When I saw this the other day, l thought, "So fun! The discussion contains so much fodder for discussion of food culture; I bet I will use this in class sometime." #foodstudies #foodanthro #teaching https://twitter.com/jonbecker_/status/1196805486907052033

But since then, I have seen playful teasing turn to sincere and oblivious #ethnocentrism that goes beyond breaking the standard principle of #gastro- #culturalrelativism that I quote often and attribute to @literalleigh, who first put it in these terms to me: "Don't yuck my yums!"

E.g., there's one comment that got attention about Indian food being "terrible." As a scholar of South Asian food cultures, I'd like to publicly agree with others who've already noted this is not only a bad opinion but also comes off as ignorant of the interplay btw power & food.

So, the Twitter convo is still rich material for examination in class, but now in more ways, as we can talk about the hegemonizing process of codifying cuisine (what is "Indian food?"), colonialism (as several people note, Euros wanted those spices real bad at one point),

... #Xenophobia, #Orientalism, and Othering (who is "we"?), and more.

Beyond the political, intellectual, and culinary reasons I feel this "controversial opinion" is a bad take, I would like to echo this response and find some rasam to soothe my soul: https://twitter.com/tylergarret2/status/1198441382899339264?s=19