Stolen tortillas
Another “cultural appropriation” crisis.
Willamette Week reported ten days ago:
During an impromptu Christmastime road trip last year to Puerto Nuevo, Mexico, Kali Wilgus and Liz “LC” Connelly lost their minds over tortillas.
“In Puerto Nuevo, you can eat $5 lobster on the beach, which they give you with this bucket of tortillas,” Connelly says. “They are handmade flour tortillas that are stretchy and a little buttery, and best of all, unlimited.”
They liked them so much they wanted to sleuth out the recipe.
“I picked the brains of every tortilla lady there in the worst broken Spanish ever, and they showed me a little of what they did,” Connelly says. “They told us the basic ingredients, and we saw them moving and stretching the dough similar to how pizza makers do before rolling it out with rolling pins. They wouldn’t tell us too much about technique, but we were peeking into the windows of every kitchen, totally fascinated by how easy they made it look. We learned quickly it isn’t quite that easy.”
They went home to Portland and worked on trying to make something similar.
“On the drive back up to Oregon, we were still completely drooling over how good [the tortillas] were, and we decided we had to have something similar in Portland,” Connelly says. “The day after we returned, I hit the Mexican market and bought ingredients and started testing it out. Every day I started making tortillas before and after work, trying to figure out the process, timing, refrigeration and how all of that works.”
They came up with something they liked, and opened a weekend food truck, and Willamette Week reported on the story…and they promptly closed the food truck.
Mic.com’s Jamilah King responded to the Willamette Week interview with a piece Friday calling out the women for “stealing recipes from Mexico to start a Portland business.”
“The problem, of course, is that it’s unclear whether the Mexican women who handed over their recipes ever got anything in return,” King wrote in the piece that also outlined how others had begun to accuse the women of cultural appropriation. “And now those same recipes are being sold as a delicacy in Portland.”
As opposed to what? As opposed to not being sold as a delicacy in Portland. Why is the second an obvious improvement? The women in Puerto Nuevo weren’t going to move to Portland, so why couldn’t tourists try to replicate their delicious tortillas in Portland so that more people could enjoy them?
There’s this thing in the world called the recipe, and recipes are often shared. They’re also often kept secret and jealously guarded, to be sure, but that doesn’t prevent people from using trial and error to try to replicate them. Broadly speaking, though, cooking techniques are part of human culture and heritage. If you sell food, as the tortillas were sold in Puerto Nuevo, there’s a chance consumers of the food will go home and try to make it themselves; some might even sell it. Is that really stealing, or appropriation?
If an entrepreneur did it and made a hugely profitable product I would say yes, seek out those cooks in Puerto Nuevo and give them a damn good cut. But a little local food truck? Is it really worth bullying them into closing?
“How would you people feel if I went and spied on your family or business recipes and took it somewhere else for my own financial benefit?” Olivia L. from Portland wrote in a Yelp review. “This is stealing.”
If you took it to Venezuela or Belgium? I would probably feel flattered. If you took it down the street from my restaurant, that would be unfair, but thousands of miles away? I would see it as the usual cultural cross-pollination.
Supporters, however, have pointed to how common it is within the culinary world and food industry to take methods and ingredients from other countries and profit off of them.
Fast food places tend to do it badly. Small local places can do it well. I’m not convinced that anyone was harmed in the making of these burritos.
Oh no. I spent three years trying to replicate the squash burritos I ate at a little place in Texas; when I moved to Nebraska, I couldn’t get them anymore. I got the recipe right eventually. I don’t make a profit off it (just make it for myself), but I’ve given the recipe to several friends. What if…horror of horrors…one of them should use it to open the first ever decent vegetarian restaurant in Nebraska? (Well, there might be one in Omaha, but I haven’t found it. I don’t spend a lot of time in Omaha, but if anyone knows of one, I would be happy to hear about it, since I’m currently at a conference in Omaha, and would love to have a new place to eat).
How dare a Nebraskan culturally appropriate something from Texas? It’s a damn outrage.
Well, it was a Mexican place, run by Mexican-Americans….
But Texas does sort of like to think of themselves as being their own sovereign nation, and sometimes seem to think not only are they a different nationality, but even a different (superior) race to the rest of us mere mortals.
If the couple directly competed with those mexican establishments and thereby reduced their custom, then it could – arguably – be considered stealing. Seeing as how they are not even in the same nation as those they learned from however, it is most certainly not stealing because no one has been deprived of something.
I’ve seen it pointed out that flour tortillas are not, strictly speaking, Mexican food. The idea of making tortillas with flour came to Mexico from immigrants from elsewhere.
I’ll bet some abeluita enjoyed a neighbor’s pita bread and back-engineered the recipe, the sneaky old appropriator.
(Oh, guess what!? I just checked Wikipedia, and…there’s a history of Lebanese immigration to Baja California. Check Google for the 10 best Lebanese restaurants in Puerto Nuevo.”
Holms #4, from a strictly legal standpoint it’s not stealing even if there’s direct competition. Recipes cannot be copyrighted, and they can’t be patented either unless the technique is “novel and nonobvious,” which isn’t the case here.
Whether it’s appropriation is a separate question (it’s not), as is whether the Mexican tortilla makers should have been compensated anyway (probably not, unless the Americans made a huge profit, as Ophelia pointed out).
What would American food be without this sort of appropriation? Or any country’s for that matter.
I prefer Ophelia’s phrase, cross-cultural pollination. That’s what it is, really. Cultures gaining new and wonderful things from each other, and often sharing in return. And as we learn more about different cultures through food, music, and movies, they cease to be so frightening and foreign. It’s harder to “other” Mexicans when we have tacos in our hands, right?
A taco stand on every corner!
That was only going to happen if we failed to elect Trump. Another bad thing he hath wrought – depriving us of all the taco stands (even in my small city, there are quite a lot of corners).
Shit! I made tortillas for dinner not eight hours ago. To whom do I report for corrective measures?
They were bloody delicious, mind you.
Tomatoes used in Italian cooking, hot peppers used in Korean food. They came from somewhere else. You couldn’t stop it even if you wanted to.
In that case, iknklast, you were appropriating ‘up’, which I suspect is completely acceptable according to the rules of these things.
Culture is both voluntary and dynamic. To try and ascribe something like intellectual property rights to a set of cultural practices denies both of these facts; it denies that people born into one culture could ever learn anything other than that culture has to teach them, and in particular it denies that they can improve themselves or their communities on the whole by changing the way they interact with the world at large and one another. For that’s all ‘culture’ really is…the first way we learn to interact with the world, the things we learn to do and think and say to be members of a community. To say that we own it, rather than having it imposed on us, gives individuals far too little agency and communities far too much.
Now what would’ve happened if it was two white *men* doing this?
I have a suspicion that I already know the answer…
The complaint about stealing recipes isn’t really even accurate. These people didn’t memorise or copy exactly what they saw the locals doing in Mexico, then import identical ingredients and produce the “same” food. They got some information on how the food tasted and some tips on how it was made, then went back and through trial and error created something they were happy with. That is to say, they created their _own_ recipe for these tortillas. I highly doubt that their methods and ingredients were identical to what the Mexican cooks used.
I do a fair bit of knitting and crocheting and in those crafts it’s perfectly feasible for an experienced practitioner to recreate a finished piece without a pattern, especially if it’s a simple one. To me this complaint sounds like a claim that the Portland women ripped off (=copied directly) a commercial “pattern”, then went off to sell that “pattern” in the same market as the original creator. In my view a much more analoguous situation is going to Norway, seeing all these lovely traditional mittens, and upon returning home proceeding to make mittens in similar styles, with colours, materials and decorative patterns of one’s own choosing. These two things are NOT the same. The former raises questions of actual intellectual property and copyright, the latter is just how culture works. People encounter things they like in other cultures all the time, then take their experiences home and use them in their own lives. Hell, entire university curriculums are dedicated to tracking and studying this process, (e.g. in ethnology). But apparently it’s all supposed to come to a stop now, or at least it’s only allowed to go in one direction or something.
Oh no, Margot, the “other way” is cultural imperialism; it’s at least as bad.
