Quotulatiousness

May 25, 2024

Another thing for progressives to obsess about – “horticultural appropriation”

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In Spiked, Lauren Smith wonders if your garden — yes, your garden — is a nest of racist appropriation:

Is your garden a bed of racist colonialism?

Is your garden racist? As incredible as this may seem, it’s a question many gardeners are being forced to ask themselves. The innocent act of planting a few flowers can now get you branded with the r-word.

A piece in the June issue of the BBC’s Gardeners’ World magazine claims that the weeds of racism have sprung up in some unlikely places. Landscape designer Jackie Herald argues that choosing to plant non-native species in British gardens can constitute “horticultural appropriation”, because they were originally brought to the UK as a result of colonialism.

Herald writes: “Embedded within cross-cultural borrowing is horticultural appropriation, something that’s all too easy for our nation of gardeners to carry on regardless. In many cases, the abundant plant selections that we now take for granted did come via free-willing exchanges, but were sourced by plant hunters during years of colonialism and power-grabbing global trade.”

So, instead of picking out plants willy-nilly, Herald tries to choose plants that “connect to my client’s cultural heritage”. That means you had better check your 23&Me results before filling your flowerbeds, otherwise you could be horticulturally appropriating plants that don’t align with your racial heritage.

Uprooting racism from your garden might be more tricky than you’d think. Not least as some of the UK’s best-loved flowers are products of “colonialism”. Magnolias, for example, came from colonial Virginia and camellias from China.

Apparently, the most problematic perennial of all is wisteria, that inoffensive purple plant you often see hanging around the doors of posh houses. In 2022, Transport for London published a sightseeing guide called Art on the Underground, which claimed that wisteria has “colonial roots” (presumably no pun intended). This is because it was brought to England in the early 19th century from China. The guide also highlighted the supposedly racist nature of using words like “exotic”, “native” or “invasive” to describe plants. According to TfL, these can cultivate painful memories of “histories of conquest” and are best avoided.

February 7, 2024

“China is a food-obsessed society”

Filed under: Books, China, Food, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

If your initial reaction to the headline is to assume this is because of the amazingly unsettled history of mainland China over the last several hundred years and the totally understandable fear of famines, I’m with you, but we’d both be wrong, as John Psmith explains:

One sunny December morning years ago, Jane and I were on holiday in the South of China. Far from the city, a little temple had been hewn out of a seaside grotto so that it partially flooded when the tide came in. We stood inside and gazed up at a statue of 觀音, “Guan Yin”, the lady to whom the temple was dedicated. Her legend originated in India, where she was known as the bodhisattva Avalokitasvara, but she’d been absorbed and appropriated by Chinese folk religion many centuries ago, and in this statue there was no trace to be found of her South Asian origins. A minute or two into our reverie, a local came over to us and, seeing that we looked out of place, helpfully explained in unaccented English, “This is one of the most important Christian goddesses.”

The Chinese are almost as bad as the Romans were about pilfering the deities of their neighbors, so you really can’t blame them when they occasionally get confused about who they stole them from. As with goddesses, so with food: earlier that day a different helpful local had steered us towards a restaurant specializing in “Western cuisine”. The menu listed steaks “French style”, “German style”, and “Barbecue style”. Soup options included minestrone and borscht, both of them with the surprise addition of prawns. Their pride and joy, however, was their breakfast menu which included roughly seventy different varieties of toast. The chef told me that there were restaurants in Europe and America that did not have so many kinds of toast, and beamed with pride when I nodded gravely. One of the diners, delighted to see real living and breathing Westerners in her local Western restaurant, told me: “The thing I love about this place is that it’s so authentic.”

