Queen of Congee: Sorry for whitewash

Karen Taylor, a White acupuncturist from Eugene, Ore., said in a recent blog post that she has spent “a lot of time modernizing” — even improving — congee, a traditional Asian rice porridge, for the “Western” palate.

Taylor, the owner of the company Breakfast Cure, has also called herself the Queen of Congee. She has said she started eating congee roughly 25 years ago as a student of Chinese medicine in Santa Fe, N.M.

Now, Taylor is facing criticism that her company has culturally appropriated and whitewashed the dish, claiming to have made it less “foreign.”

Taylor has since edited the blog post and removed her title as “queen” of the dish. Breakfast Cure has also apologized, saying on its website that “we fell short of supporting and honoring the Asian American community, and for that, we are deeply sorry.”

Congee is a rice porridge found in many Asian countries. At its base, it is made from water and rice, but it can contain anything from chicken to pickled eggs.

“It’s a way that Chinese people made something go a long way,” Valerie Soe, a professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University, told The Washington Post. “You only need, like, one cup of rice or less to make an entire pot of this stuff.”

Soe said the dish is something that many Chinese Americans grew up eating, noting it is especially popular in Southern China, where her family is from. There, she said, they call it “jook.”

Soe learned about Taylor’s congee company in recent days, and she immediately thought Taylor was “Columbusing” — a term referring to purportedly discovering a piece of culture that, in fact, has existed long before.

“It is disrespectful to the culture,” Soe said.

Taylor has deleted many of the comments her critics found disrespectful. Since facing criticism for not sufficiently supporting the Asian community, she has pledged to donate 1 per cent of her sales to the advocacy group Asian Americans Advancing Justice.

And she has made further attempts to show her support to the Asian community.