Badly-Cooked Food For Thought

There's a story going around the Internet about American university students who have been complaining that their cafeteria is guilty of cultural appropriation. It's easy to see how that would get people's attention: many sins are committed in university cafeterias, but cultural appropriation had got to be a new one. Now they'll just need mail-fraud to complete the set.

If you're not familiar with it, cultural appropriation is the idea of taking another culture's symbols and using them for your own purposes. That fashion house that used Inuit designs for their own clothing is a classic example.

The concept is controversial, since it's hard to pin down, and potentially widespread. It's easy to come up with obviously bad examples, but it's also easy to come up with innocent, or even obviously positive things, that an extremist would consider appropriation. If I try to make my own pad thai, it would be hard to claim that as unfair to the people of southeast Asia.

And in this case, it's also hard to accept the students' criticism. Look, I spent longer in university residence than anyone really should, so I definitely wouldn't deny them the right to complain about school food. But, well, that's just the problem: this food is just bad, not disrespectful. And I should point out that I discovered that dorm/residence food is bad not because of the skills of the cooks, but primarily because of the poor supplies they have to make do with. And that just further explains the substandard dishes the students found: the cooks appear to be attempting to diversify, but without access to proper ingredients.

Of course, it's entirely possible that the students know all this, and just came up with the cultural angle because it was the only way they could get the administration to do something about the food. I have to admit that while my first thought about this story was that the students were misguided, my second thought was that I wish I'd thought of that. One particularly memorable bad meal from the residence cafeteria was a curry that somehow came out as bland. That was one of those mind-bendingly bad meals that wasn't just really bad, it was bad in an entirely unexpected way, if not a completely impossible way. If I'd thought of complaining that it was insensitive to students of South-Asian extraction, I might have gained some traction with the bureaucracy.

So no, I don't think there's grounds to believe the university is guilty of cultural appropriation. Just ask the white kids what they think of the school's rubber steaks and you'll see that there are some circumstances where all cultures are equally abused.