This “Western” restaurant may sound ridiculous to you, but it’s only as ridiculous as most of the “Chinese” restaurants you’ve encountered in the West. First of all, there’s no such thing as “Chinese” food. China is a country, but it’s the size of a continent, and it boasts a culinary diversity which exceeds that of many actual continents. Second, the dishes you encounter in the average Chinese restaurant over here bear about as much resemblance to real Chinese food as the seventy varieties of toast and the barbecue steaks do to French cuisine. “American Chinese food” is an interesting topic in its own right, and there are some good books about it, but now that I’m through the mandatory throat-clearing you have to do when writing about Chinese cuisine for a Western audience, I’m never going to mention it again.

China is a food-obsessed society. People are always talking about their next meal. People talk about it incessantly. The Chinese equivalent of talking about the weather, a way of making polite chitchat with strangers, is to mention a restaurant that you like, or a meal that you’re looking forward to. A standard way of saying “hello” in Mandarin is “你吃饭了吗?” In Cantonese it’s “你食咗飯未呀?” Both of them literally translate as something like “have you eaten yet?” and produce a natural conversational opening to begin immediately discussing food. Perhaps most uncanny to foreigners, Chinese people will sometimes discuss their next meal while they are in the middle of eating a fancy dinner. Dozens of gorgeous little dishes spread around them, chomping or slurping away at exquisite cuisine, and happily chattering about what they plan to eat tomorrow.

None of this is remotely new. If anything, between the Revolution and the famines, Chinese food culture is actually tamer than it used to be.1 We know this from literary and historical accounts, from archeological evidence (China had fancy restaurants about a thousand years before France did), and from the structure of the language itself. They say the Eskimos have an improbable number of words for snow,2 but the Chinese actually do have a zillion words for obscure cooking techniques. What’s more, many of the words are completely different from region to region, which is hardly surprising since the food itself is bewilderingly different from one side of the country to the other.

How food-obsessed are the Chinese? One of the most priceless artifacts belonging to the imperial family, the one thing the fleeing Nationalists made sure to grab as communist artillery leveled Beijing, now the most highly-valued object in the National Palace Museum in Taipei is … The Meat-Shaped Stone.3 A single piece of jasper carved into a lifelike hunk of luscious pork belly, complete with crispy skin and layers of subcutaneous fat and meat. Feast your eyes upon it.

    1. Ferran Adrià, the legendary chef of El Bulli, once said that Mao was the most consequential figure in the history of cooking because: “[Spain, France, Italy and California] are only competing for the top spot because Mao destroyed the pre-eminence of Chinese cooking by sending China’s chefs to work in the fields and factories. If he hadn’t done this, all the other countries and all the other chefs, myself included, would still be chasing the Chinese dragon.”

    2. I once tried searching Google to find out whether Eskimos really have a lot of words for snow. The top results were all places like BuzzFeed and the Atlantic denouncing this as an outmoded racist stereotype … followed by a Wikipedia article patiently explaining that no it’s actually true.

    3. The Meat-Shaped Stone is not some weird aberration. The runner-up most valuable items in the museum are a piece of jadeite carved to look like a cabbage and a very fancy cooking vessel.

October 1, 2023

QotD: Curry

Filed under: Americas, Food, India, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I’ve just had my version of a hot curry. Now, every single Indian friend of mine just fell off their chair laughing. My Bangladeshi friend I am sure is rolling on the floor. Because honestly, their reaction to it would probably be something like: “Be quite tasty if it had any chili in it.” Or “Bit mild.”

Of course for me, that was sweaty forehead, and under my eyes beading with it, burning lips and the thought that I ought to put a roll of toilet paper in the freezer for later.

In no small part … it is what you are used to. The chili pepper was native to Mexico. It’s not something the Indians were used to … once. But they have made it their own, and added their regional variant to it, making the food they add this foreign spice to very much characteristic of their culture and their cuisine. To them it very much part of what they are. Oddly, it seems expat Indians end up eating even hotter curries than those eaten in the country — fascinating in itself.

