You can hear, even from a great distance, that some arguments have a hot, intractable core that won’t be easily cooled, in the same way that you can tell by watching a pub fight whether it is about a fraternal betrayal or somebody spilling something. The fracas over the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s punchy jerk rice – which led the Labour MP Dawn Butler to tweet: “Your jerk rice is not OK. This appropriation from Jamaica needs to stop” – is just such a row.
Oliver fans forced themselves awake. Which bit of his rice is wrong, again? That he would use seasoning that originated in another culture; that he would get the seasoning wrong; or that he would misapply it to the wrong ingredient, “jerk” being intended for meat, not rice? What do the liberals want? Where was Butler when he started using mostarda di frutta on pasta? Won’t someone think of the Italians? “And what about tea?”, added the contrarians. “Is that cultural appropriation? Now we’ve appropriated it, is anyone else drinking it appropriating it back off us?” The untrained observer, arriving from space, would assume we were a nation that furiously and irrationally loved, or hated, Oliver, whereupon discussing him at all itself becomes an act of cultural appropriation. But that’s not really what’s going on.
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