Something went wrong here on Unfogged.

We should blame ogged.

It's awful to be all, haha Unfogged so white I've got news for you when you are (as far as I can tell) so likely perpetuating that in your own behavior.

One of the things I was thinking about saying, upthread, to people who responded with, "why should I care about this?" is that, in my experience, it's almost never productive to tell people that they shouldn't be interested in the things that they're already interested. It's more work, but almost always more productive to engage people with, "yes, you have your existing interests, but here's something new which you might be interested in as well."

I feel like the same is true about saying, "these sorts of discussions on unfogged suck." That is worth saying sometimes; certainly there are cases where it's important to put a marker to say, "this is really not a good way to talk about this topic." But the long-term way to actually change things is to try to initiate (and signal-boost) good and interesting parts of the discussion.

For me, personally, I'm interested in a variety of conversations about race, including these sorts of discussions of cultural visibility and legitimacy. I am aware that my perspective is limited, but I'm interested in reading and contributing to that conversation. I appreciate this post, and the linked article, and I have found parts of the conversation helpful, along with the people saying, "why care about this at all?" So I'd be interested in figuring out how to cultivate the good parts of the discussion, and I make some effort to do that in my comments.

172, 174: holy shit though, if you made that joke and the context dawned on you, like, two seconds later, wouldn't you turn scarlet and will the earth to swallow you up? I would have been mortified beyond words. I honestly can't even imagine trying to defend myself. Who cares about my headmemes?

The earth is really bad at swallowing people up, except in Florida.

I'm figuring she didn't realize what people thought until the reaction happened? I mean, the options are that she was doing a mocking Asian accent, in which case she meant to do it and wouldn't be realizing after the fact, or she wasn't doing that at all, in which case picking up what the written transcription would look like to people who were already primed by the controversy wouldn't be likely to occur to her.

178: She didn't realize in the moment and when it was brought up she explained and said "I realize how that reads and feel embarrassed!" I find the idea that explaining yourself is bad because the thing you're saying you didn't do is bad baffling and a bit scary.

Defending, not explaining. You can do the latter without the former. If she didn't defend herself, or at least not too stringently, fine.

That said, I think I don't get the neutral/innocuous point of the joke at all.

The minimalist selling cheap kitchen goods?

Taking her version as true, which is of course not necessarily reliable, I don't think it's as much of a joke as sort of a jocular verbal tic. She has a thing with her friends about riffing on the Please To The Table thing, and so she throws in "please to" when she's being joky. I've got things I do like that.

Said the actress to the archbishop.

I think at least some of the reaction re: Chrissy Tiegen is that Tiegen was on board to executive produce her new tv show, which reads as though not only was Roman taking unnecessary jabs, she was spectacularly stupid about it as well.

I read this article when it first came out and thought it was wonderful; I'm exactly the target audience (late 30s white woman following all the players on social media, own Roman's cookbooks and Tiegen's and many of the other authors mentioned in the article, and spend most of my disposable income and time on food, equipment, and cookbooks while living on Instagram) and while I don't think it's offering a solution, I think it's neatly articulating a phenomenon in this slice of the world and one that is worth thinking about. It's certainly encouraging me to think about my consumption habits in regards to who I'm buying/supporting.

Other people have said this already but expression doesn't have to be offering a solution or action steps to be worthwhile. Another source of pain and frustration I've heard people express about white people's adoption of "ethnic" food is that it's infuriating growing up having the food you bring to school, or the food cooked in your home, and by extension your body and your home, be mocked as weird and gross and smelly, and then turning around and seeing white people celebrated and paid for promoting that same food. It doesn't matter that maybe they weren't the same people (but maybe they were). Being able just to say that out loud and have people listen to it and understand it is, I imagine, a benefit unto itself. And not being able to do that is a harm.

188: Completely agree.

180: When I was a kid there was a show called, Yan Can Cook, where the guy used to say in this super thick Chinese accent, "if Yan can cook, so can you." Then I found out that he had come to campus to give a talk and spoke perfect unaccented English. The guy who told me that was Taiwanese and very mild mannered but very offended. But maybe that was the hustle he needed to do to get a TV show.

