Jerk rice – with a side serving of insanity

Earlier this week, the Labour MP Dawn Butler ‘called out’ Jamie Oliver for ‘appropriation’. His sin, according to the shadow minister for women and equalities, was to launch a product called Punchy Jerk Rice. ‘I’m just wondering do you know what #Jamaican #jerk actually is?’ she asked him on Twitter. ‘It’s not just a word you put before stuff to sell products… Your jerk rice is not OK. This appropriation from Jamaica needs to stop.’

The notion that it is problematic for white people to ‘appropriate’ the culture of other ethnic groups has become widespread on the left. Three years ago, Erika Christakis, a Yale lecturer, sparked protests after she questioned official university guidance telling white students not to wear ‘culturally insensitive’ Halloween costumes, such as feathered headdresses. Student activists were so enraged by her description of American universities as places of ‘censure and prohibition’ — and her outrageous suggestion that there was nothing inherently racist about blond toddlers dressing up as African-American Disney characters — that she was forced to resign.

More recently, a white American teenager was shamed on Twitter after posting a picture of herself in a traditional Chinese dress she was wearing to her high-school prom. ‘Was the theme of prom casual racism?’ asked one enraged liberal, whose tweet immediately got thousands of likes.

But accusing white chefs and restaurateurs of being racist if they have the temerity to serve food that isn’t… well, white — whatever that is — seems a reductio ad absurdum. Last year a burrito van in Portland was forced out of business after activists accused its two white owners of ‘stealing’ their recipes from Mexico. Soon afterwards, a list was circulated of similarly inadmissible behaviour entitled ‘(Alternatives to) White-Owned Appropriative Restaurants in Portland’.