Cultural appropriation seems to be the hot issue of the day—and frankly I don’t give a damn. The best responses have already been written, intricate arguments and refutations that wrestle with food and power and politics and history.
While I appreciate all the thought that has gone into these think pieces, the most appropriate answer might yet be that of pretending you didn’t hear a thing. The issue doesn’t deserve attention, unless you’re a cultural studies major looking for yet another topic to “problematize.”
Cultural misinformation
But cultural misinformation is another thing entirely. Last June 2, Vogue.com published an article by Claudia McNeilly, “How Filipino Food is Becoming the Next Great American Cuisine”—a clickbait title, but I get what she means.
Filipino food doesn’t belong to Filipinos anymore, or at least belong solely to Filipinos. It has joined the diverse cuisines that make up the “Great American Cookbook.”
It has taken a while—perhaps due to the status and degree of integration of the Philippine diaspora community in the States—but Filipino food has finally moved from being the next big thing to actually being a big thing.
A lot of the coverage of Westerners liking Filipino food has been written by, or in close collaboration with Filipinos, so it’s actually very interesting to see how a food writer who is new to the culture writes about it. I’ve had to write on assignment about cuisines that I know about, and between frantic note-taking, internet searches and some digging through my reference books, I can usually conjure up something. Between me and the reader stand my eagle-eyed editor and a very patient sub-editor whose job it is to pick through my prose and call me out on my more outrageous errors.
Dangerous territory
McNeilly hacks her way through some potentially dangerous territory, linking to a Quartz article on food styling inaccuracies, invoking the passive voice to deliver a referenceless description (“often,” she says) of Filipino food as “the original fusion cuisine.” Then she blunders straight into fantasy land.
“Kare kare, or oxtail stew,” she writes, “derives its name from ‘curry’ as a result of the country’s deeply rooted Indian heritage.”
Where to begin? “Curry” is an English word; its origins are in the Tamil word “kari.” Kare-kare may have had a connection to India through traders, but this is only one of numerous unproven hypotheses. The Philippines does not have a deeply rooted Indian heritage.
The adventures in wonderland continue: “The celebrated use of Spam—fried to golden crisps in spamsilog or served in sandwiches between fluffy French bread topped with a fried egg—remains a symbol of the American influence during World War II.”
The use of Spam is not something that is celebrated, it’s actually quite ordinary. When Spam is fried, it goes from being deep red to having a crisp, brown exterior, especially if it is glazed with sugar. I have never seen it become golden. It is usually eaten between slices of fluffy American-style soft bread.
There is only one French loaf which comes close to this, the pain de mie, but the term “French bread” usually refers to the baguette, which we don’t regularly use for Spam.
“The crunchy, indulgent exterior of lechon, or whole spit-roasted pig, is lightened with a dip of lechon sauce made from vinegar, sugar and a pinch of liver.” Surely she means liver, vinegar and a pinch of sugar?
Dairy, gluten
“Filipino food is notoriously unburdened by dairy or gluten, making it suitable for a variety of diets and health regimens.” This statement is unburdened by research, the kind that involves flipping through pages of a Filipino cookbook. It also directly contradicts her earlier statement about eating Spam with French bread which, to the best of my knowledge, contains gluten—as do most noodles and spring roll wrappers.
As for dairy, has this author tried Filipino desserts? Filipino cheese? Carabao milk? Local ice cream?
Read the article online and I can assure you that, if my intention were to really nitpick, I would just be getting warmed up. This is, after all, Vogue—the same magazine whose food critic Jeffrey Steingarten was rooting for us before anyone else.
But I will not be raking McNeilly over the coals. Although her research is sloppy and her fact-checking team needs to be disciplined, she is on the right track. All of us have been guilty of the equivalent of trying to generalize about the whole of Chinese cuisine from one meal at the Golden Phoenix restaurant, or trying to draw more than we should have from a brief encounter with Peruvian or Nepalese or Eritrean.
Counterproductive
To return briefly to that dreaded theme of cultural appropriation, it is getting harder and harder—and counterproductive—for die-hard traditionalists to say that only people whose native cuisine it is are allowed to comment or expound on it, which is another way (the other being cooking it) to claim ownership of a cuisine.
I would even go so far as to say that McNeilly’s appropriation is that she wants Filipino cuisine to be this light, citrusy, dairy-free thing that would sell well among health-conscious Westerners—which it isn’t, and she has to respect that.
Respect, or the absence thereof, is what makes cultural appropriation OK or not. And also some basic fact-checking would help. —CONTRIBUTED