Martin Yan denies his accent is in any way fake.

she throws in "please to" when she's being joky. I've got things I do like that.

Oh, I do too, and that's probably why my reaction was so overheated. It's all about the politics of broken English as comedy, I guess, which is a mess to begin with. I hope I would have paused before using my habitual broken-English catchphrase to mock (the merchandise of) someone who used an interpreter on her TV show, but I have definitely fucked up like that. It happens quickly, but quicker than unconscious bias? That's the question I'd be asking myself, and have asked myself a lot, because IME unconscious bias is lightning fast. I think that's all I have to say about that. Pushback totally welcome.

191: huh. The guy I know thought it sounded pretty exaggerated.

I feel weird pushing back, but I don't think I would draw a connection between a joky use of Eastern European word order and making fun of a Japanese woman who speaks English through an interpreter, rather than speaking non-fluent English. Those seem far enough separated that it wouldn't click for me as something to be more sensitive about.

194: I don't think any of us know what Alison Roman meant, either consciously or unconsciously, and in light of that fact we may as well take her at her word that her comments were innocent. But the idea that racist mockery is necessarily rigorously reflective of the actual speech patterns of the target is laughable. I say that as a person who has repeatedly been mocked to my own face in accents that are not only not related to how I talk or have ever talked, but also how people from my parents' culture talk.

When I make fun of how Iowans talk, I just try to sound like somebody from Minnesota because I have never actually noticed an Iowan sounding different from a decent person.

this whole thread and my own experience of it have made me newly aware that my early and on reflection relatively long experience working in restaurant kitchens (briefly and intermittently front of house, i never liked it as much as playing with knives and fire) has somehow seared (ha!) itself into me , still i'm just floored that any of what i've shared is news to anyone. i mean i've banged on in this thread and many other over the years about how the overwhelming bulk of food workers on the west coast are from mexico, and i've not gone on about what happens in other regions of the us because i don't have the same personal experience. but - every time i've been in the northeast, southeast and briefly in various parts of the south, i absolutely notice that the folks doing grunt work in kitchens and the lower rungs of front of house tend to be pretty homogenous racially/ethnically, and those folks are not white! you guys never clocked this??? the meat and dairy industries in the country, not just california's row crops and vine-tree fruit industries - overwhelmingly it is a mexican and central american labor force. fellow americans - take away mexican labor and you are fucked the hell up and *hungry*.

195: This is absolutely true. I didn't mean to say that the circumstances cleared Roman of bad intent, only that they were such that if she didn't have the intent to mock Kondo's speech, it wouldn't have obviously leapt out after the fact as having sounded like making fun of Kondo's speech.

Pittsburgh is really an outlier in terms of Mexicans. It's been changing a bit, but I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't more Slovak-speaking people than Spanish-speaking people in the city even now.

My sister talked about that. She was a resident in Newark and then a surgical fellow in Pittsburgh, and the comparative almost complete absence of Latinos was startling.

It was startling coming from North Carolina.

the idea that racist mockery is necessarily rigorously reflective of the actual speech patterns of the target is laughable

Assuming this is at me, and yeah, point taken, but I think if people are bolstering the idea that her mentioning Kondo and Teigen is proof of her bias with this, it's...not exactly laughable but it raises an eyebrow at least.

So, entirely because of the book Good Omens, I would have looked askance at "please to" because I associate it with a racialized joke about the Witchfinder's early Japanese import car. But .. if that's not universal and it's her brand, hard to say, but it also wouldn't have been hard for her to say oops.

197: definitely true in the Northeast. Somewhat true in Utah, depending on the locale.

197: Yeah, my local hep brunch place started out in a long, narrow space maybe 15-20 feet wide, with the cooking all being done behind the counter, so the racial disparity between white/Asian women serving and Latinos cooking was really noticeable.

