A storm in a rice bowl
Online outrage and some of the things I hate about social media food culture
If you are a chronically online foodie, you may have recently seen a kerfuffle about chocolate rice.
Certainly, the first I caught a glimpse of it was when I was aimlessly scrolling through Reels late one evening; one after another, I started to see these reaction videos from comedy creators, whereby they saw this chocolate rice and said various things such as “nope, straight to jail”, as if it was some sort of culinary abomination.
But chocolate rice? Isn’t that just champorado?
Well, not quite. The video, created by Kat Lieu of Subtle Asian Baking, sees her washing then putting rice in a rice cooker (all good and proper), and then adding chocolate bars for them to be cooked alongside the rice, the melted gloop ready to be mixed in right at the end. She recommends eating it as is, or with berries and nuts on top. As an additional step and a way to use up leftovers, she even blends some of the chocolate rice with coconut milk to make a pudding. It all looked alright.
My wife told me today that she had actually seen the video before, but decided not to show it to me as it just seemed like a “cheat way of doing champorado”; to her, champorado was already straightforward to do it properly, so why this method? But fair enough, I thought - not everyone’s got the time or energy to do everything, and sometimes we do things on a whim, right? To me, it seemed harmless, and just another (modern) way of doing something with a long and storied history.
I guess I was wrong:
Lieu would later say that people hoped that she would die, and she has talked about the sexism and racism she often faces as a female Asian content creator. And for what? A chocolate rice dish, that draws very loosely upon champorado (Lieu has a Filipino husband) and more generally upon the many sweet rice puddings and porridges that exist around the world? People be crazy mean.
Look, I get it... a bit (not the racism, sexism, or death threats. God no). A lot of this is just people leaning into internet meme-ery to try and score social points, views and the like, and I have enjoyed my fair share of Chef Reactions videos where he tears apart ridiculous cooking videos (though he argues that he only targets those who are very obviously doing it as a bit, and grossly wasting food in the process). And alas, as the BBC has pointed out, rage-bait and controversy can be lucrative.
But it’s the ignorance underlining these attempts to be funny and/or internet-savvy that gets me. Accusations that this is some sort of culinary hate crime perpetuated by non-Asians are just straight up erasing the fact that chocolate rice is definitely A Thing in the Philippines (and elsewhere), and last I checked the Philippines was in Asia. It’s no surprise that Lieu’s most ardent defenders were indeed Filipino, as she states in her post:
While this is not champorado (Filipino chocolate rice porridge), my Pinoy family approves and I appreciate all the Filipinos coming to defend this recipe and educating the trolls and bullies 🇵🇭💜 masarap and mabuhay!
But aside from erasing cultures and cuisines, the other thing that irks me about these sorts of criticisms is this: are foods really all that different as to be completely alien and unrecognisable?
It makes me think of another genre of social media food content that I dislike, that tries to rev up the strangeness and foreignness of foods that are being tried for the first time. I get that it’s click-bait, with a deliberate strategy of trying to hook you in, but I feel that rather than bridging the gaps between different cuisines and peoples, it instead amplifies and highlights the differences, driving more of a wedge between people.
In the champorado context, rather than celebrating the fact that we all (mostly) enjoy a good sweet rice pudding in its different formats, instead we have people eager to jump in and decry something that they’re not familiar with.
As part of my reading around this, I watched a video by the Best Ever Food Review Show titled Eating the Philippines WORST Rated Foods!! (It’s bad…). With such a provocative and click-baity lead (on an admittedly more nuanced and thoughtful video) how could I resist? But my interest stemmed from the fact that for some reason, tiyula itum and champorado are on the list. But why??
As to why tiyula itum (a wonderful Tausug dish I’ve taught myself to cook recently, thanks to Nicole Ponseca’s I am a Filipino and Abdulaziz H. Hamsain’s The Tausug Cookbook) is badly rated, Tausug chef Miguel Cabel Moreno ruefully posits that “it’s unfamiliar to many, not a lot of people get to travel to the area where it comes from”, a sentiment that I feel drives a lot of the Taste Atlas rankings that get people so excited and agitated. People downvote things that they’ve never heard of or know very little about. It’s rather sad, no?
As for champorado, apparently the bad ranking comes from the fact that tuyo, a type of salted fish, is often used to garnish the dish, adding a salty and savoury element to complement and contrast the sweetness. Just like in so many other desserts in the world. And yet people who probably wouldn’t flinch at the thought of candied maple bacon or salted caramel, grimace at the idea of a salted fish being used instead.
Hating on difference rather than seeing and celebrating commonalities just seems more fun to people, I suppose.
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Although Lieu was drawing upon champorado and other sweet rice porridges, by cooking it as she did in her rice cooker she demonstrated an element, albeit small, of creativity and pushing of the boundaries.
