Hurrah for tasty cultural appropriation

By Jason Lim

A recent AP article titled, "New Asian American bakeries find bicultural sweet spot," tells the story of Asian-American bakeries innovating on traditional American cookies with ingredients from their cultural culinary traditions. For example, the article highlights a "Dimsum Cookie" that's infused with sesame seeds and red beans.

But if you lived near a "Korea Town" in well-known center with a Korean population, bakeries that sell traditional Korean baked goods next to American staples infused with ethnic flavors is nothing new. At least in the Northern Virginia area where I live, Korean bakeries seem to have a large and ever growing following among non-Asian Americans for offering new, interesting, and tasty treats for the whole family.

This is a natural phenomenon that happens when cultures come together in the same space. Adding this culture to that one, mixing them together, and producing something new is a natural evolution of people and traditions colliding in a largely friendly way. It's food production as a means to new identity production. As the article says, "From ube cakes to mochi muffins, bakeries that sweetly encapsulate growing up Asian and American have been popping up more in recent years. Their confections are a delectable vehicle for young and intrepid Asian Americans to celebrate their dual identity."

Identity is not a static thing. It's something that morphs and churns as you encounter new kinds of people, information, environments, and stimulation. It's also very localized. For example, my Indian American friend and I will both self-identify as Asian American when asked in the U.S. But if we find ourselves in Singapore, for example, identifying ourselves as Asian American doesn't make too much sense. We would default to either Americans or Indian or Korean.

It's not just baked goods, of course. It's not uncommon to see food trucks that sell bulgogi tacos these days. Or, as the headline of Eater, Washington DC says, "At revamped Succotash, Edward Lee serves smoked steaks with a southern-Korean touch."
Southern-Korean touch wouldn't even make sense twenty years ago, but now, it's a headline text that actually delivers an articulated meaning. And we celebrate this, as we rightfully should. It enriches the world we live in.

However, we also see outrage erupt when a white woman in Portland writes a company blog essay titled, "How I discovered the miracle of congee and improved it," as a part of a marketing effort to sell prepackaged congee kits called, "Breakfast Cure." Her apparent fault was that she dared to claim that she improved on a traditional Asian staple by adding fruits, nuts, and other sundry ingredients.

There were supposedly many reasons for the outrage, but what I can gather in essence is that people were irate that a white woman claimed intellectual ownership over something that Asians considered their own. Oh, apparently, she also called herself the, "Congee Queen."

As with similar cases, claims of cultural appropriation were thrown about, whatever that means, as a means to shut down any meaningful discussion than to facilitate one. There was the assumption of the "righteousness" of Asians to feel anger at the white woman's presumption that she could be any good at making congee, let alone pollute it with non-traditional ingredients.

Then the argument would also point out that the ingredients that the woman used to make congee better were already being used in China to make congee better. So, she shouldn't have been messing with congee but, whatever she did, an Asian already did it?

Why couldn't a white woman be a congee queen, just as a Korean-American chef became famous for his southern cooking? Is a bulgogi taco Korean or Mexican? What if you put kimchi shavings on top? If I can barbecue a mean steak in my backyard during Labor Day, can I call myself the BBQ Prince of Virginia? Or do I have to look like a middle-aged white man? Then again, is it OK if I sprinkle Korean red pepper powder over the meat? Does that give me more claim?

Let's be honest. Purveyors of cultural appropriation accusations are not trying to defend indigenous culture per se. They are actually anti-culture, bad-tempered beavers that want to build dams to prevent cultural tributaries coming naturally together to form larger, deeper rivers of human experience. They'd rather keep the water all bottled up and static in their little beaver ponds so as to be able to claim pride of ownership.

But who really owns culture in any case? It's not something that you can patent. Culture is a set of undulating narratives that dynamically, but always temporarily, draws boundaries around certain social identities. It's meant to be inclusive, diverse, and ever-changing. Cultural appropriation, especially over food, is a concept meant to divide us into "us vs. them" so that "we" can feel safely victimized and indulge in righteous anger over "them." Grow up already and bon appetit.

Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture.