Let’s talk about food

So we talked about a pretty controversial topic last week. The idea of gender being taken from another person and not having any issue with it. How is that different than cultural appropriation? Why is gender more “shareable” than culture? We share culture in a lot of ways. Culture is considered a lot of different things. Food, art, fashion, language… the list goes on. So why are we only okay with sharing certain aspects of culture and not the other ones?

When you go out to a restaurant, you first have to pick the genre of food before anything else. You list off the options: Mexican, Chinese, American, Thai, Indian… you can go on for days about this. So, you’re an American and nobody looks at you sideways when you go to a Japanese restaurant. Nobody is accusing you of offending anyone, but you’re technically consuming part of Japanese culture.

Well, what happens when you come across a restaurant that is Asian-fusion. What the heck does that mean? Fusion is the blending of two different things to make one thing. So, are they saying they’re blending two types of food genres? That’s exactly what they’re saying and they aren’t getting scrutinized for cultural appropriation. In fact, it is actually celebrated as a revolutionizing culinary genre.

So you decide to go with Asian-fusion for dinner. You go to Ho Sum Bistro, a “Californiental” restaurant in Newport Beach, CA. Californiental is the idea of Chinese food blended with the organic and fresh California genre. The blending of this makes for some really healthy and delicious Chinese food. You get to try some dim sum, rice dishes, and end with some noodles. You finish your meal feeling full, but knowing that you just had a really healthy meal.

You wouldn’t have had the opportunity to have this healthy Chinese food if it wasn’t for the fusion of the two genres. When you ate the food, you felt like it was an inventive take on the Chinese food genre. You didn’t think it was insulting to the Chinese culture or that it was ripping it off. I guess we aren’t always mad about cultures taking inspiration from each other.

Looking in to these comparisons makes me think more and more that we need to redefine cultural appropriation or at least just let people know what it means. It needs to be reiterated that appropriation is when something is offensive such as making fun of another culture in a way that makes people uncomfortable. We can’t keep accusing people of appropriation for adopting aspects of other cultures. Then nobody will have the freedom to express themselves.

We are a very generous world when it comes to most things. We share our food, our art, our clothes, and our language. They say the mixing of cultures is a beautiful thing. So when we do it, we can’t get offended or critical. More and more, I keep hearing about needing to be sensitive when it comes to outfits or posting things on social media, specifically because of cultural appropriation. It gets exhausting always having to think about who you’re offending or which of a hundred different ways something you do might be taken. What happened to our freedom of expression? We need to get back to being free with blending and mixing it up.