Surely it’s not cultural imperialismin if it’s “punching up”… Or at least that’s how I heard someone explain why Asians or Africans adopting western garb or food does not count as cultural appropriation (them merely copying the styles of the dominant populations in order to improve their disprivileged status). But I suppose you refer to the idea that they aren’t actually adopting anything, westerners just forcibly shove western customs down their throats. Neither assumption of course being in no way patronising, not at all.
The biggest “Cornish” pasty festival in the world is based in Mexico.
I also offer Chicago pizza from Italy using tomatoes originally from Central America.
Chillies in Asian dishes, potatoes everywhere, wheat, FFS!
AND CHOCOLATE!
And the ‘appropriation’ whingers DARED to use the Latin alphabet to compose their objections. I bet they use ‘arabic’ numbers without even thinking of how they were stolen from India.
And John the Drunkard, they go to Algebra class and never stop to think about the fact that it was invented by the Arabs. (Of course, we shouldn’t say this too loudly, or the constant whingers might decide to insist we not be allowed to teach Algebra in school. Without Algebra, calculus would no longer be possible. We could no longer train engineers – not to mention many kinds of scientists. Physics would not be possible. Statistics would not be possible.)
If we gave up everything that has been “appropriated”, we would probably have to go back to a hunter-gatherer society, since many of our domesticated foods have been at least in part from other cultures. Of course, then we’d quickly become the oppressed culture and no one would be able to “appropriate” from us.
*Groan*
I think the key here is that the two women who inspired the new recipe (as stated, I doubt if it’s exactly the same given it was “reversed engineered”) are not in competition with the newcomers, they have not suffered financially, there isn’t an ethnic Mexican food van that’s been put out of business or which has been unfairly disadvantaged by this “appropriation”. In other words, no one has been hurt and the objection is purely philosophical. And I fall out with philosophy when it places a principle ahead of practical good – like two women setting up a business.
Of course, I’m English so I have good reason to give thanks every day for the cultural appropriation of recipes! (OK, a little unfair. There is good English food but, seriously, we’re never going to go down in history as one of the world’s great cuisines. Brewing beer on the other hand…) The British army has had curry on its menu for nearly 200 years.
Come to think of it… Chicken Tikka Masala was created in the UK by a clever chef who was English of Indian descent. It’s not authentic Indian food but is probably the UK’s favourite curry – so does that mean when it was exported back to India and started turning up in restaurants there that it had been appropriated? Who has been hurt here? OK, it’s a common complaint amongst the English of Indian descent that the English of other backgrounds take the food and diss the rest of the culture (and there’s some truth to that) but where does this end? In some ways this is very similar to right wing nationalism – we should all stay in our nice discrete little boxes, doing our own thing. Equal but always separate – and I don’t need to point out how that idea has been used historically.
Absolutely. It’s one of the things that has always bothered me about this kind of regressive-progressive argument. At some point your actions, while based on an entirely different set of motivations, become indistinguishable from the actions of true arseholes. What do those same people say about intent?
I say you can tell an arsehole by its actions, not its motivation.
Funny thing, at a point growing up I lived in a commune. During that period my mother taught a guy who was half-French, half Jewish how to cook.
He would later go on to start a restaurant, using my family’s recipes and techniques.
The feeling was “Good for him.”
I suspect a lot of these racists who go on about “cultural appropriation” (And yes, they are racists, their arguments are indistinguishable from those who argue for segregation) are upper class twits who don’t actually cook.
Because everybody I’ve ever met who does cook, no matter what cuisine they cooked, actually likes the thought of other people using their recipes.
That includes people who are or were chefs at restaurants, the idea that people ate their food and then tried to replicate it gives them a kick because they successfully introduced someone to something new and awesome.
Not only that but everyone I know who actually cooks, isn’t terribly puritanical about it and likes experimenting with their food themselves. Hence why you get things like corn capsicum massala, or bunny chow, or various different takes on peri peri dishes. Seriously, are the people of Mozambique supposed to stop using Portuguese flavours?
In food the bullshit of those who would keep us all separate is laid bare, and wrapped in a crepe filled with cape Malay curried mince, topped with tzatziki. There are few things more liberating than sharing a good meal.
What matters is not how pure a food is in its cultural background, but whether it is delicious.
But of course people don’t worry about that if they don’t cook, and rather spend their lives playing “foodie” on the Internet in order to score points with their racist friends.