+1
Seriously. Anyone who can reproduce a genuine Mexican taco is welcome in my neighborhood.
I’m not sure how one can steal a recipe for tortillas. They aren’t exactly Beef Wellington.
…the NSW Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby are SJW’s. Shannon Molloy is a Social Justice Warrior. Isn’t everyone in the story an SJW? Don’t you support the “good” SJW’s in this story?
No need to assume any more. You should have just said “you weren’t doing that.” At least now we know. Especially when you post bullshit like this.
You exist in a fucking bubble. You are convinced that your observations are correct and representative of reality. And you are convinced of that not because of objective evidence: but because of subjective experiences and feelings based on the social circle you keep and the media you read. And you are too intellectually lazy to step out of your bubble. You follow twitter accounts like @TheSafestSpace. Is it any surprise you’ve come to the conclusions you have?
Because in real life: the stuff you are posting here is just the tip of the iceberg. As unfortunate as that story you linked to about Shannon Molloy was, you miss the big picture. That the harassment that Molloy had to deal with is an everyday occurrence for many women on the internet. That women and minorities do not get the same opportunities that you get. Telling you this is going to piss you off but I don’t give a shit. You live a life of extreme privilege. There really is nothing more pathetic than to have to read your posts here bleating about “female only grants” and “women in media” events. You don’t have a fucking clue.
You work in the media. More than anyone here you’ve got access to the tools and resources that could confirm your observations. Even better than that: you could simply go and talk to the women you work with and ask them about their experiences. But I know you aren’t going to do that. Because you are too terrified of what you might find out.
Those ladies didn’t need to travel to Mexico to get some ideas for food. They could have read a few Pit threads and got all the public domain recipes they needed.
Those always seem to come out a little bitter for some reason.
I am a bit curious as to what the super secret tortilla technique is. Here, the best tortillas I’ve ever had are hand made right in front of you, so you could watch all you want. (Luckily, by an actual Mexican, too!) Yes, I get that it’s not cool to sneak around to steal recipes and techniques, when you’ve been expressly told not to, regardless of issues of cultural appropriation or not, and perhaps even dumber to talk about it in an interview, but what could be so secret about this technique? Inquiring minds want to know!
WRT that article, the whole premise is based on an assumption. Says so right in the second paragraph.
Nice of the author to get SJWs all riled by setting the scene for the reader when we don’t even know if it happened. At least they included the word “probably”.
Also, this line " “They told us basic ingredients,” Connelly said, adding “[but] they wouldn’t tell us too much about technique.” Hmmm. Wonder why?"
Why? Cuz most places (I’d wager even in Mexico) require you to disclose ingredients. People don’t like giving up recipes. I’d further guess they weren’t concerned about someone opening a food truck a thousand miles away, it’s just part of having a business. Most food places are like that. Go to your local deli and ask for the ingredients of a soup or chicken salad or steak marinade and you’ll get it. But ask for the recipe or ask the owner to take you in back and teach you how to make it and you’ll likely not get far.
But, hey, let’s just let the author decide that all the grandmas in Mexico were guarding their top secret recipes because they knew that these two predatory women wanted to steal them. That’s, literally, what she said, it must be true, right?
Yeah, re-reading the original interview with them in the Willamette Week, while they do say they were peeking through the windows of every kitchen, I’m not entirely sure that’s literal. And it seems to me that it’s more likely that, given they admit to their poor Spanish, that nobody wanted to go into technique because these two girls wouldn’t understand, anyway. Or not. It’s just a tortilla. I’m sure you can take cooking classes in Mexico that will teach you various tortilla making techniques and much more.
I’d be surprised if they’re making anything that can’t be found on google or cooking classes in the states or working in any of the thousands of Mexican restaurants around here or the Food Network for that matter. If they had worded things a little better, what they did was really no different than saying ‘before opening, we took a tour of Mexico and spent some time learning how to cook authentic Mexican food’. Same thing, no ‘peaking in the windows’.
Oh, no doubt. I mean, here’s one abuelita’s recipe. Oh no! I don’t really think there’s any sort of “secret” technique they figured out or stole from the locals that isn’t freely available from the comfort of your own home. I personally think it was just said somewhat facetiously to add an air of “authenticity” and perhaps mystery to their product. It’s a much sexier story to say you traveled to Mexico and had to peek in kitchen windows to find the “secret” tortilla recipe than to say, yeah, we read a Rick Bayless book and watched some videos and figured it out.
That’s how they make the sour cream.
Goddamn it, now I want someone to open a really authentic taco place.
