Cultural-Appropriation Nachos on the Prairie

Just like Mama used to make

For all of you who’ve been hoping that I would one day convert the Freedom Scale into a food blog, your patient wait is over!

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You’re hungry. You probably want to just skip to the recipe. But don’t you want to understand these nachos first? I mean really understand them?

Let’s take a journey back to my childhood…

Imagine cold winter nights on the prairie. Wind whistling through gaps in the roof of our rustic sod house. My baby brother crying in his crib.

And, off in the distance, the sound of hoofbeats—desperados thundering up and down, looking for another lonely farmhouse to plunder. Would they come to our house next?

Our one milk cow was sick. Would she survive the week? Old Doc Brown had done all he could…

Daddy had gone off to Sioux City to try to earn some money. He’d been gone for so long! He sent back what he could, but it wasn’t much. Certainly not enough to buy the medicine we needed for our cow.

Mama did all she could in his absence, but she was with child, and it was getting harder for her to move around…

And would any of it matter anyway, if the desperados got to us?

Those were the kinds of thoughts that ran through my head, as I sat trying to keep warm in the flickering candlelight.

And yet, just before I became completely consumed with fear, I would see my mother’s smiling face as she placed a plate of cultural-appropriation nachos in front of me.

I still remember it with such fondness. Warm… gooey cheese… red streaks of Thai sriracha glistening in the dim light.

“We may be poor,” she would say, “but at least we can appropriate foods from other people’s cultures.”

“Tell me again how you made these,” I would implore, even though she’d already told me many times before. Hearing her talk about colonizing exotic cuisines…well, it just let me forget, for a few precious seconds, just how desperate our situation was. God, I was so cold.

“First, you take two handfuls of tortilla chips,” she would say. “Your grandpappy appropriated those back in ‘47, in the Mexican War.”

“Then, you throw a handful of Cheddar cheese all over ‘em. We took that kind of cheese off those lousy Redcoats during the Revolution.

“Next, you slather it all with meat-hot sauce. That actually hasn’t been invented yet, but when it is, it will have been invented in Rochester, NY, by a Greek immigrant named Alex Tahou. And no matter how grindingly poor we are, it is our privilege to be able to appropriate the inventions of Greek men in the future.

“Finally, you zigzag some streaks of Thai Siam sriracha across the top. The Siamese appropriated sriracha from the Vietnamese and then added some sugar to it. Then your great-great uncle Horace, using his privilege powers, swindled it from a tradesman in a market in Bangkok. And that’s why your nachos have that sweet-hot flavor today.”

There are lots of different ways of pillaging the cuisine of other peoples. This was my mama’s.

Cultural appropriation never tasted so good.

Ingredients:

• Two handfuls of tortilla chips

• A handful of cheddar cheese

• A slather of Rochester-style meat-hot sauce

• Several zigzags of Thai sriracha

Instructions:

Do what mama said.

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I made the above-described nachos a couple of days ago. I wanted something quick, and all those ingredients were staring me in the face, so boom—insta-snack. Not as advanced as my cultural-appropriation nachos #945, but still delicious.

As mama mentioned above, the tortilla chips were appropriated from Mexico. I am not at all Mexican, so eating tortilla chips is definitely a form of colonialism.

I (and every other house in America) must atone for this sin by throwing our tortilla chips in the garbage. Then, we must all get our DNA checked at Ancestry dot com, and then only eat the cuisine associated with our ethnic background. If you are more than one ethnicity, be sure to eat those foods in the correct proportions.

The cheddar comes from England, right? (From Cheddar, in Somerset, actually. If they didn’t want their cheese appropriated, why did they name their town after it?) I am part English, so I guess I am okay to culturally appropriate the cheddar.

Every living soul within a 40-mile radius of downtown Rochester has appropriated meat-hot sauce from Nick Tahou Hots. The Tahous are Greek. I am a little bit Greek, so am I okay there?

But wait—the particular meat-hot sauce I used came from Jimmy Z’s, a local landmark restaurant. (They are closing, so we stocked up, because theirs is the best!) I think Jimmy’s family came here from Macedonia. Am I Macedonian at all? Is my Greek part close enough? Probably not if you ask a Macedonian.

I am not Thai or Vietnamese at all, so I guess I am just going to have to throw out all the sriracha bottles I bought after my Thai neighbor hipped me to the sweet-hot goodness of Shark-brand Thai sriracha. And then maybe submit myself for reeducation?

Bottom line:

The whole notion of “cultural appropriation” is truly, deeply evil.

Cultural sharing is wonderful.

Don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise.