Comedian Rob Schneider decided to make paella, and got himself into a paella pan of hot water thanks to the culinary-correctness police.
For it seems that if you don’t make paella just right—that is, according to Spanish chefs’ notion of auténtico—you’ve committed the crime of “cultural appropriation.” Cultural appropriation means eating a taco at Taco Bell instead of at a restaurant owned by genuine Mexicans—or, if you happen to be white, eating a taco, period. As Everyday Feminist puts it:
So poor Rob Schneider committed a no-no when he tweeted a photo of his family’s Spanish-themed Christmas Eve dinner just before it went into the oven, plus these words: “We just put the Paella in the oven!! Que rico!!”
Uh-oh—soon enough chefs all over Spain were setting Twitter ablaze with angry insistences that Schneider’s “paella” wasn’t actually paella at all, and that he was desecrating a beloved national dish. You sort of can’t blame them. For starters, he didn’t use an authentic paella pan: a huge flat metal two-handled dish. Instead, Schneider dumped some precooked rice, plus about $100 worth of raw lobster tails into a Pyrex baking dish before taking his photo. ¡Ay caramba! That is not how we do it in Spain, where the rice is supposed to cook along with the shellfish, expensive lobster is definitely not part of this working-class dish, and purists don’t use the oven but instead set the paella pan on top of a charcoal brazier. Spanish-born celebrity chef José Andres got into the act and offered to give Schneider some paella lessons. The tweets from the outraged chefs in Spain went like this: “[S]top making ‘rice with whatever'” and “Your paella is an abomination.”
Humbled, Schneider tweeted back an apologetic joke: “For the people of Sevilla who were insulted by my Paella, I didn’t mean to use lobsters. They crawled in the pan by themselves!” In so doing, he committed another Spain-insulting blooper: Paella originated in Valencia, not Seville—and in Spain that’s a big difference.
Then, as might be expected, Salon added its two cents’ worth of trendy moralizing: “When celebrities . . . render Spain’s beloved dish unrecognizable, our culture suffers,” a headline announced portentously. Spanish-surnamed Salon contributor Mireia Triguero Roura wrote: “Massive raw lobster tails aside, Spaniards were reacting to what they felt was cultural appropriation of their cuisine.” Roura pointed the finger of appropriation blame at . . . white people:
Of course, the Spanish in Spain aren’t exactly people “of color,” as any La Raza enthusiast who insists on not being called “Hispanic” can tell you. But, hey, there’s a cultural appropriation bandwagon, so why not jump onto it and earn some victimology credits, too?
