Vegemite is an appropriation of Marmite.
If anyone’s doing this right, it’s Rick Bayless. He speaks Spanish; he has been doing immersive research visits in many regions of Mexico every year for decades; he presents his restaurants as a place to experience his original take on various traditions, not as a “visit to Oaxaca” or whatever. I’d hate to think that we might have missed out on his work because he’s Anglo.
Rick Bayless? Never heard of him before… but then it is not like tasty Mexican food is hard to find around here, or needs an “ambassador”.
And there are lots of restaurants where the ethnic food is prepared by people not of the same ethnicity. Then there are also “ethnic fusion” foods – is someone claiming that only people with the matching multiethnic background should prepare such foods?
You obviously don’t know Rick Bayless because what he makes definitely isn’t tasteless Mexican food. He’s not doing tex mex more Oaxacan.
Claiming that only people of certain racial / ethnic heritage or “blood” should be allowed to do something (or should be discouraged or forbidden from doing something) is kind of the very definition of racism, to me at least.
This is ridiculous.
If you can make great food – of any ethnic or national cuisine – go ahead and attempt to sell it. You should not, and do not (still, thankfully), have to flash an ethnic or national ID card to be able to do so. And by the sound of things in here, the market agrees.
If there actually is a rear end-hurt segment out there, arguing against, say, an ethnic Kurd selling sushi or a German-American making Cantonese cuisine… please forget the angst and just enjoy the food. If you want to compete, well, pick up a cookbook and get to work.
Life’s too short to sweat the small stuff.
Seems like people only complain when it’s a white person that “appropriates” another culture. Especially white men.
Sorghum - I’m half Italian and I’m totally fine with you opening an Italian restaurant as long as the food and wine are good 
My area is known for good pizza. A remarkable number of good pizzerias here are owned by Albanians.
The only thing I roll my eyes about regarding Barnes is when he said he wanted to bring authenticity to Mexican food in Southern California. WTF. That didn’t win him many fans here. The people complaining about appropriation are likely in the very vocal minority. Especially here in California where it’s more likely than not that any food you eat is prepared by a Latino.
As a Latina, I only get offended at the horrible Mexican food I’ve eaten outside of the Southwest.
There was a goat herder yesterday missing a goat in Starbucks
https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2016/04/11/escaped-goat-goes-starbucks-run-california/Ty2BOlhfKc4h7DvKeO2ktN/story.html
This is a classic example to me of a real issue (cultural appropriation) being turned into people looking for any excuse to create a tsimmis.
Food is the ultimate in appropriation, the italians got noodles from the Chinese. Corn wasn’t native to Europe, yet it got into European cuisine, with things like Polenta. Tomatoes were not native to Europe either and when first brought back they either were considered poisonous, or according to some of the more dimwitted church fathers, too ‘sensuous’. Hot dogs came from German wursts, and then you have some of the wonderful hybrid cuisines, like Chino Latino. One of the best cultural appropriations I ever experienced was in my old neighborhood in the Bronx, there was a Chinese take out place whose menu was half chinese food, half italian food, and the local people loved it (it was a heavily italian area). If someone loves Mexican food enough to want to cook authentic food, why not?
I would be a lot more concerned about the packaged crap passing itself off as ethnic food, whether it be Chung King canned Chinese food, or some of the hideous frozen food claiming to be ethnic gag.
It isn’t an issue to me because it isn’t like they are taking the native cuisine and then at the same time trying to make people forget who the originators were, or worse, taking the food or other ethnic attribute of a people at the same time denigrating them. A classic example was Jazz music, when it was mostly black artists doing it it was seriously looked down upon, and in the early days white’s who appreciated Jazz music were looked down upon for doing so, it was only after white artists started doing Jazz that suddenly it became “real music”. Likewise, rock and roll came directly from both jazz and the blues, it most certainly was taking from black culture, yet it didn’t become acceptable until the form was mostly white (yes, there are shades of gray around this.