Authentic pre-columbian Aztec tacos. Which involved more insects and less meat.
“After cleaning and cooking them, insects are usually eaten either toasted or as ingredients in a taco. Grasshoppers continue to be eaten this way today, especially in Oaxaca. Some insects can be ground if they have a stronger flavor and are therefore mixed with herbs and spices so they can be used a source of varied and original flavors.”
Why no, I wouldn’t eat there. But if you want to be authentic and really take something from another culture, why not go back to the real original recipe?
Grasshoppers aren’t bad. They mostly taste like whatever they are coated in, usually chile and lime.
Grasshoppers are apparently a sell-out favorite at Mariners games.
All this talk about Mexican food is making me hungry for tacos.
I don’t know why you think I’m trying to hide anything. I included a link to the full article in my previous post and, as always, I encourage everybody to read it so they can see for themselves just how stupid, spiteful, and petty minded SJWs can be. Forgive me for neglecting to quote the author’s pious rationale. The tears of my contrition are unbearably bitter. For what it’s worth, you’ve proven that quoting her argument doesn’t improve it.
Besides, I don’t fault SJWs for being nonsensical, same as I don’t fault Time Cube guy for being nonsensical. I fault SJWs for being nasty, vindictive, supercilious, mean-spirited cunts. I quoted the sections of the article which best illustrated that. Since her argument was bullshit, I saw no harm in leaving it where it was. It was only so much blather anyway. Still, since you insist, I’ll address it here.
Recipes are just lists of ingredients and lists of ingredients aren’t intellectual property and cannot be copyrighted. Of course, there are a very, very few rare edge-cases in which this may not necessarily be true. UK chef Heston Blumenthal has made a name for himself creating recipes so baroque they blur the line between cooking and organic chemistry. His techniques include freezing mincemeat in liquid nitrogen to give it the consistency of sorbet, and making noodles from shrimp by dissolving them in a special enzyme called transglutanimase. If these Mexican abuelitas were making their tacos out of genetically modified caviar and krypton plasma or something, then maybe, perhaps, one might claim they’d had their intellectual property stolen. But they weren’t. So one can’t.
Nope, they were making their tacos out of regular old ingredients and there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, either illegal or immoral about figuring out what those ingredients are and selling those same tacos yourself. And it’s not industrial espionage to peek through a window and see how they hold their fucking rolling pins.
And the judge would throw it out of court just as fast. You can’t copyright a recipe. You can copyright a recipe book, because that contains embellishments like photographs and commentary. But you cannot copyright a list of ingredients, and that’s all a recipe is.
Besides, even if you could (which you can’t), the case still wouldn’t have merit. Why? Because they didn’t take the recipe verbatim! They got a little bit of information from the abuelitas, and they may have gotten a little more information from peeking through the windows (assuming, of course, that they actually did peek through windows and that this “admission” wasn’t just a figure of speech and/or comical hyperbole, which is an assumption I’m not prepared to grant), but then they came back to the USA and experimented with numerous different combinations of ingredients themselves until they found a recipe with which they were satisfied. From the interview (which you can read here:
*"“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.”
Well, she figured it out."* (bolding mine)
So, as you can see, the chefs did their own experimentation trying to duplicate the taste of the food. Given that the ingredients they used were almost certainly not the same as the ingredients used by the abuelitas (unsurprising, since Portland is thousands of miles from Puerto Nuevo), and given that sense memory degrades very quickly over time (meaning the finished product almost certainly didn’t taste exactly like the tacos in Puerto Nuevo), the odds of them exactly reproducing the original recipe are probably less than the odds of winning the Powerball.
So, in summary, the Kooks Burritos recipe was almost certainly not exactly the same as the original, the end product almost certainly didn’t taste exactly the same as the original, and even if it did it wouldn’t matter because you can’t copyright the recipe for a fucking taco!
All that happened is that two curious and resourceful chefs had their hard work rendered pointless by a bunch of haughty, attention seeking SJW cunts. That’s it.
Cultural appropriation is made up nonsense and doesn’t matter. Just because a bunch of screeching, underemployed millennial assholes make a stink about something doesn’t mean it matters.
Of all the sins against reason committed by SJWs, perhaps the one I hate the most is their intentional devaluing of the term “white supremacy”. When most people hear “white supremacy” they think of Auschwitz, or apartheid, or Strange Fruit. That’s as it should be. Some terms are loaded with such profound historical weight that to overuse them is to devalue not only the term itself but the society in which they’re used. A few years ago I attended a lecture given by a holocaust survivor. It was harrowing. I can think of few things as disgustingly offensive as using the same term to describe both the ideology that persecuted him and the notion that people should be allowed to cook whatever they like. It’s just fucking deranged. Yes, the USA has problems with racism. No, copying a taco recipe isn’t racist, or supremacist, or anything else, even if the people doing it have been convicted in the court of public opinion of the mortal sin of “cooking while white”.
