I despair of the finger waggers more angry about Jamie Oliver’s Jamaican jerk rice than young black men being stabbed on our streets

SOME politicians have strange priorities. A brutal crime wave is gripping Britain, with young black men the prime targets.

The horrific nature of this crisis was epitomised by an appalling incident in South London last week, when a teenager was disembowelled by a machete-wielding gang.

Yet, in the face of this deepening emergency, what is Dawn Butler, the Labour MP for Brent Central, most worried about? Microwaveable food.

Yes, that’s right. Instead of focusing on real problems faced by black communities, she used her position to launch a bizarre attack on the chef Jamie Oliver over his new product called ‘punchy jerk rice’, which is inspired by Jamaican cuisine.

Bitter

Brimming with outrage, Ms Butler — who, like me, is the child of Jamaican immigrants — asked Oliver on Twitter: ‘I’m just wondering do you know what Jamaican jerk actually is?’

The MP then adopted the pose of global guardian of Caribbean culture, telling Oliver: ‘Your jerk rice is not OK. This appropriation from Jamaica needs to stop.’

The term ‘cultural appropriation’ has become increasingly fashionable among professional grievance-mongers and selfappointed social justice warriors eager to find offence.

It is an accusation that can be hurled at anyone who embraces a custom from a culture that is not their own, such as a white woman having her hair styled in traditional cornrows, or festival-goers donning Native American headdresses.

The incendiary charge is a loaded one, implying both racial insensitivity and the exploitation of white privilege.

Indeed, that is precisely what lies at the heart of Ms Butler’s verbal assault on Oliver.

‘Jerk,’ she grandly informed him, ‘is not just a word you put before stuff to sell products.’

But to me, her condemnation is misguided. Not only is it a gross distraction from the crime wave, but it shows no faith in assimilation and cultural progress. In her extraordinary outburst, Ms Butler is essentially arguing that cultures should be ringfenced zones, where any outside influences are banned and any imitation is a form of theft.

So, presumably, Jamie should stick to only traditional dishes from his native Essex. And, of course, he has no right to make programmes such as his current one entitled ‘Jamie Cooks Italy’, since he is not Italian.

This amounts to a blinkered denial of what it is to be human. The rich story of mankind is dominated by the intermingling of cultures. Throughout history, that has been the source of creativity in everything from food to music, sport and architecture.

At this moment, as the Indian cricket team is touring England, we should remember the game was a 19th-century export to the sub- continent. Shouldn’t Ms Butler be upset about its appropriation over there?

Similarly, the term ‘bungalow’ was a 19th-century import into Britain from India. But today it could not be more British.

Instead of getting hung up about the supposed purity of Jamaican cooking, Ms Butler should celebrate this cultural to-ing and fro-ing.

After all, it’s a phenomenon that led to the creation of one of modern Britain’s favourite dishes, chicken tikka masala — which was reportedly invented in Glasgow by a migrant Bangladeshi chef.

The same applies to Jamaican culture. Whatever protestations Ms Butler makes, there is no absolutely authentic jerk recipe — my mother’s was her own concoction — and no sacrosanct way to cook rice.

I know from bitter experience many Jamaicans are unenthusiastic about the fare offered in their own supposedly authentic Caribbean restaurants in Britain — which is why they tend to cook at home.

In her tweet, Ms Butler referred to Levi Roots, the producer of Reggae Reggae Sauce who got his break on BBC2 series Dragons’ Den.

But there is no single concept as ‘reggae sauce’ because there are so many variations. And factory production means the food is nothing like that used in kitchens in Jamaica.

Roots’s sauce was simply a brilliant marketing exercise — like so much of Jamie Oliver’s output.

In truth, the history of Jamaica exposes so much of the nonsense about authenticity and ‘cultural appropriation’.

The practice of carnival, which has been exported all over the world — not least to London’s Notting Hill — began when plantation slaves were given a day off and used festivities to mock their masters. Should such events now be banned because they had their origins in slavery?

The Jamaican legend Bob Marley also could be accused of ‘ cultural appropriation’ because, with his producer Chris Blackwell, he took traditional Jamaican music and made it more accessible for mainly white American and European audiences by adding electric guitars.

Was he guilty of betraying his Jamaican roots? Nonsense.

Disgrace

Today, the wailing about ‘ cultural appropriation’ is motivated not by genuine concerns, but by the twin desires of protesters to signal their virtue and to enforce a narrow political ideology.

The prevalence of social media, especially Twitter, helps to fuel this relentless, quivering discontent, as we have seen in the Butler row, with her puerile supporters shrieking that Jamie Oliver is ‘a disgrace’ and ‘out of order’.

This mentality is producing a catalogue of absurdities, such as the ban at the University of East Anglia on a Mexican restaurant handing out sombreros to students as part of a promotion.

Or the synthetic outcry at Pembroke College, Cambridge, last year over ‘ culturally insensitive’ food when the menu included a ‘Jamaican stew’ and a ‘Tunisian’ dish, deemed by the self-appointed censors not to have the correct ingredients.

This tyranny of manufactured offence should not be allowed to prevail. The very term ‘cultural appropriation’ is an insidious, divisive form of oppression, for it implies that we should remain permanently trapped in our backgrounds.

But cultural mingling benefits mankind and promotes mutual respect.

Slur

That is perfectly illustrated in the hit new film Crazy Rich Asians, a romantic comedy directed by Jon M. Chu and set in Singapore. The movie has encountered criticism from politically correct zealots who insist it does not reflect the diversity of the city state.

Yet Asians are flocking to see it, while Asian Americans have reportedly accounted for 38 per cent of ticket sales in the U.S.

Moreover, another potential controversy in the film has been turned into a triumph, after the song Yellow by the band Coldplay was used.

Initially, the band’s lead singer Chris Martin was reluctant, fearing its title might be associated with a slur against Asian people. But Chu persuaded him the opposite was true, that the song could become an anthem for true diversity.

‘I wanted to take hit American songs and make them Chinese to give audiences a sense of how we feel as Asian Americans, that crazy blend of identities and cultures that makes up who we are,’ he has said.

These words should be heeded by Ms Butler and her finger-wagging followers, all desperate to build a mood of victimhood. In our age of globalisation and mass immigration, trying to keep cultures in silos is neither attainable nor desirable.

Jamie Oliver did nothing to deserve this absurd dressingdown from a politician full of her own opinions, but devoid of any sense of perspective.