The word curry is facing calls for cancelation after a food blogger pointed out its links to colonialism.
While we are all familiar we the word curry and its common use in the modern language, one food blogger and critic suggested we should dump the word over its origins.
As 27-year-old Chaheti Bansal from California suggested in one of her viral cooking videos, people should unlearn the word curry because of its ties to colonialism.
“Not in all cultures but specifically in Indian cuisine because I don’t understand what that word means,” the food blogger explained in a video that was shared by Buzzfeed Tasty.
“There’s a saying that the food in India changes every 100km and yet we’re still using this umbrella term popularized by white people who couldn’t be bothered to learn the actual names of our dishes. But we can still unlearn.”
After the video went viral, the young lady spoke out to NBC Asian America to double down on her opinion that people who don’t truly understand the word curry should stop using the broad term to generalize dishes from various parts of the world.
“Curry shouldn’t be all that you think about when you think about South Asian food. You can travel like 100 km, and you can get a completely different type of cuisine,” Bansal told the publication.
“And it’s a completely different language and a different culture. And it just goes to show that there’s so much diversity in our food that doesn’t get recognized.”
While the food blogger admitted that the word is commonly used in various South Asian nations, she suggested that people use it to refer to a specific dish rather than using it to “lump all of our foods together under this term.”
Though some people may not agree with the idea of canceling the word curry, another food blogger, 36-year-old Nisha Vedi Pawar, appeared to echo Bansal’s words as she drew a comparison to Western food.
“It’s just like for American food. You wouldn’t want everything dipped in like Old Bay right? You wouldn’t want to put everything with good old American French’s mustard. The same way, we don’t put everything in tikka sauce,” Pawar told NBC.
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