This is something millions of non-Indian folk across the world appreciate too. Now-a-days you’ll find many families who are neither culturally nor genetically Indian who have grown up eating curries. Many of them will be very knowledgeable about what a good curry ought to be, and some of them will even prepare it with strict adherence to the methods that good cooks in the Indian subcontinent use, and go to great lengths to get the right ingredients.

Of course: if we’re going to get puerile and talk “cultural appropriation” – it’s worth reminding people that the key ingredient came from Mexico. And, if you bother to start researching many of the other much beloved ingredients – they, as often as not had their origins elsewhere. This is as much part of being human as following these silly fads is. Whenever you look at any so-called cultural appropriation, you’ll find the xyz people actually adopted chunks of that culture from … someone else, and changed it a little to suit themselves. That’s as natural to humans as farting. Some people may do it less than others, but we all do it.

Curry and the world-wide spread of curries, has mostly been a win for the species, outside of the ill-judged dodgy vindaloo eaten after sixteen pints of lager.

Dave Freer, “Curry”, Mad Genius Club, 2019-08-26.

May 18, 2023

QotD: The unironic joys of British cuisine

Filed under: Britain, Food, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In the 18th century, when William Hogarth wished to highlight Britain’s political and cultural superiority to pre-revolutionary France in immediately appreciable terms, he did so through the medium of food, distinguishing between the Roast Beef of Olde England, and the ruddy and rotund yeoman nation fattened on it, and the scraps of putrid flesh with which scrawny Frenchmen were forced, beside the crumbling gate of Calais, to satisfy their wants. For food and political nationhood go together like few other cultural products: witness the squabbling between Israel and Palestine over the right to commercialise hummus, Greeks and Turks over baklava, or of Russians and Ukrainians over ownership of borscht. Food is, after all, inherently political, a basic building block of national identity, and it is the humblest foodstuffs, the basic comfort foods of childhood, that are more often fought over than the elaborate confections of the great chefs.

Indeed, it would be trivially easy to trace the shifting faultlines of broader political currents through the prism of food. Witness the sudden shift within America’s food culture, as a previous generations’ celebration of the diverse culinary options provided by mass immigration has morphed into stern lectures from diaspora commentators on the vaguely-defined evils of white people appropriating “ethnic” cuisine. In Britain, equally, a slim volume could easily be written on the political import uncomfortably burdened on fish and chips or chicken tikka masala by devotees of mass migration; a cultural theorist could likewise tease apart the “Proper” label now applied to a distinct category of foodstuff — proper pies, proper burgers, proper chips — as a marker of a specific type of middle-class yearning for proletarian authenticity, while maintaining socially acceptable levels of consumption standards. Like the fetishised fry-ups of London caffs in prosperous areas targeting themselves at tracksuit-wearing millennial creatives, the Proper Burger is the self-consciously gentrified football terrace of our national cuisine, a cultural marker of a precisely measurable socioeconomic bracket.

When this dynamic is considered, Britain’s strange relationship with food, and with its own national cuisine, becomes worthy of analysis. Though much mocked by online Americans, presumably inured to the Lovecraftian horrors of their own food culture, British cuisine at its best is hearty, simple fare, showcasing the natural bounty of these islands, our waters rich with fish and seafood (much of it exported abroad to more appreciative consumers), our rain-soaked pastures the nursemaid of the free-range meat and rich dairy goods Britain has excelled in for millennia. At its best, British food displays the worth of good ingredients cooked well — and at its worst, of poor ingredients cooked badly.

Yet the much-vaunted culinary renaissance in British food from the Nineties on, despite the buoyant effect of an endless stream of glossy cookbooks on the publishing industry, does not seem to have had an appreciable effect on the food most of us eat from day to day. Which British office worker does not recognise the moment of weary, grudging submission to the lunchtime meal deal, the limp and soggy sandwich which fuels the nation’s economy? If Britain has a national dish, it is more likely to be the Ballardian misery of the provincial train station panini, simultaneously scorching hot and half-raw, than it is a steaming steak and ale pie, its crust crisp with suet, or a plate of sizzling lamb’s liver fried in butter with farmhouse bacon.

There is, as there is with every aspect of British life, a strong class dynamic to British food. The most fervent appreciators of the frugal peasant dishes of the past, the nation’s only consumers of stewed beef shin or lamb sweetbreads, are more likely to be upper-middle class, middle-aged executives, who by lunching at St John or the Quality Chop House celebrate the forgotten folkways of their own country, than the call centre workers or shop assistants who have replaced our rural and industrial proletariat. Yet who in Britain is immune to the sudden craving for comfort satiable only by a serving of rich cauliflower cheese or of dark and savoury cottage pie, or has not felt the hobbit-like “Why shouldn’t I?” satisfaction of choosing the fry up at a hotel breakfast over the continental pastry selection?

Aris Roussinos, “How Britain eats itself”, UnHerd, 2023-02-03.

September 21, 2022

Jonathan Kay on cultural appropriation

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Quillette, Jonathan Kay put together “a somewhat lengthy manifesto” on the topic of cultural appropriation in response to a request from Robert Jago who wanted to do an interview with Kay on this issue:

Justin Trudeau (Canada’s most prolific cultural appropriator) with dark makeup on his face, neck and hands at a 2001 “Arabian Nights”-themed party at the West Point Grey Academy, the private school where he taught.
Photo from the West Point Grey Academy yearbook, via Time

“Cultural appropriation” typically gets defined in a way that depends on whether one is defending it or denouncing it. If you’re defending it, you prefer to look at the big picture: Every new kind of art form, literary genre, style of dress, or cuisine typically represents a mix of inherited and borrowed elements. Shakespeare’s sonnets were written in an Iambic pentameter that Chaucer had “appropriated” from the French and Italians. So if Indigenous or African poets want to appropriate it from the English, no one has any basis for complaint. If you define cultural appropriation in this big-picture way, the concept isn’t just permissible. It’s artistically necessary, and indeed inevitable.

But if you’re denouncing cultural appropriation, on the other hand, the argument is more persuasive when your frame of reference is small, local, and community-rooted. I’m thinking of the (white) novelist or film director who passes through a region, and hears some garbled version of folklore that relates to a nearby Indigenous community. The guy thinks, “Oh wow, that’ll make a great novel” (or TV show, movie, etc.), and then makes a mint without consulting (let alone cashing in) the Indigenous community.

So the debate over cultural appropriation is like a lot of debates: It’s really easy to win if you get to define the terms. And since both sides pick definitions that suit them, it can become a dialogue of the deaf.

Indeed, there’s often no dialogue at all. Rather, both sides are apt to retreat into apocalyptic language about, respectively, (a) totalitarian censorship, and (b) white supremacist (cultural) genocide. This is absolutist language that leaves no room for nuance or discussion.

The cultural-universalism side of this dialogue is represented by people like me. I write about every topic under the sun, and so I get my back up when someone tells me that I’ve got to “stay in my lane”. My whole career is built around hopscotching from one idea to the next without worrying (much) about who gets offended. For me, the imposition of rules on what people are allowed to write about isn’t just an annoyance. It’s an existential threat to the creative faculties.

But if you’re on the other end of this — say, you’re a member of a small Indigenous community whose history and folklore have yet to be recorded or celebrated in any definitive form — you don’t care about some white guy in Toronto whining about how he can’t do the equivalent of wearing a sombrero on Cinco de Mayo. A small First Nations community might get only one real shot at telling its story to the world. If that shot gets used up by an outsider who strip-mines the locals’ oral history for a bestseller, that can no doubt feel like existential threat to one’s cultural autonomy. It’s like: “So you took our land, punished us for using our own language, sent our kids to residential schools, and now all we really have left is our culture, and you want to steal that, too?”

