A New York restaurant promised 'clean' Chinese food, sparking claims of cultural appropriation

[IronLionZion]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/voraciously/wp/2019/04/09/a-new-york-restaurant-promised-clean-chinese-food-sparking-claims-of-cultural-appropriation/?utm_term=.4ac3a7629ca1&wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1



It wouldn’t be right to blame the disastrous opening day for Lucky Lee’s, an optimistically named Chinese American restaurant in New York, on bad luck. What happened was not an arbitrary curse from the universe. Rather, it was a series of missteps that led the restaurant into the bull’s-eye of America’s ongoing conversation about culinary appropriation.

Chef/owner Arielle Haspel, a nutritionist, set out to open a restaurant that pays tribute to the Chinese food she and her Jewish family ate growing up in New York — except she planned to make versions of popular dishes, such as lo mein and kung pao chicken, without gluten, wheat, refined sugar, genetically modified organisms, MSG or additives. She has described the restaurant as a “clean” Chinese restaurant for “people who love to eat Chinese food and love the benefit that it will actually make them feel good.”

Haspel later clarified on social media that she meant “clean” to indicate ingredients without additives, an accepted definition of the word in the holistic community but one that conjured up an ugly stereotype that immigrant restaurants are dirty. By positioning her restaurant as one that will “actually make [people] feel good,” she seemed to imply that other Chinese restaurants couldn’t do the same. Other posts alluded to the perceived unhealthiness of Chinese food: One post, since deleted, called lo mein a dish that “makes you feel bloated and icky the next day.” But Chinese food, with its abundance of vegetables, can be quite healthful. In fact, many of the less-healthful selections you find in Chinese restaurants are Chinese American dishes that were adapted to appeal to American diners’ predilections for sugar and fat.

The problems were compounded by the fact that Haspel named the restaurant after her husband, Lee, who is also white. Here is where the conversation about cultural appropriation gets tricky. The issue is not that a white person is making food outside their cultural heritage. San Francisco Chronicle food critic Soleil Ho has outlined the ways that cultural appropriation can be done right: primarily, when a creator gives credit to the people whose food they’re making and is deferential toward the group and its cuisine’s history.

There are kosher and other styles of American Chinese restaurants but this case is pretty blatantly offensive.

[greymattermom]

1. Panera advertises clean food.

That has nothing to do with immigrants.

[IronLionZion]

3. I have a Jewish coworker who cooks "clean" Chinese food at home

and that's fine. Same with Indian or Mexican or whatever. I'm Indian and I mostly cook Italian or Asian food most nights because I like it.

But to open a business using marketing that disparages other people's culture is the problem. It's great to have healthy Chinese restaurants, but the marketing can be done better to highlight the vegetables and nutrition instead of saying negative things about the other restaurants that have traditionally been run by immigrants from Asia.

There are ethnic restaurants that do it right without insulting the people whose culture they are appropriating.

[IronLionZion]

2. In the Twin Cities, Asian chefs feel the sting of Andrew Zimmern's insults. They say his apology isn

In the Twin Cities, Asian chefs feel the sting of Andrew Zimmern’s insults. They say his apology isn’t enough.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/in-the-twin-cities-asian-chefs-feel-the-sting-of-andrew-zimmerns-insults-they-say-his-apology-isnt-enough/2018/12/26/77beee1e-ff37-11e8-862a-b6a6f3ce8199_story.html?utm_term=.fa2b784e8844

[packman]

4. Cultural appropriation on food - total B.S. to the extreme

Isn't that what food and cooking is all about - the mixing of cultures and tastes.

[IronLionZion]

6. People are objecting to the marketing, not the food

[JayhawkSD]

5. I think it's mostly all attention seeking.

Today's social environment reminds me of when I was a child growing up. It was a family affected by one alcoholic parent, with the other one a narcissist whose disorder was exacerbated by the other's drinking behavior. As is typical in such families, there was extreme competition for attention. (I was a middle child and sort of hid from the whole thing and am still very much an introvert.) As is common in such families, I was always trying to figure out what was normal. My friends didn't seem to have this kind of shit going on in their homes, but...

There was a lot of "how can I enjoy doing something if you're doing it too?" going on, along with "how can I enjoy having anything unless I'm the only one who has it?" Somehow the competition included that if you do something, especially if you do it well, then that diminishes the value of me doing it at all. If a family member was doing something and a second family member started doing it too, then the first family member either started a fight to get the second family member to quit doing it, or the first family member simply quit doing it.

Today I recognize that all of that is part of a very sick emotional environment. I spent years outgrowing it, including no small amount of therapy. But compare it to the complaints of "cultural appropriation" and it pretty much describes our social milieu today, does it not?

[IronLionZion]

7. Glad the therapy is working out for you

But what you describe sounds more like how conservatives trying to stop certain demographics of people from having equal rights or poor people from having social programs.

Nobody is stopping whites from opening ethnic restaurants, they just object to the marketing that disparages other ethnic restaurants run by immigrants.