The college students in my critical thinking class and I live in Los Angeles where some of the best food in the world is in our very backyards. I don’t want my students or me to take this for granted. I want us to do a deep dive into the Los Angeles food world, particularly Mexican food, the most popular cuisine in the world. So for our final essay assignment, we read Gustavo Arellano’s article “Let White People Appropriate Mexican Food--Mexicans Do It to Ourselves All the Time” and we write an essay that supports or refutes Arellano’s defense of cultural appropriation.
Arellano defends cultural appropriation by explaining three things. One, that since the beginning of time restaurant owners have copied their competition; two, social justice warriors aren’t helping anyone when they patronize Mexicans by painting them as helpless victims when in fact Mexicans steal in the food industry just like everyone else; and three, what some might call appropriation or stealing can be in fact the healthy human impulse for cross-cultural pollination, evidenced by the fact that many of Mexico’s most famous regional dishes incorporate the food and ingredients from Spain, France, and the Middle East.
Arellano’s argument forces us to question the very idea of authenticity. What is authenticity? In the context of Mexican food, authenticity is the traditions of regional Mexican cooking that bring labor-intensive cooking techniques, geographical richness, and time-tested rituals to produce some of the best food in the world. But authenticity is more than food. It is family and culture. I urge you to watch The Taco Chronicles on Netflix. When you see families in different parts of Mexico making carnitas, canasta, asada, pastor, barbacoa, guisado, suadero, cochinita, cabrito, birria, and pescado, you will find that the geography and family traditions make these dishes authentic. But just as importantly, these foods are so good that they are a miracle from God. Look at the love the community lavishes on the local taquero, the man selling tacos on the street corner. He is bringing love to the city, and he is appreciated for it. Look at the entire communities gathering together to make these authentic dishes and you will see that food is rooted in family and culture. What is most beautiful about this notion of authenticity is the expression of love for others by bringing them the food of the gods. There is a reason in Mexico why the taco is called madre.
When we watch The Taco Chronicles, the sense of community combined with the making of the best food in the world wins our hearts and our stomachs. Any notion of violating this authenticity rightfully angers us and we are disinclined to agree with Arellano’s support of cultural appropriation. However, if you read Arellano’s book Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America, you will get more context for Arellano’s defense of cultural appropriation. Arellano would never want us to violate the authentic regional traditions of Mexican cooking. Instead, he is arguing that the splendor of regional Mexican cooking spread to America by bringing food that is both desirable and affordable and that some, not all, of the magic of authentic Mexican cuisine became accessible to the American masses. Moreover, this Mexican food changed American culture for the better. Full-flavored Mexican food replaced the tasteless pablum of “American” food. Americans speak with their money and they spend so much money on Mexican food that they have made a statement that they want Mexican food in their culture.
Is Gustavo Arellano defending all forms of cultural appropriation? Clearly not. If you read his articles and watch the Netflix series Ugly Delicious, “Tacos,” you will see that Arellano has contempt for “soulless” Mexican food, “Mexican” food chains that bastardize good-tasting Mexican food, food chains that disconnect the food they sell from the workers and from the Mexican culture; you will also see that Arellano has a healthy contempt for white-washed tourist food--phony overpriced Mexican food that has no spice and has been altered to appeal to the most infantile tastebuds. These counterfeit “Mexican” restaurants aren’t serving Mexican food at all. Rather, they are shamelessly serving overpriced tasteless codswallop. They are an abomination of Mexican food and the very idea of cross-cultural pollination.
However, there are defensible iterations of cultural appropriation. Stealing recipes from Mexico and elsewhere and bringing affordable street food to America doesn’t hurt anyone and in fact brings the nectar of the gods to more people for affordable prices. Recipes are stolen all the time. Just don’t take aqua fresca and call it “spa water” on your Tiktok channel, as Gracie Norton did, which is a form of racial plagiarism.
Some will argue that if some white ladies from Portland go to Mexico and steal taco recipes from grandmothers in Mexico City, those grandmothers are entitled to a cut of the action. But in reality, millions of recipes are stolen every day in the restaurant industry and any kind of compensation through accurate and detailed accounting is an impossibility.
Another defense of Gustavo Arellano’s claim that cultural appropriation is a good thing can be found in Netflix’s Chef’s Table Pizza series. Specifically, there are two chefs, Chris Bianco and Ann Kim, who break the rules of tradition to show that there is a place for creativity and improvisation in making superior pizza that violates notions of tradition and authenticity. In fact, Italian pizza experts have visited Chris Bianco’s Pizzeria Bianco in Pheonix, Arizona, and have proclaimed that his pizza is superior to the traditional pizzas of Italy. In the case of Ann Kim, she puts kimchi on her pizza and serves Korean mung bean pancakes and her restaurant Pizzeria Lola is so famous that to meet demand, she opened three other restaurants: Hello Pizza, Young Joni, and Sook & Mimi. Incidentally, her most recent restaurant Sook & Mimi features handmade tortillas made in the tradition of Mexico.
When we see successful restauranters such as Chris Bianco and Ann Kim make delicious food that is based on both authenticity and creativity, we see that making authentic food, or not, is not an either/or proposition. It is possible to do both. Again, this notion of combining authenticity with cultural cross-pollination supports Arellano’s defense of cultural appropriation.
Clearly, not all forms of cultural appropriation are alike. Some types are an abomination. Others are a celebration. The purpose of this assignment is to use our critical thinking skills to distinguish the good from the bad and to find nuance, shades of gray, and complexity.
Just as the best tacos have a complexity of flavors, the best essays have a complexity of ideas.