I’ve wanted to write about a particular food marketing peccadillo of mine for a long time and was handed the perfect opportunity to do so when I was in Pret a Manger the other day.
Take a look at their new menu items and tell me if anything stands out to you:
Italian Deli
Coronation Chicken
Veggie New York Bloomer
Curried Chickpea & Mango Wrap
Vietnamese-style Prawn Noodle Salad
Korean-style Chicken & Slaw Wrap
Mexican-style Chipotle Chickpea Salad
Korean-style Sticky Mushroom Salad
Korean-style Mushroom & Avo Wrap
What do the eagle-eyed among you spot? Yes, you at the back? Correct. It is the ubiquity of the word:
style
Every recipe writer’s secret weapon, this five-letter word is a #cma clause to whip out at the faintest shriek of CULTURAL APPROPRIATIOoOoN! by the TikTok mob. And I only had to glance at the Pret website to confirm the presence of another favoured bit of jargon:
“Our wraps and salads are bursting with flavour and inspired by our favourite global cuisines.”
Ah, there it is:
inspired
The Dean to STYLE’s Torville, the Dec to his Ant.
What else did you think about that list of menu items (aside from why anyone would find a sticky salad appetising)? Anyone? Yes, you again. Good observation. It’s the cuisines to which STYLE are affixed.
An upfront mea culpa
I don’t know about you, but I read a lot of recipe books as well as English-language (and awkwardly translated Chinese) online recipes too. I also love to read food labels and menus, from those of big supermarkets to neighbourhood bistros and pop-up food trucks. I maintain a keen focus on Chinese and Sino-adjacent cuisines, both because it’s what I want to cook, and also because I’m always thinking about how to contribute to the discourse around Chinese diaspora foodways, in particular how we attempt to translate and convey intangible heritage, practices and identity.
(If you have read my An A-Z Of Chinese Food essay series - unfortunately now offline - this will not be news to you.)
So trust me when I say that this use of STYLE and -INSPIRED has become noticeably endemic to food writing and food marketing in the last 5+ years. In fact, it’s been incorporated to the extent that the STYLE and -INSPIRED suffices are integral to the recipe names themselves. In other words, they are fundamental to the identity of the dish.
As you may have worked out, this artful linguistic diplomacy is an effort on the parts of recipe developers, writers and food companies to tactically swerve any criticism about cultural appropriation. Look at the Mexican recipes on Jamie Oliver’s website - a chef who hired cultural appropriation specialists last year, to mixed feedback. Almost every recipe authored by Oliver, especially the more recent ones, uses the suffices STYLE and -INSPIRED.
Then there is the culinary magpie Yotam Ottolenghi, who approaches global flavours like a child handed an empty sack in a sweet shop. Ottolenghi’s writing style manages to avoid the usual pitfalls of exoticising or infantilising language, though sometimes to the other extreme as to be inaccessible (what do you mean, you don’t have barberries and yuzu oil in your pantry?). It should be noted that his latest books are co-authored with various non-white female food writers from his Test Kitchen. This affords him - as a queer British-Israeli man - a certain cultural sovereignty in the court of public opinion that isn’t afforded for Oliver; white bloke, man of the people, etc.
(N.B. this is not necessarily my opinion, this is observation. Also N.B. Ottolenghi is not exempt from heated accusations of cultural appropriation, especially on the topic of Israeli/Palestinian food.)
So, in a way, we the public might exempt Ottolenghi from using these suffices, or maybe he does not believe in using them. Where they do appear are in headlines and subtitles (see this Guardian article, and a subsequent comment that irked me), which many readers don’t realise is an editorial decision beyond the writer’s control.
In the end, I see the use of these suffices as a well-meaning but double edged sword of acknowledgement towards an inherent ethnicity/race/place-based power imbalance. Those suffices are almost always attached to food that belongs to poorer, browner and/or colonised people.
In other words:
“I’m about to borrow from your culture, so here’s my upfront mea culpa.”
But it also can’t give you carte blanche to create a really awful recipe. It’s like those drivers who wince a halfhearted sorry at pedestrians while proceeding to bulldoze through the crossing at 35 mph.
Exercise 1
Questions for you to ask yourself when you are next out and about and looking at food language:
Which cuisines do you see these suffices STYLE and -INSPIRED attached to?
Pret’s Italian Deli needs no caveat, although Italian immigrants were once as vilified as the Chinese and the Jews. Same goes for the Curried Chickpea & Mango Wrap, clearly an Indian-ish creation. What does this say about which cuisines - and indeed ‘immigrants’ - are considered to be assimilated or accepted in the UK/US and which are still considered foreign?
Where is the point at which an ‘immigrant’ cuisine or dish transcends the border between Our and Their culture? (When do we see the italics or suffices being removed?)
