So hopefully you're getting the idea here, dear author, that maybe your reasoning is specious, and your glee about this is misplaced. But let me be specific:
-After you actually described someone cooking the cuisine of another place as "colonization of food," you even less believably went to "This is where things go from quirky to predatory," in describing their efforts to find out why this food tasted the way it did.
I'm pretty sure that under this ideological purity test, the only thing these two women could do that would be acceptable to you would be to uproot these women from Mexico and give them a food cart in Portland. This is problematic for lots of reasons, and not just practicality.
-You then managed to misuse the term "intellectual property." I like tortillas too, but I know they aren't anyone's property, intellectual or otherwise. You later -halfheartedly- note that all cuisine is borrowed at least, but for some reason you continue to describe this particular venture as genocidal, somehow.
For instance, you also describe the recipe as 'stolen.' No, you can't steal this sort of thing: people already know how to make tortillas. And the Mexican women were good enough to tell these Americans what goes into making a tortilla, but stopped short of explaining how to make one, assuming they -like many others- could figure it out.
-There's lots of "well, I'm not sure that's true" moments in here, but my favorite is the whole part about "this cycle of cultural appropriation will never end until people of color call attention to it."
Yeah? What if they do it poorly? With bad reasoning and sloganeering rather than marshalling decent argument with good examples? What if all they traffic in is $#@!ty generalizations and blanket statements? I dunno: what exactly is an acceptable response to your critique, actually? Does Andy Ricker need to import only Vietnamese chefs? Or is it okay for people everywhere to cook everything, and make money? How about a suggestion from you as to what would make it right?
But based on your entire approach here, I'm pretty sure you'd rather talk $#@! about something much more rooted in capitalism than in someone's malevolent approach to other cultures, because you don't know the $#@!ing difference. So I'm asking again: under your strictures, what is an acceptable food for white people to make and market, other than -say- Velveeta and Miracle Whip on Wonder Bread?
And hey: if there's a Korean family that opens up a place that sells pot roast and creamed tuna on biscuits, can I be outraged? Seriously, be coherent about this.
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