US students have protested against the use of ciabatta in their banh mi, but there is never just one way to cook a dish
In the 1970s there was a Chinese restaurant near where I lived that served a dish they called sweet and sour pork. It was the colour of David Dickinson, and tasted of a cross between Tizer and orange-flavoured Nurofen. Naturally, being a kid, I thought it was brilliant. Doubtless anybody with a detailed knowledge of Cantonese food would have raised an eyebrow. What I suspect they wouldn’t have done is flown into a spittle-flecked rage at the way a culinary tradition was being traduced, and bellowed “cultural appropriation” at the chef. Not least because back then we didn’t know what cultural appropriation was.
Oh, for those lost days of innocence. Last year, students at the impeccably liberal Oberlin College in Ohio protested about the dismal food in the student canteen. They claimed poor versions of dishes from Vietnam and Japan were “culturally insensitive”. Apparently they were making banh mi with ciabatta rather than baguette. The sushi rice was undercooked. “If people not from that heritage take food, modify it and serve it as ‘authentic’, it is appropriative,” one furious Japanese student told the New York Daily Post. Last month, a similar row flared when the website Food Republic credited a young white chef with launching a craze for Nashville “hot chicken”, fried chicken with a cayenne-boosted sauce. Furious critics pointed out that he hadn’t launched anything; that it was a venerable African-American dish which he had “appropriated”.
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