Do you think language really is that effective, that something so incidental as a suffix can appease the ‘cancel culture brigade’? If so, what is the element of a recipe that gets to be defined as quintessentially ‘representative’ or ‘authentic’? Is it the presence of some mint and rice noodles in the Vietnamese-style prawn salad, even if they omitted fish sauce?
Why are we over-focused on getting certain facets of cultural identity ‘right’, primarily race, place and ethnicity? Why would we not credit the religious, class, behavioural or gendered aspects of certain dishes?
What is style?
Oh, we’re not done. We were just setting the scene…
What does STYLE actually mean? My Pinterest search returns a stream of motivational fashion quotes that are probably all misattributed:
In arts - including literature - STYLE means having an ‘original voice’. Essentially it’s the how-ness of something you do rather than the what-ness. It’s how you wear the skirt, not the skirt itself. It’s how you perform the monologue, not Shakespeare’s words themselves. But this is to possess STYLE. What does it mean to create in the STYLE of? Here, we are actually searching for a different word:
pastiche (noun) pas·tiche pa-ˈstēsh
a literary, artistic, musical, or architectural work that imitates the style of previous work
“His building designs are pastiches based on classical forms.”
also : such stylistic imitation
Pastiche is a creative technique that I still resent from my musical composition lessons some 20 years ago. Write a four-part fugue in the style of J.S. Bach! Urgh!
What is inspiration?
As we wade deeper, the waters get murkier.
What is the difference between a pastiche of Mozart - which we might also call ‘paying homage’ - and being inspired by Mozart? To be inspired by means taking something and making it yours - that something being an original idea that has its own creative property or style, let’s say. To ‘make it yours’ you would have to add something fresh and unique in order to avoid the danger of… PLAGIARISM.
Exercise 2
Let’s start stirring the murky waters then:
In the realm of recipes and food creation, when does pastiche stop being ‘homage’ and become copying?
How do you judge where a recipe sits on the spectrum of inspired by / making it your own / misrepresenting / downright inaccurate / reputational damage / making a mockery of?
(I.e. a spectrum of pastiche to parody)
If your intention is always pure and good, does that absolve you of any and all criticism?
Is it enough to change the how-ness of a dish? What about the what-ness?
Are the rules fluid if you are an unknown writer vs a multinational corporation?
Is ‘inspired by’ basically borrowing from another culture by any other name? And does this translate into cultural appropriation?
Is cultural appropriation = plagiarism?
I’m not answering these questions. They are for us to ponder together, without expectation of right or wrong answers. I have asked them on behalf of us (feel free to add more questions in the comments), because I truly believe that if we want to engage in conversations on cultural appropriation - which so many people seem to be - we need to move beyond platitudes and knee jerks.
In IP law, there are ways to safeguard intellectual creations. There are no ways to safeguard cultural heritage (unless you make it onto UNESCO’s intangible heritage list, which is also not without contentious politics). I’m not condemning the ‘spray and pray’ method of adding suffices like STYLE and -INSPIRED, but to me, those words have reached a semantic satiation point. Instead, they reveal something telling about our engagement with multiculturalism, and that is:
We still have an ongoing, collective hangup about authenticity. What’s obvious here is that STYLE and -INSPIRED are positioned as a culturally acceptable antidote to AUTHENTIC in a climate where narrow notions of authenticity and ownership are demanded of and imposed on The Other.
I’m writing this in a month where I tried very hard to resist being pulled into the whole ‘American TikTok discovers British Chinese food’ debacle. I did, however, do a quick analysis of the post-match commentary and once again it confirmed my frustrations; that we are constantly asking the wrong question: ‘Is this authentic?’ Instead, we should be asking ‘how did this dish come to be?’, ‘what is authenticity?’ and ‘what even is creativity?’.
In the 150 days since ChatGPT was released, and even more days since various AI image generators were made available for netizens to use, our conception of original content, artistic creation and how this correlates to authenticity has had to shift so far off the map that debating ‘what is authentic food’ is like arguing about watering cans vs buckets while a forest fire rages behind you. It’s moot - we’re all f***ed mate.
This comes back to another focus of my research; the commodification of cultural identity. We place so much value on creative IP and newness because capitalist society equates it with individuality and innovation. Back to all those recipes that I collect: sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but almost every new cookbook I’ve read merely offers you a tweaked version of a dish that already exists in 10,000 digital iterations and manuscripts. But here is where it clashes against that systemic pressure for marginalised people to commodify their culture, their narrative, their memories.
A piece of music cannot be unrecorded, a book cannot be unwritten. But the iterative nature of food is that we can start all over again and make it again, make it yours, make it uniquely more yours. Indeed, we do this many times a day. A dish that you cook and create in the privacy of your own home need not pay homage or virtue signal. It doesn’t even need naming. If questioned on the dish’s authenticity, what’s the worst that could happen? You eat it, it passes through you. It never happened.