I’m old enough to remember when living in a racial and cultural melting pot was a good thing. Not anymore.
Just one week after Kooks Burritos in Portland, Ore., was featured in a profile for local publication Willamette Week, the pop-up Mexican food cart has closed down amid accusations that they ripped off their recipes.
Kali Wilgus and Liz “LC” Connelly, the two white women who started Kooks earlier this year, have been accused of stealing their techniques from the “tortilla ladies” of Puerto Nuevo, Mexico — because Connelly told Willamette Week that they gathered their recipes and tortilla-making processes during a holiday road-trip to the Baja California village.
In other words, they did what cooks and chefs have done since the beginning of time. They learned how to make a dish from somebody else, and they started making it themselves. I always kind of figured that was how it worked. Right?
But of course, because these two women are white and they’re living in America in 2017, they get criticism like this:
Update: Looks like that Facebook post was deleted within minutes after I posted this. Guess I culturally appropriated it! Here’s the screenshot I took, just in case.
So these two young women shut down their business, in the hopes that everybody will stop shaming them for being “racist.”
For making burritos.
Are there any other foods that white people aren’t allowed to make anymore? Are white people even allowed to eat burritos now? Do they need to take a DNA test, and only eat food from the countries where their ancestors lived? Should that food only be prepared by people with the same genetic makeup? That would certainly prevent such awful “cultural appropriation.”
Segregation is back, and this time it ain’t white people’s idea.
