Food isa matter of, well, taste. Yum for one teenager is yeek for another. Washington Post columnist Gene Weirgarten, a self-acclaimed “enthusiast of excreta-related humor” [https://twitter.com/geneweingarten], turned to the other end of the gut, and penned supposedly humorous column on a variety of foods you can’t make him eat. No issues so far. But, among other things, he turned to Indian food and made some unsavory comments. Social media backlash was predictable. Padma Lakshmi, the celebrity foody, found a “colonizer” attitude at work and posted a GIF that alleged racism too. [https://twitter.com/PadmaLakshmi/status/1429851029940670469]

The column [https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/gene-weingarten-you-cant-make-me-eat-these-foods/2021/08/12/e34996a8-efc0-11eb-81d2-ffae0f931b8f_story.html] made many unpalatable remarks about various foods. Sampler: “If you think Indian curries taste like something that could knock a vulture off a meat wagon, you do not like a lot of Indian food.”Some people call it humor, but it was outright factually incorrect to say that Indian cuisine is based on one spice, curry, and that Indian food is made up only of curries, types of stew.

The paper and the columnist ended up eating a humble pie. The former placed a correction at the top (“In fact, India’s vastly diverse cuisines use many spice blends and include many other types of dishes”), and the latter tweeted: “From start to finish plus the illo, the column was about what a whining infantile ignorant d---head I am. I should have named a single Indian dish, not the whole cuisine, & I do see how that broad-brush was insulting. Apologies.(Also, yes, curries are spice blends, not spices.)” [https://twitter.com/geneweingarten/status/1429889354902671363]

The American columnist obviously knows little about Indian food. But Padma Lakshmi’s charge of a colonizer attitude and racism [https://www.ndtv.com/offbeat/padma-lakshmis-reply-to-writer-who-said-indian-food-based-entirely-on-1-spice-2517309]is not entirely digestible. India’s colonizers, the British,are fonder of Indian curries than Indians themselves [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VijTieSlaE0]. The very word ‘curry’, ironically, reeks of colonialism. [https://news.sky.com/story/food-bloggers-call-for-word-curry-to-be-cancelled-over-claims-it-is-rooted-in-british-colonialism-12376985] The spices that go into many of them would not have arrived in India without colonization either. [https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20190609-the-surprising-truth-about-indian-food] This does not imply Indians should seek reparations, but all sides could put parochialism off the menu and appreciate the fact that what is identified as the cuisine of a nation is the product of long centuries of globalization.