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Any fans of the Great British Bake Off here? I think this season has been a case study in the mechanisms by which wokeness latches on and does its best to ruin things. I'm so sick of people talking about how offensive Mexican week was. If you ask me, I really have no idea what was so offensive about it. Acknowledging that Mexican culture and food exists is not the same as being racist towards Mexicans. Also, since when are Mexicans even considered to be oppressed, and worthy of people getting outraged over? Have Mexicans historically been oppressed, especially by the British?
Following Mexican week, now, I guess the outlets all saw that claiming offense at GBBO was a great way to get more views, because every week I see at least one article about how viewers were "shocked and outaged" at the latest episode of Bake Off. Often, these are related to the fact that several contestants this season aren't native to Great Britain and are not being handled sensitively enough with regards to the recipes they do and their ability to follow the instructions in the technical challenges.
I don't watch cooking shows and haven't seen the episode, but looking at Twitter, there seems to be people offended at mispronunciation of Spanish-language food names (a trifling complaint - why should Spanish-language words even be pronounced in a Spanish way when speaking English? It's a different language!), some anger at stereotyping (maybe valid?) and just sheer anger at food being done the wrong way.
Coming from a country with a notoriously bland cuisine (people still remember when Silvio Berlusconi appeared to have prevented the European Food Safety Authority from being placed to Finland because Finnish food is so bad), I've never quite got the idea how seriously the people from Actually Good Cuisine Nations are when they do these ostantateous displays of grief and anger about food being done the wrong way. Are the Italians really on the point of suicide when seeing someone posting online how they've cooked Carbonara with cream and bacon?
If someone did Finnish food the wrong way in a big foreign cooking show, we'd probably just be happy about being mentioned outside Finland, and also befuddled why someone else than us would choose to eat our food. (Then again, I just ate a bowl of porridge so gray and chunky that my toddler daughter spontaneously went BLEUUGHHH! when looking at it.)
Italians are justly famous for overblown drama over food. You pronounce it wrong, maybe just a correction and a dirty look. But you make that meatball with a little less veal and a little more beef, and you've committed treason, treason I say! Even if -- no, especially if -- your neighbor has made them that way all along.
We had an Italian grad student in a lab my wife worked in. We started getting Hawaiian pizzas just to fuck with him. It was great.
Hawaiian pizzas? You are like a little child when it comes to trolling Italians.
Finnish people winning at trolling by food desecration seems like a guy who always wins at gay chicken because he's gay. On the one hand, congrats, first prize for you, no one else was close, but on the other...maybe you started with a bit of an advantage?
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