Several weeks ago, as is our Sunday night tradition, my mother and I sprawled out on the sofa to enjoy the latest episode of the Great British Baking Show. We were both particularly excited for “Mexican Week.”
My white, Jewish, Bostonian mother has, over the last 25 years, become reasonably skilled at cooking traditional Colombian foods. Having grown up with flan on the Shabbat dinner table, it never occurred to me that adopting or integrating cross-cultural cuisine could be construed as cultural appropriation.
Boy, was I wrong!
I knew we were in trouble when Noel and Matt, the goofy co-hosts, appeared in sombreros and serape ponchos. Although the pair began by acknowledging that their jokes would probably be poorly received, they immediately segued into intentionally misusing a Spanish name for a laugh.
It really went downhill from there.
As Chef Adriana Cavita points out in Rachel Hall’s Guardian piece, “Great British Bake Off accused of cultural appropriation in Mexican week,” the show essentially reduced Mexican cuisine to “just a cactus and a sombrero.”
The cuisine was completely stereotypical. On a show known for its wild variety, “Mexican Week” was strikingly homogeneous. In her Bon Appétit article titled “GBBO’s ‘Mexico Week’ Shows the UK Doesn’t Understand Mexican Food Quite Yet,” Sylvio Martins points out that seven contestants chose the same conchas pastry for their signature bake.
Cavita and Martins are both entirely correct to point out that, leaving insensitive jokes aside, the greatest flaw of this episode was its reliance on easily accessible stereotypes of Mexican food.
You don’t have to be a famous chef or a food writer to recognize that tacos, the food most associated with Tex-Mex fast food, don’t belong on a gourmet baking show.
Seriously, GBBO, from a country of 130 million people and thousands of years of culinary history, you couldn’t come up with an actual baking challenge other than a tortilla?
It seems intuitive, particularly as a Latin watching this show, that this was cultural appropriation. But, we should be able to do better at defining cultural appropriation than “I know it when I see it.”
When considering if something is “appropriately inspired by” another culture, people must 1) think about how the people of that culture would feel, 2) ask themselves if their actions would be exploitative, and 3) determine if they are giving a skewed or inaccurate perspective of that culture or reinforcing stereotypes.
Cross-cultural exchange is a sharing of culture between two parties to better understand each other. In cultural appropriation, one party takes the culture of the other party and applies it without respect for or knowledge of the culture.
The issue of cross-cultural appropriation is particularly sticky with regard to food.
Many argue that the late Diana Kennedy, a well-known English food writer and cookbook author, is the exemplar of a non-native champion of culinary cultural exchange.
In her New York Times article titled “Diana Kennedy’s Complicated Relationship With Mexican Cuisine,” Tejal Rao attempts to understand whether Kennedy’s relationship with Mexican food represents cultural appropriation.
After decades of living in Mexico, Kennedy became the leading English-speaking expert on Mexican cuisine. Rao explains that “Kennedy apprenticed herself to…rural Mexican women, Indigenous women and working-class women.” The author of nine cookbooks on Mexican cuisine, Kennedy is often credited with bringing Mexican cuisine into the mainstream of English and American culture.
One of Rao’s bones to pick with Kennedy is the concept that, although Kennedy promoted local Mexican cuisine, “Zapotec cooks still aren’t in the international spotlight as experts on their own foods.”
The idea that a white woman should be the expert on Zapotec cooking is at the heart of Rao’s insinuation of cultural appropriation. It’s essentially impossible to argue against this. Clearly, Zapotec cooks should be the experts on Zapotec cooking. However, without Kennedy, Zapotec cooking might still be unknown to huge parts of the world.
Rao’s other major issue with Kennedy is the rigidity with which she clung to “her” Mexican cuisine. Rao views her as a dogged defender of her own orthodoxy, explaining, “Once she learned a recipe inside and out, practiced it and published it, she guarded it ferociously. In her mind, the recipe was hers now, and her job was to secure its survival, no matter the cost.”
Again, we’re left with the same paradox that plagues Rao’s first critique. Yes, it appears to be cultural appropriation when a white Englishwoman sets herself up as the guardian of Mexican recipes. On the other hand, in the geopolitical world that Kennedy inhabited, there was no one else to take up that gauntlet.
In an ideal world, we would learn about each native cuisine from the people who cook it. However, bringing minority ethnic cuisine into mainstream culture may always involve some cultural appropriation. It's awfully hard, without ambassadors like Kennedy, for novel culinary ideas to be introduced.
Apparently, it's also awfully hard for those mainstream ambassadors to yield to the expertise of the native experts and allow those natives to become the authorities.
Neither the GBBO nor Kennedy got it exactly right. Although Kennedy showed tremendous respect for the Mexican cooks and recipes, she should have worked harder to bring her Mexican sources into the public eye. Given that she did not, the GBBO should, at the very least, have looked at one of Kennedy’s nine cookbooks to learn more about Mexican cuisine instead of relying on cheap jokes and Taco Bell’s appropriation.
