On May 16th, a local Portland news site published the article “Kooks Serves Pop-Up Breakfast Burritos With Handmade Tortillas Out of a Food Cart on Cesar Chavez” which reignited a controversial debate about race and cultural exchanges. In this case, the two owners of Kooks Burritos were lambasted for attempting to bring a cherished memory from a trip to Mexico with the rest of their town with cries of cultural appropriation and even claims of theft of intellectual property.
“‘I love Portland, but I don't love people who steal recipes and cooking methods without compensating for them,’ wrote Bahram A. in his one-star review. ‘Shame. If I were this business, I'd start donating a portion of the profit to the business you stole from so they could be able to afford curtains.’”(2)
Before addressing the claims of intellectual property theft, one must first look at the underlying issue here, that of “cultural appropriation.” According to the website Everyday Feminism, there are two definitions of cultural appropriation. The simple definition is “when somebody adopts aspects of a culture that’s not their own” but they also give a more in depth definition,
“cultural appropriation also refers to a particular power dynamic in which members of a dominant culture take elements from a culture of people who have been systematically oppressed by that dominant group.”(3)
This idea stems from a postmodern and post-Marxist worldview. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, describes these postmodernists in that they
“don't believe in the individual…[t]hey believe that since you don't have an individual identity, your fundamental identity is group fostered, and that means that you're basically an exemplar of your race...you're an exemplar of your gender, or your sex, or your ethnicity, or you're an exemplar of however you can be classified so that you are placed in the position of a victim against the oppressor.”(4)
Which brings us to the idea of cultural appropriation and its present day usage. Much like the new definition of “racism,” the idea of cultural appropriation is what Dr. Peterson would call a “post-Marxist sleight-of-hand” as it is the consequence of an attempt of finding an “oppressor” that is not simply the rich.(4) As someone who does not hold this kind of presupposition, I do not agree with this idea as it seems to only push people away from each other, rather than bring them together.
The second slur thrown at the two women who created Kooks Burritos was that they were committing theft of intellectual property by “peeking into the windows of every kitchen” to find out more about the techniques they were trying to learn.(1) According to the Legal Information Institute, there are 4 legal protections for intellectual property: patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets.(5) According to the United States Patent and Trademark Office,
“patents may be granted for any "new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof" according to Title 35 of the United States Code, Section 101 (35 U.S.C. 101)...In terms of patentable subject matter, a list of ingredients can fall under the headings of a composition of matter and/or manufacture, and the way the food product is produced can fall under a process. So the short answer is yes, recipes are eligible for patent protection because they potentially contain patentable subject matter.”(6)
While this may sound like the previous accusations are valid, the article cited previously continues saying
“To be patentable, an invention must also be ‘novel’ and ‘nonobvious,’...That means a patentable invention can neither have existed before, nor be an obvious improvement or alteration of a previously known invention, which could be determined by someone with reasonable skill in the art encompassed by the invention...For example, if a pancake recipe calls for adding an egg while the pancake is cooking on the griddle, while that may differ from what is commonly thought of as a pancake, it will produce a result that can be considered obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the culinary arts.”(6) The article goes on to say that the only way to keep a recipe safe legally is to use trade secrets. However, they aren’t perfect’ “[t]rade secrets do not prevent others from independently discovering or reverse engineering a recipe or invention.”(6)
Therefore, one must conclude that the two women have not committed any sort of illegal action nor should they be looked down upon for doing all that they could to unlock the secrets of authentic tortilla making, as the accusations not founded in the US revised code, but rather stem from a postmodern, more specifically post-Marxist, worldview.
Works Cited