Which is probably how Filipino champorado came about. Those of you only familiar with Mexican champurrado have probably been quite confused as to what I was talking about up to this point: why are we talking chocolate rice, when it’s a chocolate corn drink?
A chocolate corn drink is probably the first way in which it appeared in the Philippines, during the days of the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade that facilitated a massive material, cultural, culinary and human exchange across the Pacific. Alongside corn, products like atole and champurrado were brought over and introduced by Spanish and Mexican colonists and traders. Although mais/corn has proved quite popular, it and its derivatives didn’t quite take and get embedded in the way that was expected; as Doreen G Fernandez wrote:
Corn cooked in water [as in an atole] probably did not appeal to people who preferred rice, and already had lugaw, a rice congee or gruel, as an alternative rice dish.
(Side note: the way that Mexican ingredients, particularly corn, were adopted, adapted and indigenised in the Philippines is a fascinating story worthy of its own essay)
And so, when it came to making champurrado/champorado, Filipinos used rice instead, creating something different in the process.
Could you imagine the online outrage these days, if someone posted up a recipe video all excited about “my new take on champurrado, using rice"? Actually, I don’t really have to; you just have to see the comments on Lieu’s posts to see the madness. And with the undercurrent accusing Lieu of doing ‘white people’ things with rice, we start to see the emergence of the spectre of cultural appropriation.
After one of my supper clubs back in the day, a food blogger posted up photos and a glowing description of my leche flan. A Spanish chef commented, first out of bemusement and then increasingly in anger; I can’t remember the exact wording (because the blogger eventually deleted the comments), but the general gist was ‘leche flan is not Filipino, it’s Spanish, how can you say such a thing, Filipinos appropriated it and it’s not theirs, if it wasn’t for us they wouldn’t have anything’. Rather ironic, a Spaniard telling Filipinos that they stole Spanish things, no?
As I understand cultural appropriation, what tends to distinguish it from other forms of cultural borrowing or sharing, is that there is a power imbalance and consequently an implicit element of disrespect or erasure. It’s the idea that ‘I will mock you for doing this, but if I take it and do it myself, and perhaps disconnect it from its origins, it will automatically be better, and maybe I can profit from this imbalance too’. It is not merely a case of someone from one culture doing/enjoying something from another culture (which is very often what critics of the term assume it means, often in bad faith) - cultural sharing and participation is a very natural thing to happen.
It’s quite clear that Lieu making chocolate rice in her rice cooker is not cultural appropriation. Funnily enough, the mainly white cooking influencers who have picked up and shared/adapted her video, often with very little credit as to where it came from and what it might be referencing, could be more convincingly described as culturally appropriating. Indeed, some of their followers are already calling their new takes on it better than the original.
Many Filipino dishes that bear foreign influences are also not evidence of cultural appropriation. Aside from the fact that the balance of power lay with the colonisers - controlling what foods and ingredients were being shipped in, what crops could be grown and where, and who was allowed to cook in certain situations - most Filipino adaptations are attempts to recreate, using what was available, as a form of tribute or homage. Again, I love this paragraph by Doreen G Fernandez:
The assimilation of these foods has not however, been slavish. Always, it has involved indigenization, in which tastes are adjusted to the Filipino palate. Long-ago noodles brought in by Chinese traders, for example, when cooked with Filipino ingredients, and then adjusted to local tastes by their Filipino wives, became pansit. The Chinese batsui (“pork and water”) is now the Ilonggo bachoy, with pork lights, broth, egg noodles, and a sprinkling of toasted garlic and chopped scallions. The Spanish paella became Pinoy via a native edition in sticky rice, chicken, and coconut milk. The most popular burger chain in Manila is not McDonald’s but Jollibee, whose hamburger is filled with chopped onions like the nativized bistek, and whose repertoire includes pansit palabok in a Styrofoam container.
It’s this sort of organic transformation that I like to see, that makes for lasting changes in a cuisine. Something like cultural appropriation, that disrespects and seizes, will not lead to something like this.
So when we’re setting out to criticise and challenge, perhaps let’s be a bit more careful and targeted. Jumping on something that’s unfamiliar, especially when it’s rather benign, is not going to solve the problem. Indeed, it may stop the cultural sharing, the natural evolution of a dish or a cuisine into something new and exciting.
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There are many recipes for champorado out there, which you could look up. But why not give Kat Lieu’s recipe for chocolate rice a go?
Social media particularly IG in my experience, has become a platform for trolls and entitled people who think theirs is the only opinion that matters. There's an amazing mix of food writers here who I follow and it's nothing like the ugly and loud mess in that other app.
Social media is filled with ignorant people and bullies hiding behind private accounts and they're usually the loudest in the room. Such a shame that it has come to this. I love Katie's creativity and respect for using up ingredients in hand. We love champorado at home and my girls eat with pan fried dried squid. To each his own. If only people know how to be more respectful and realise that it's a big wide world of cuisines and food out there beyond the whiteness of their bread.