I have a poor ear for languages and accents, but I always took Billy Crystal/Nora Ephron to be having a little fun with "please to" at the expense of Eastern Europeans here. (First ten seconds and last ten seconds for those who don't want to watch the whole minute-long clip")

I've used "please to" and not to mock, in fact I think I picked it up from a white friend I met in Morocco who grew up in Utah and Wisconsin.

To bring this thread together I need to ask, is Swedish Chef canceled?

He was already cancelled because of his Twitter rant about Norwegians.

Attacking Norwegians? Chrissy Teigen is taking fire from all sides!

jms in 169 sums it up for me.

It even makes me feel less safe and comfortable. Something went wrong here on Unfogged.

In about 15 years of commenting here, I'm not sure it ever went right.

Well the discussion here clarified things for me and changed my mind. I still think it's ridiculous to call it cultural appropriation if I eat a burrito or dosa or whatever and even if I make it myself, because it is. But who gets to represent these different culinary traditions and make them popular and make money off of it is might white and that's a real problem and one I'm going to be much more aware of from now on.

In about 15 years of commenting here, I'm not sure it ever went right.

Yeah, to be clear, I don't mean to say we veered off course from some halcyon origin. I've been commenting here about 15 years too, and I'm certain I've contributed to the problem, and likely still am contributing. It has taken me a lot of years of life to get to the point where I understand oppressively white environments as a problem (a problem even for me!), can recognize some of what maintains them, and can pull back from some of those behaviors.

Note to all, and I've said it before: I still have defensive, dismissive responses! It's just that now I understand that those emotions and thoughts are not immediate license for any behavior I've been taught that I'm entitled to! Instead, they're a sign I really need to shut up just then. I try to quiet myself and listen and maybe ask a question if its appropriate. Among the things you get from that are more chances to have honest relationships. People who are regularly condescending and dismissive about these things, if you act this way in real life, you are going to hear less of the truth from non-white people. If you are like, oh, the non-white people I know all think a ton of the other stuff all these whiny wokesters complain about is stupid, then you have rewarded a certain kind of confidence, and punished others, and it does not mean you are getting a representative sample of what people think.

I still think it's ridiculous to call it cultural appropriation if I eat a burrito or dosa or whatever and even if I make it myself, because it is

Pretty sure I've never heard anyone say this.

214 Not here, no. I've seen it on the twitter but they'll let just any idiot on there. I think exposure to that take is where the dismissiveness/defensiveness stems from.

Ok, I guess I'm not on the twitter enough to be able to imagine all the takes that could exist. But (and I know this is not different from what you're saying), someone said some shit that went too far once on twitter is not a reason not be careful and listen to what else is being said in that conversation that I should hear and learn from and let inform my behavior.

And I have! That's the point of my 212. I just wanted to say that the discussions here while they are sometimes tiresome and frustrating can also be productive. YMMV.

I know, that was the point of my parenthetical! I'm just trying to generalize the point. It's good when white people learn something but sometimes that learning also comes at the expense of the poc who have to trudge through an exhausting conversation, for the thousandth time in their life, in which a substantial portion of participants are invalidating and dismissive. It would be nice if, in the world and here, we could have these conversations without the usual suspects jumping to say everything is bullshit. I get that in some ways that behavior provides fodder for the conversation, but frankly it gets tiring just trying to play whack-a-mole with it even when you're not the person directly affected (see how tired dq is in this thread. ask me how much of my energy that 1000 comment thread took), and if you are directly affected by it, it is obviously way worse.

Comity!

I'm certain I've contributed to the problem, and likely still am contributing

I'm sure that's true of me too*; I don't mean to exclude myself simply for not being (entirely) white. Over time I've been making an effort to be less extremely online, and I've been trying to comment less, read and listen more, and follow a more diverse range of sources. So for a post like this, I thought the link was really interesting and not something I would have otherwise read, but I was hesitant to look at the comments because of the likelihood of how they would go - and also I don't have much to say on the topic beyond this meta-discussion.

*I mean, dq was right to call me out for being annoying in a pandemic thread some months ago.