Please don’t appropriate my burrito
I’m not here to lecture either side in the cultural appropriation debate.
But when a burrito gets weaponized, the debate has strayed onto an absurd battlefield. Such was the case this week when two women in Portland, Ore., closed down their pop-up taco cart amid accusations of racism and exploitation.
The problem started with a story in the Willamette Week. The women, Kali Wilgus and Liz Connelly, talked about how a road trip to Puerto Nuevo, Mexico, inspired their aptly named Kooks Burritos.
The women fell in love with the local tortillas. So they started asking questions.
“I picked the brains of every tortilla lady there in the worst broken Spanish ever, and they showed me a little of what they did,” Connelly told the publication, unaware she had just opened a can of worms in perfect English.
“They told us the basic ingredients, and we saw them moving and stretching the dough similar to how pizza makers do before rolling it out with rolling pins.
They wouldn’t tell us too much about technique, but we were peeking into the windows of every kitchen, totally fascinated by how easy they made it look.”
Run for cover. That quote landed like a cluster bomb. The Burrito Wars rumbled to life and soon there were counteroffensive headlines such as, “These White Cooks Bragged About Stealing Recipes From Mexico To Start a Portland Business.”
That’s one way of looking at it. But if travelling the world and finding inspiration in local cuisine now qualifies as a crime against humanity, I fear many of our master chefs may need to lawyer up.
Every “fusion” restaurant may need to be shuttered. We’ll also need to investigate the ownership and supply chains of every company inside this diabolical web of “ethnic” foods.
The confusing part about the Burrito Wars is the inconsistent rules of engagement. These women started a business so small, it was run out of a parking lot. It was open only for weekend breakfast. They didn’t kidnap an abuelita and imprison her in a tortilla sweatshop. They didn’t even “steal” a recipe, not unless the Mexican locals are cramming eggs and fries into their beach burritos.
So why are protesters not targeting Taco Bell, which this week announced plans to expand with hundreds of new restaurants in China, Brazil, India and Canada? Is it be- cause the only thing a Doritos Cheesy Gordita Crunch is likely to appropriate is indigestion?
And what are we to make of the cultural hybridization — Sweet Chili Thai, Baja Chipotle, Butter Chicken — offered by the taste scientists at Fat Bastard Burrito? One of the Japanese restaurants I frequent now offers a sushi burrito. Should I notify the UN or gather more evidence on the wildly inauthentic Burrito Bowl at Chipotle? To whom should I apologize for the dessert burrito I once devoured in Salzburg or the cheeseburger I ordered in Cancun?
You know who invented the burrito? That’s a trick question: nobody knows who invented the burrito. It has multiple origin stories. I suspect this is why burritos are like snowflakes: no two are the same. A burrito is a culinary blank slate.
In fact, if we pull back the lens, we can see that all cuisine has benefited from regional cross-pollination at some point in history.
Food, much like art, is not static. It is dynamic. It changes over time and place. I could bore you with Hellenic tuna commodification tales or the diffusion paths of tomatoes and potatoes as a byproduct of trade and exploration.
Demographics in Portland, which was recently described as “the whitest city in America,” are no doubt fuelling the Burrito Wars. There is even a Google doc floating around that lists “White-Owned Appropriative Restaurants in Portland.”
But the question becomes: when is appropriation just appreciation? When are divisions based on ethnicity or skin colour at odds with globalization and diversity?
Just asking that question now seems dangerous and may be the reason you see me operating a forklift at Home Depot next week. But with so many other roiling divisions, shouldn’t food be a unifying force?
I love that my daughters live in a multicultural city where a school lunch consisting of a thermos full of biryani triggers no reaction. When I was their age, a thermos full of biryani would have triggered a severe wedgie.
Again, I’m not lecturing. But if we can’t have melting pots in our kitchens, we are left with artificial silos beyond. Navigating life within narrow cultural lanes seems more racist than the racism these lanes are allegedly designed to escape.
I was born in Akron to parents who emigrated from India. We all moved to Canada, the most welcoming and tolerant nation on earth. I wear glasses, jeans, speak and write only in English, watch baseball, consume foods from dozens of countries, play the piano, use a laptop and drink too much vodka, all of which when calibrated against my ancestral roots could be construed as acts of cultural appropriation.
But only if identity is a reductive, zero-sum game.
It’s not and that’s why the Burrito Wars is such a half-baked battle.
We are not what we eat. Sometimes food for thought is just food.