There’s this trite expression that often gets trotted out these days: Intent doesn’t matter, only the harm you cause. But of course, intent does matter. And if an author, director, or artist intends to respectfully and accurately include a community’s story in his or her work, then, for me, that’s very much a mark in their favour. That said, I absolutely do not think that this means there is an obligation to “honour” or “uplift” the community in question — let alone express “solidarity” or “allyship” with them. Doing so means you’re writing activist propaganda. What I mean, rather, is that you shouldn’t be intending to mock or belittle whole swathes of humanity.

The problem is that, in Canadian cultural circles at least, this isn’t really the standard that’s applied. I’ve spoken to a number of Canadian writers who, out of the best of intentions, invest their own funds in “sensitivity readers” — a process that can be not only expensive and time-consuming, but also creatively ruinous, since these consultants often are bursting with ideas about how to turn your novel or movie into a specimen of the above-referenced activist propaganda. I know one woman, in particular — a novelist — who appeared before a First Nations tribal council, and got its official permission to include a character in her book whose identity related to their community. But then a community member, someone not even involved with the band leadership, went after the woman and tried to smear her as racist. This is after she’d dotted every I and crossed every T of the sensitivity-reader process.

February 7, 2022

American pizza

Filed under: Food, History, Italy, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At An Eccentric Culinary History, H.D. Miller makes a strong case for pizza being more an American dish than an Italian one:

“Pizza” by rdpeyton

Today, standing atop the sprawling edifice that is the American restaurant industry, it’s hard to imagine a time when pizza wasn’t popular. But, prior to World War Two, pizza was barely known in the United States outside of a few Italian enclaves in the Northeast. For all of the praise heaped upon Lombardi’s in New York City, until the war, few people north of Houston Street had heard of it, or the dish it served.

From the mid-19th century forward, there were plenty of Italians in America, in places like New York, New Orleans and San Francisco. Most of those early Italian immigrants — around 75,000 before 1880 — were from northern Italy, not the South, and the restaurants they built were usually serving multi-course, table d’hôte meals of meat, bread, macaroni, wine and coffee at reasonable prices. The model was Caffe Moretti’s in Manhattan. Established in 1858 by Stefano Morretti, an ex-seminarian from the Veneto, Morretti’s offered diners generous portions and cheap prices. It did not, however, offer pizzas.

I have to emphasize this, you couldn’t order a pizza in the vast majority of Italian restaurants in America prior to 1945. And the reason you couldn’t order a pizza in Italian restaurants is because pizza isn’t Italian.

Let me repeat that: Pizza isn’t Italian.

Pizza is Neapolitan. It’s a distinct speciality of Naples, developed at at time when Italy didn’t even exist as a nation. Saying pizza is Italian is like saying haggis is British. It might be technically true, but not really.

As in America, prior to the 1950’s, pizza wasn’t something most Italians knew or cared about. In 1900, there were supposedly no pizzerias in Italy anywhere outside of the medieval walls of Napoli. You couldn’t even get pizza in the suburbs. Pizza was strictly street food for poor people in the crowded tangled alleys near the port. […]

In other words, pizza was not something the average Tuscan, Ligurian or Venetian would have thought suitable for a sit-down meal. Or, if they ever did think of it, it was to revile pizza as oily, unappetizing and a likely vector of cholera. This is because Naples was really famous at the time for being dirty and disease-ridden. (If you’re serious about early pizza history, one that strips away the just-so stories, then go read Inventing the Pizzeria by Antonio Mattozzi.)

What brought pizza to America was the mass immigration of southern Italians between 1880 and 1910, when more than 4 million people moved to the United States. That’s why Lombardi’s didn’t get going until 1905, when there were finally enough Neapolitans in Little Italy to keep the doors open.

The same dynamic played out in South America, in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. The first successful pizza restaurant in the world located outside of Naples was founded in Buenos Aires in 1882, when a Neapolitan immigrant baker named Nicolas Vaccarezza started selling the pies out of his shop in Boca. For reference purposes, a decade earlier, an attempt to open a pizzeria in Rome, Italy, had ended in bankruptcy, meaning, at the turn of the last century, you could get a pizza in Buenos Aries, São Paulo or New York, but not in Rome, Florence or Venice.

H/T to Ed Driscoll for the link.

December 11, 2021

Pretendians in Canadian academia may resemble “those legendary Klan gatherings where everyone is an uncover FBI agent”

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

After recounting the rise and fall of Carrie Bourassa, Ed West looks at other examples of white people deliberately passing themselves off as members of First Nations groups and other disadvantaged groups:

Carrie Bourassa with media.
Lead photo in Geoff Leo’s article for the CBC – https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/carrie-bourassa-indigenous

… then some serious allegations came to light casting doubt on Morning Star Bear’s fitness for office: Bourassa, it turned out, was white. Her forebears were all Russian, Czech and Polish farmers, who while the Metis struggled with the arrival of the Europeans were back in Tsarist Russia, living lives of unbridled white privilege as agricultural workers.

The response was merciless anger. Bourassa’s colleague Winona Wheeler, an associate professor of Indigenous Studies at the University of Saskatchewan, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that what she did was “abuse” and “theft”, “colonialism in its worst form and it’s a gross form of white privilege.”

Another called her “the modern-day Grey Owl” in reference to the famous early 20th century English conservationist who had managed to convince the world he was Native American, rather than being Archibald from Hastings.

Bourassa’s outing was followed last weekend by that of Jessica Bardill, an “indigenous” language speaker at Montreal University who was reportedly suspended because of doubts about her race. And who could have suspected she was white?

Bourassa and Bardill are hardly exceptional: the past two years have seen at least half a dozen similar racial unmaskings, almost all female academics. Is this the result of the strange racial spoils system created by affirmative action, or does it reflect the cultural emptiness felt by some North Americans, the unbearableness whiteness of being?

Among them is Suzy Kies, an indigenous “expert” in – yet again – Canada, on whose advice a Catholic school district burned 30 library books about indigenous people, removing another 4,700. Kies had become quite a prominent figure on all matters indigenous; again, how could they have possibly noticed?

One suspects that a conference of Canada’s indigenous educators would turn out like those legendary Klan gatherings where everyone is an uncover FBI agent, or that meeting of Holocaust survivor memoir writers where both were fake.

Many of these “indigenous” experts had risen far by telling white liberals what they wanted to hear, confirming their worldview. The same was true of @Sciencing_Bi, who enthralled Twitter last spring with her powerful denunciations of sexual misconduct in higher education. The mysterious young woman had grown up in Alabama, a member of the Hopi tribe, but had “fled the south because of their oppression of queer folk”. Sadly, Sciencing Bi contracted Covid in April 2020, having been forced by her cruel university to do in-person teaching just at the point when that issue was becoming a culture war hot topic, and died, quite unusually for someone so young.

May 30, 2021

New frontiers in cultural appropriation

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

John McWhorter considers the notion that white people shouldn’t be allowed to use “black” words and phrases because it’s a form of cultural appropriation and therefore another aspect of white supremacy:

Screencap from NBC’s Saturday Night Live highlights for “Gen-Z Hospital” skit.

A little while ago, a Saturday Night Live skit depicted a multiracial group of teens communicating in what was depicted as “Gen Z slang”, with the doctor they were talking with having to “translate” his thoughts into it to communicate with them.

A lot of people didn’t like it, because the slang in question was mostly of Black English origin. The complaint is that the skit was denying the black roots of these terms, and instead ascribing them to Americans in general – i.e. (shudder) white persons. As in, yes – the problem was cultural appropriation.

