"Stealing" recipes from taco ladies? Come now, the recipe for a burrito is not intellectual property. You can learn traditional Mexican cooking on Youtube if you understand a little Spanish. Burritos arguably aren't even Mexican, for crying out loud! Go a hundred miles south of the US border and there's nothing that even vaguely resembles what Americans call a burrito. It's a border region phenomenon.
As if only brown people are allowed to use tortillas? The act of accusing someone of "cultural appropriation" is segregation, pure and simple.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Make a burrito (or taco, or nasi goreng, or pad thai, or whatever) and enjoy it guilt-free.
I completely agree with a lot of your points here. I've been making enchiladas for years, and I've incorporated a lot of recipes into my approach. I suspect that very, very few people would take issue with me enjoying the food of another culture.
But I think this misses a very big point of discussion, which is what are the conditions that makes capitalization of another person's and culture's effort ethical? A big part of what made people feel uncomfortable with the taco truck story was, I suspect, that these recipes were not freely shared. Instead they were reverse-engineered.
> "I picked the brains of every tortilla lady there in the worst broken Spanish ever," Connelly tells Willamette about a trip the pair took to Puerto Nuevo, Mexico. "They wouldn't tell us too much about technique, but we were peeking into the windows of every kitchen . . ."
If these women were just finding out how to make the best taco possible for their own enjoyment, that would be one thing. But given American's history of white folks making money off of the efforts of People of Color, I don't find it particularly unusual that people are taking issue here. One article[1] fairly notes that "it's unclear whether the Mexican women who handed over their recipes ever got anything in return."
I don't think the lines of what does and does not constitute cultural appropriation in food are well defined. I do think that it exists though.
> A big part of what made people feel uncomfortable with the taco truck story was, I suspect, that these recipes were not freely shared. Instead they were reverse-engineered.
Just as a thought experiment. If they went to Italy and did the same thing to learn how to make pasta, then opened their own Italian restaurant, would anyone care? If they went to France and spied on pastry shops to learn how to make the perfect croissant, would anyone care?
If two Mexican ladies went to North Carolina and stole the secrets of BBQ and opened their own BBQ joint in Guadalajara, would anyone care? Would we be questioning their ethics?
If you read the original profile[1] it's a pretty standard foodie piece about people who really enjoyed a food, learned how to make it themselves, and wanted to bring it back to where they're from.
The parasitic clickbait mic.com article pulls a few quotes out of context, then Russell Conjugates[2] the narrative to cast the pair as evil villains who exploit helpless minorities. Note how they're not just telling the story of what inspired them to start a taco truck, now they are bragging about stealing recipes. This is a hit piece that is engineered to direct online vitriol towards them, for the crime of being white people selling tacos.
Free speech, of course. People can write whatever they want. But I think it's important to ask ourselves, who is this helping? What is being accomplished here? Were these two ladies really such evil villains that deserved everything that comes with being the target of an online mob? (harassment, death threats, loss of livelihood, lifelong fear of anyone ever Googling your name...) Is this a great victory against systemic racism? Was the life of a single person of color, or anyone, improved by this? I mean, I guess it improved the bottom line of the publishers of Mic, but it's hard to see what else.
"Stealing" recipes from taco ladies? Come now, the recipe for a burrito is not intellectual property. You can learn traditional Mexican cooking on Youtube if you understand a little Spanish. Burritos arguably aren't even Mexican, for crying out loud! Go a hundred miles south of the US border and there's nothing that even vaguely resembles what Americans call a burrito. It's a border region phenomenon.
As if only brown people are allowed to use tortillas? The act of accusing someone of "cultural appropriation" is segregation, pure and simple.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Make a burrito (or taco, or nasi goreng, or pad thai, or whatever) and enjoy it guilt-free.