Entertainment

Lena Dunham Now Says Sushi Is Cultural Appropriation

(Photo: Michael Buckner/Getty Images for SXSW)

Anders Hagstrom Justice Reporter
Font Size:

Hide yo’ nachos; hide yo’ pizza, we culturally appropriating everything up in here!

“Girls” writer and feminist icon Lena Dunham spoke out in support of a protest at her alma mater demanding a change in cuisine at the the Oberlin College cafeteria on Tuesday.

“There are now big conversations at Oberlin, where I went to college, about cultural appropriation and whether the dining hall sushi and banh mi disrespect certain cuisines,” Dunham said in an interview with Food & Wine Magazine. “
The press reported it as, ‘How crazy are Oberlin kids?’ But to me, it was actually, ‘Right on.'”

Dunham graduated from Oberlin in 2008 and now agrees with current students that the school’s “insensitive” use of Japanese food needs to stop.

According to Dazed, Clover Lihn Tran wrote in The Oberlin Review that Bon Appétit, the food service vendor, “has a history of blurring the line between culinary diversity and cultural appropriation by modifying the recipes without respect for certain Asian countries’ cuisines. This uninformed representation of cultural dishes has been noted by a multitude of students, many of who have expressed concern over the gross manipulation of traditional recipes.”

Notably, neither Dunham nor the students have called for pizza to be referred to as “cheese, tomato, and bread triangles,” or nachos as “assorted ingredients with chips.”