As I write, there are still people grousing on social media in the wake of that skit about whites “stealing” black language, with a leitmotif being that we should apply our N-word taboo more widely. To wit, many propose that whites should not be allowed to use Black English terms because they are “ours”. Many who haven’t outright proposed this give the notion Likes, which suggests that a considerable group of people – and from what I can see, quite a few of them are white – concur with this line of reasoning.

Let’s break this down. To do so we must understand the sorts of terms in question. The SNL skit included, among others, yo, bestie, vibes, feels for feelings, salty for irritated, bro / bruh and no cap for “I’m not kidding” (as in, these are actual whole gold teeth, not golden caps on teeth).

Is there a case that you should only use these terms if you’re black, or that if you use them as a white person you should “do the work” of thinking hard about whether or not it is problematic (blasphemous)?

February 28, 2021

Cultural appropriation foods around the world

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Food, France, History, India, Italy, Japan, Pacific, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

J.J. McCullough
Published 14 Dec 2019

Baguettes in Vietnam! Curry in Japan! Tea in India! Let’s look at the practice of eating food from other countries, which is more widespread than you might think, thanks to imperialism and immigration.

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February 13, 2021

MORE cultural appropriation foods!

Filed under: Americas, Europe, Food, History, India, Japan — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

J.J. McCullough
Published 14 Nov 2020

How much famous food is just copied from some other country? Thanks to Jack Rackham for the shogun animation!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaQz…

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January 8, 2021

QotD: Culinary appropriation

Filed under: Americas, Europe, Food, History, India, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Cultural appropriation is good. When ideas from different cultures are imperfectly absorbed, new ideas ensue. Exchange promotes change. I detest empires, but, in deference to truth, praise them as culturally creative arenas in which new ways of life, thought, art, language, worship, work, government and food take shape, as people swap and circulate biota, behaviour and brilliance.

Some of the resulting dishes are deplorable. I could live happily in a world without chop suey, chilli con carne, or coronation chicken. I’m not going to try a recipe described in Eater magazine as “huevos Kathmandu that paired green chutney and spiced chickpeas with fried eggs”.

Tex-mex cuisine is Montezuma’s most effective revenge. Rijstafel conquered the Netherlands more thoroughly than the Dutch ever subjected the East, and now rivals the drearier Hutspot as Holland’s national dish. Yet Dutch food still lags behind grandes cuisines.

Vindaloo is the epitome of culinary appropriation: a Bengali dish with ingredients from the Americas — potatoes and chillies — and a corruption of a Portuguese name: vinho d’alho, or garlic wine. It has become so British that “Vindaloo nah-nah” was the chorus of a chant popular among English football fans at a World Cup tournament (perhaps they confused it with Waterloo). I still dislike it.

Usually, however, culturally exchanged foods produce admirable dishes. Chocolate, tomato and avocado are among the few English words derived from Nahuatl. The Aztecs never used the items they designate in pain au chocolat, or tricolore, or avocado toast. But the responsible cultural appropriators deserve praise, not blame.

Satay would be unthinkable if Malays hadn’t incorporated peanuts that Portuguese pinched from Brazil. The basics of cajun cuisine reached Louisiana with “Acadian” migrants from French Canada — but cultural appropriation made it what it is today. Black chefs in the same region would be at a loss without African-born yams.

Curries would be historical curiosities if Indians hadn’t appropriated chillies from Mexico. Is Sichuanese cuisine imaginable without American peppers or sweet potatoes. Tempura would be unavailable if Japanese chefs hadn’t annexed and improved Portuguese techniques of frying. Culinary historians bicker over whether Jewish or Italian immigrants developed fish and chips. But almost everyone agrees that the British could never have done it on their own.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto, “Bad taste of PC foodies”, The Critic, 2020-09-19.