In baseball, there was a slightly different form of this. Baseball wasn’t a product of a particular culture per se, but because of segregation in pro baseball blacks ended up starting their own leagues that because of the nature of their segregation, meant it was going to be different (read up sometimes on the old negro leagues). A lot of the things in the modern game came out of the old negro leagues, hit and run was a big one, so were some of the pitching methods that became big in the major leagues once they were integrated, it was a differen game, one that I think helped make baseball what it became. Yet for many years once baseball integrated it was almost like they pretended that baseball was baseball and that the game was like it was all along, even trying to get the old negro league players recognized in the Hall of Fame took ages, and I think it was only once Ken Burns did his “Baseball” epic that people realized how much baseball owed to the black players who played when the game was segregated, what they brought to the game, but MLB for years pretended like the black leagues were this inferior side show, while taking a lot from it.
I’ll give you another example, wasn’t all that many years ago that many people in this country would have considered Italians nothing more than a bunch of uncouth, course people, fit for only manual labor, yet at the same time they would be drinking Italian wines and eating the cuisine and reveling in it.
“I would be a lot more concerned about the packaged crap passing itself off as ethnic food, whether it be Chung King canned Chinese food, or some of the hideous frozen food claiming to be ethnic gag.”
What’s to be concerned about? If you don’t like it, don’t buy / eat it. Problem solved. If other people like Chung King canned Chinese food or Chef Boy-ar-dee Spaghetti or whatever, what is it to anyone?
In our little town the Americans from Mexico own the Swedish Pancake house and they have an American Greek cook. Food is food and ethnic lines blur all over the place.
Just as long as the taste is authentic enough for me. I’ll patronize whatever culture is selling it.
In my town there is a fusion Asian restaurant owned by a mixed race well known local chef. It is an interesting place, interesting menu, and I like some of what he does. But for sheer comfort, am far happier to go to the more purely Korean or Japanese places and eat the traditional dishes.
Is this new restaurant appropriation? No, it is creativity, which whether in art or food can draw from many sources. Does being mixed race give him a pass in cooking Asian food? Would you like it less if he were white or black or some combination?
We are a melting pot. The lines are supposed to blur in that melting pot. But then some, me included became fascinated with cultural difference, cultural individuality. Not judging, just interested. Then somehow it became PC to not notice, not remark. Sorry, have been fascinated all my life.
Us white Arizonans, or past Arizonans feel that the Arizona (not texmex) Mexican food is our hometown cuisine. We grew up on it, revere it, are comforted by it. Is this appropriation? Having eaten it all my life, it is more my home cuisine than anything American Midwestern, which my mother grew up with, but rarely cooked.
“by the sound of things in here, the market agrees.”
Bayless makes enough money that he chooses to shut down his entire row of flagship restaurants – three of them – on Sunday and Monday every single week so that the entire staff can have a real weekend. NO ONE DOES THIS IN THE RESTAURANT INDUSTRY. All three have lines out the door every day they’re open, and he’s just throwing money away by being closed. I respect him a great deal for doing that. The only shops he has that are open 7 days are the ones at O’Hare.
Just for sake of small counterpt, lots of hibatchi, sushi places around her run by Chinese folks who see a higher margin in japanese food as opposed to chinese food. They put on a show with bowing and wearing kimonos but speak mandarin to each other.
Rick Bayless also has a location in Northwestern’s student center - I was on campus on Saturday and saw it, though it appeared to be closed at the time I was there.
The takeaway from this thread for me is that there are people who simply cannot see when something has been achieved that they wanted.
All these examples of restaurants run by people who did not grow up eating a certain food, but are successful in creating and selling such food, is a worthwhile example of how people instinctively got past “My this, my that” and “His this, his that” and appreciate a valuable dining experience - all without some need of sociology lectures from academia. Culture and race are incidental passing thoughts, if a thought at all, as it is the food that bring people in the door.
The vexing questions are,: Why would anyone create conditions to disrupt something so peaceful and enjoyable? Specifically, why try to create a riff between peoples where there is none? The result, which would be divisive, is the completely opposite of what was developed naturally.
If the goal of social policy is to bring people together, the restaurant industry has done that. It seems that some have missed the forest for the trees and have not realized the restaurant industry has created, writ small, exactly what they say they want for the larger society. In effect, they are seemingly intellectually blind to when their own goals have been achieved.