Sunday, January 01, 2017

Why are leftists such racists?*

Among the former Saturday Night Live actor’s purported offenses: He used a glass casserole pan to make the dish, which Salon self-righteously proclaimed “failed the test” for respectful cookware, because “there’s one thing everyone can agree on, and that is that one must cook paella in, well, a paella pan.”
So, according to these self-appointed arbiters of PC, if you don't have the 'proper' pan you can't cook something?  

Proper name for those people: morons.

'Respectful cookware', for Deity's sake...

But wait!  There's MORE!
But unlike Schneider, Oliver is a chef, and a widely recognized one. So people will turn to him for advice. What are a celebrity chef’s responsibilities when writing a recipe for a dish that hails from a different cultural tradition than their own? How much should they stay close to the original dish and how much room do they have to be as creative as they want to be?
Here's your answer, Salon: all the room they damned well want.  Deal with it.  Someone wants to bitch because someone says "This is authentic!" when they've messed with the recipe, fine; you want to bitch because someone experiments with different ingredients, or a different pan?  Piss off.

...But unlike Mexican-American and Italian-American food in the U.S., which are the result of large populations of immigrants settling in the country and bringing with them their food and recipes and adapting both to the ingredients and the palates of the land, the chorizo-paella (or the Oberlin “banh mi”) seems rather the result of non-Spanish chefs in a test kitchen deciding what belongs in a dish with what seems like little research or respect to the country of origin. And unlike most creations that are a result of culinary cross-pollination (think: the ramen burger), no one is changing the name to suggest this is a new creation. (I suggest we call this “choriella” from “chorizo” and “paella”).
Got that?  "How dare someone change the recipe in any way!  You must at least change the name!"
Such bullshit.

And now we come to the main point of our upset:
Krishnendu Ray, a New York University professor of food studies, argues in “The Ethnic Restaurateur” that white chefs have more freedom to play with other people’s food than chefs of color do, which creates an inherent inequality in the field. To that, I would add that in a world where most people turn to the Internet to find recipes — and English is the de facto lingua franca of the online world — English-speaking chefs not only have more freedom to play around, but they also have the power to ultimately transform traditional dishes from other countries, without so much as an acknowledgement.
Someone explain to me- please- how the fucking hell 'white chefs have more freedom' to experiment with recipes?  Someone tell me just what Masters of Food are preventing 'chefs of color' from doing whatever the hell they want?  For that matter, explain to me why there's a 'professor of food studies' sucking at the university teat?

Also: how the bloody hell does a recipe being online in English have the power to prevent other people from translating it, and trying any damn variation they choose? 

Apparently Ray thinks 'chefs of color' are too stupid, or incompetent, to think and experiment.

I think I'll make another Mandel-Eplekake, which will make me a horrible appropriationist in two ways: far as I know there's no Viking blood in me, and I SPICE IT!! 

Suck it, bitches.



*Title borrowed from past Insty posts

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Further proof, as if any were needed, that Social Justice Warriors politicize and ruin everything, even the food on your plate.

It's like something out of The Onion, isn't it? I can't tell the difference between The Onion and the real world any more.