My white, Jewish, Bostonian mother has, over the last 25 years, become reasonably skilled at cooking traditional Colombian foods. Having grown up with flan on the Shabbat dinner table, it never occurred to me that adopting or integrating cross-cultural cuisine could be construed as cultural appropriation.
Boy, was I wrong!
I knew we were in trouble when Noel and Matt, the goofy co-hosts, appeared in sombreros and serape ponchos. Although the pair began by acknowledging that their jokes would probably be poorly received, they immediately segued into intentionally misusing a Spanish name for a laugh.
It really went downhill from there.
As Chef Adriana Cavita points out in Rachel Hall’s Guardian piece, “Great British Bake Off accused of cultural appropriation in Mexican week,” the show essentially reduced Mexican cuisine to “just a cactus and a sombrero.”
The cuisine was completely stereotypical. On a show known for its wild variety, “Mexican Week” was strikingly homogeneous. In her Bon Appétit article titled “GBBO’s ‘Mexico Week’ Shows the UK Doesn’t Understand Mexican Food Quite Yet,” Sylvio Martins points out that seven contestants chose the same conchas pastry for their signature bake.
Cavita and Martins are both entirely correct to point out that, leaving insensitive jokes aside, the greatest flaw of this episode was its reliance on easily accessible stereotypes of Mexican food.
You don’t have to be a famous chef or a food writer to recognize that tacos, the food most associated with Tex-Mex fast food, don’t belong on a gourmet baking show.
Seriously, GBBO, from a country of 130 million people and thousands of years of culinary history, you couldn’t come up with an actual baking challenge other than a tortilla?
It seems intuitive, particularly as a Latin watching this show, that this was cultural appropriation. But, we should be able to do better at defining cultural appropriation than “I know it when I see it.”
When considering if something is “appropriately inspired by” another culture, people must 1) think about how the people of that culture would feel, 2) ask themselves if their actions would be exploitative, and 3) determine if they are giving a skewed or inaccurate perspective of that culture or reinforcing stereotypes.
Cross-cultural exchange is a sharing of culture between two parties to better understand each other. In cultural appropriation, one party takes the culture of the other party and applies it without respect for or knowledge of the culture.
The issue of cross-cultural appropriation is particularly sticky with regard to food.
Many argue that the late Diana Kennedy, a well-known English food writer and cookbook author, is the exemplar of a non-native champion of culinary cultural exchange.
In her New York Times article titled “Diana Kennedy’s Complicated Relationship With Mexican Cuisine,” Tejal Rao attempts to understand whether Kennedy’s relationship with Mexican food represents cultural appropriation.
After decades of living in Mexico, Kennedy became the leading English-speaking expert on Mexican cuisine. Rao explains that “Kennedy apprenticed herself to…rural Mexican women, Indigenous women and working-class women.” The author of nine cookbooks on Mexican cuisine, Kennedy is often credited with bringing Mexican cuisine into the mainstream of English and American culture.
One of Rao’s bones to pick with Kennedy is the concept that, although Kennedy promoted local Mexican cuisine, “Zapotec cooks still aren’t in the international spotlight as experts on their own foods.”
The idea that a white woman should be the expert on Zapotec cooking is at the heart of Rao’s insinuation of cultural appropriation. It’s essentially impossible to argue against this. Clearly, Zapotec cooks should be the experts on Zapotec cooking. However, without Kennedy, Zapotec cooking might still be unknown to huge parts of the world.
Rao’s other major issue with Kennedy is the rigidity with which she clung to “her” Mexican cuisine. Rao views her as a dogged defender of her own orthodoxy, explaining, “Once she learned a recipe inside and out, practiced it and published it, she guarded it ferociously. In her mind, the recipe was hers now, and her job was to secure its survival, no matter the cost.”
Again, we’re left with the same paradox that plagues Rao’s first critique. Yes, it appears to be cultural appropriation when a white Englishwoman sets herself up as the guardian of Mexican recipes. On the other hand, in the geopolitical world that Kennedy inhabited, there was no one else to take up that gauntlet.
In an ideal world, we would learn about each native cuisine from the people who cook it. However, bringing minority ethnic cuisine into mainstream culture may always involve some cultural appropriation. It's awfully hard, without ambassadors like Kennedy, for novel culinary ideas to be introduced.
Apparently, it's also awfully hard for those mainstream ambassadors to yield to the expertise of the native experts and allow those natives to become the authorities.
Neither the GBBO nor Kennedy got it exactly right. Although Kennedy showed tremendous respect for the Mexican cooks and recipes, she should have worked harder to bring her Mexican sources into the public eye. Given that she did not, the GBBO should, at the very least, have looked at one of Kennedy’s nine cookbooks to learn more about Mexican cuisine instead of relying on cheap jokes and Taco Bell’s appropriation.