Given that white people make up about 80% of the population of Oregon, that’s hardly surprising.
This is a remarkably dense nugget of bullshit. Firstly, the cuisines aren’t “theirs”. They belong to whoever can cook them.
Secondly, the author of this witless jeremiad seems to have a perspective on race best encapsulated as “POC vs Whitey”, as evidenced by his/her lumping of all POC together. Let me ask you, do you honestly think the destructive online bullying campaign wrought against Kooks Burritos would have ever happened if the chefs had been black instead of white? If the recipe “belongs” to anyone (which it doesn’t, either in a legal or moral sense), it doesn’t belong to black people any more than white people. But I would bet literally everything I own that two black chefs, or two asian chefs, or two middle-eastern chefs, would never be accused of cultural appropriation under the same circumstances.
Thirdly, the claim that white-owned businesses “hamper” the ability for POC to run similar businesses is stated as fact without corroborative evidence. I clicked on the first three links in the google doc and found nothing concrete to support this claim. If anything, when a food becomes popular the increased demand creates more openings in the market place for POC, not fewer. If Kazakhstani Besbarmak suddenly became the Hot New Thing in Portland, Oregon, and ten new restaurants opened up to serve it, and one of them was Kazakhstani and the other nine were run by evil white people who forgot their place that’s still one more Kazakhstani business that would never have existed had the food not been “appropriated”!
The argument was fucking retarded. My posting it here wouldn’t have made it any less fucking retarded. I didn’t post the argument because (a) the reason I found the article so objectionable was its spiteful and bigoted tone (b) because the “argument” (such as it was) was beneath my notice, and (c) if I’d quoted any more than I did I would have been perilously close to committing copyright infringement…which is kinda funny when you think about it.
Stealing implies the recipe was owned by someone else. It wasn’t.
Oh, please. Kooks Burritos wasn’t an “ethnic restaurant”. It was a couple of women serving burritos out the back of a van. More importantly, it was a labour of love run by two women who wanted to share something they found amazing, and it was ruined by SJW assholes who decided - *on behalf of Mexican abuelitas for whom they had absolutely no right to speak - *that they were just too white to do that.
Fuck them.
We all live in bubbles. Everything you said applies to you as well, with the exception of the specific Twitter account. I read a lot of media from all spectrums of politics, ranging from Buzzfeed through to the Washington Post, and that includes a lot of social media. Just because I follow an account or read a news source doesn’t mean I take it as gospel - it’s an information source. Even the SDMB is an information source.
Nor do you. Go to uni, get a journalism degree, get a job in the mainstream media (good luck) and then you might be in a position to tell me I don’t have a clue. Until then: if you think my posts are “pathetic” - don’t read them. Stop participating in the thread. You’ll be happier for it, from the sounds of it.
…everything I said does not apply to me. You’ve admitted that you are not going to “discover if there is a problem you are unaware of from an objective standpoint.” That isn’t my position. You can read as much media as you like. But if read that media from the position “there isn’t a problem” then you are never ever going to see that there is a problem. This isn’t about “reading lots of sources.” Its about critical thinking. It about talking to the women and minorities that you work with. You are right: we all live in a bubble. I talk about my bubble here. To expand your bubble you have to do things differently. Is that something you are willing to do?
I’ve worked in the media as well dude and my work has probably been seen by more people than anything you’ve ever done. Get off your fucking high horse. You don’t have a fucking clue.
I’m not getting into a dick measuring contest with you, Mr Bear. Clearly you’ve got nothing constructive to say and that’s fine, but if you think I’m on a high horse I’d suggest you’re also aboard an elevated equestrian as well.
…you just finished telling me to " Go to uni, get a journalism degree, get a job in the mainstream media (good luck) and then you might be in a position to tell me I don’t have a clue."
If you didn’t want to get into a “dick measuring contest” then you shouldn’t have started one in the first place. You are the one who in this thread has constantly alluded to your “media experience” as if it means something. So you managed to go to university, get a journalism degree and get a job (luckily) in the mainstream media? Do you really think that “luck” was the only thing playing in your favour? Do you think the playing field was even? That women don’t have to face more obstacles to get the same sort of job that you do? How about Indigenous Australians?