August 25, 2020

QotD: Collective punishment

Filed under: History, Law, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

We used to take calls for collective punishment much more seriously. In the 1949 Geneva Convention it was determined that: “No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed.” Collective punishment was seen as a tactic designed to intimidate and subdue an entire population. The drafters of the Geneva Convention clearly had in mind the atrocities committed in WWI and WWII where entire villages and communities suffered mass retribution for the resistance activities of a few. In their commentary on the outlawing of collective punishment the International Red Cross stated: “A great step forward has been taken. Responsibility is personal and it will no longer be possible to inflict penalties on persons who have themselves not committed the acts complained of.”

In times of peace, collective punishment may come in the form of social media dust-ups over sombrero hats or Chinese dresses. Gradual softening on the taboo of collective punishment does not bode well for the health of liberal democracies. Which is also why it is important for us all to remember that social-justice activists who complain about cultural appropriation only represent themselves, and not the minority groups to which they belong.

Claire Lehmann, “The Evils of Cultural Appropriation”, Tablet, 2018-06-11.

June 25, 2020

QotD: Cultural appropriation

Filed under: History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In the ever-widening gyre of what cannot be appropriated without causing offense, now even American heroes are off limits. Apparently, Caucasians are no longer allowed to quote Martin Luther King. While I almost sympathize with the view that too many people of all colors tend to only quote King’s more saccharine words, it is surreal that some African-Americans would be outraged that others quote such an admirable American: “MLK belongs to us. Do not dare to quote my MLK. My Martin Luther King Jr., was not here for white people. Keep his name out your thin-lipped mouth. Y’all banned forever.” Belongs? Like a possession? Is the bitter irony of talking about King as a possession — mere chattel, the private property of a particular group — lost on some members of the current generation of African Americans? I had thought that, at least since the passage of the 13th Amendment, people could not be owned.

Joseph Mussomeli, “Victim Privilege, Cultural Appropriation, & the New Enslavement”, The Imaginative Conservative, 2018-02-09.

June 19, 2020

QotD: We call it the Corded Ware culture, not the Battle Axe culture to make it less interesting to boys

Filed under: History, India, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

India played a large role in the development of European conceptions of race. In 1786 British judge William Jones delivered a lecture in Calcutta suggesting that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin were all descended from the same lost language, a ghost tongue now called Proto-Indo-European.

Jones went on to hypothesize that an ancient invasion of Dravidian-speaking India by Proto-Indo-European-speaking Aryans from Iran could help explain the curious distribution of language, skin color, and caste within the Hindu world today.

Jones’ ideas had unfortunate influence. Reich writes:

    To the Nazis and others, the distribution of the Indo-European language family, linking Europe to India … spoke of an ancient conquest moving out of an ancestral homeland, displacing and subjugating the peoples of the conquered territories, an event they wished to emulate.

Hitler thus culturally appropriated the Hindu swastika.

Since 1945, the notion of Aryan invaders has been unsurprisingly unpopular.

In Europe, anthropologists have promoted the “pots not people” theory to argue that trade and changes in fashion must explain why Corded Ware pots suddenly showed up all over Europe about 4,900 years ago. (So did battle axes; indeed, early scientists called this the Battle Axe Culture. But that sounded too awesome. Hence, more recent academics renamed it after its pottery style to make these brutal barbarians sound dweebier and thus less interesting to boys.)

In India, the notion of Hindu culture as a giant conspiracy by Aryan invaders to enshrine their descendants at the top of the social order for the rest of eternity perhaps struck a little too close to home.

Steve Sailer, “Reich’s Laboratory”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-03-28.

March 12, 2019

9 British Dishes Everyone Should Try – Anglophenia Ep 2

Filed under: Britain, Food, History, India — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Anglophenia
Published on 22 May 2014

British food has a bad reputation, but Siobhan Thompson’s here to set the record straight, offering nine tasty U.K. dishes that will quiet the naysayers.

Visit the Anglophenia blog at http://www.bbcamerica.com/anglophenia

Photos via Fotolia.

Follow Anglophenia on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/anglophenia
Follow Siobhan Thompson on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/vornietom

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