Cultural Appropriation

After my successful return to yoghurt making I wanted to do more. With my Dairy-o kit came an instruction booklet - and since I had the foresight to cover it with plastic back in the day it's still pretty well intact. I had read it, of course, back when I got it but never gone beyond basic yoghurt making for some reason. There are other interesting recipes in it starting with how to make 'thickened yoghurt'. This is what we now know as Greek style yoghurt so it turns out I could have been making this for myself for years instead of waiting until it became a popular food item in the supermarket refrigerator shelves. Doh. Then there's how to make other cultures - buttermilk, sour cream, creme fraiche and cottage cheese - and buried among these is drained yoghurt cheese.

This last really caught my eye because I was recently watching an excerpt from The Feed (from public broadcaster SBS) in which the presenter, who is of Lebanese descent, was saying how she had come across this somewhere and how she felt there was some cultural appropriation taking place where someone had taken an item of Lebanese culture - labneh (a cheese made by draining yoghurt) - and misrepresented it by calling it something else (that is drained yoghurt cheese). I can understand how this might feel. Labneh is one of those traditional foods in Lebanese cooking that appears in many guises and I'm more than happy to acknowledge its place in that cuisine. I read a lot of cooking blogs and the further I looked into it the more often I found Lebanese folk claiming drained yoghurt cheese in the form of labneh as their culture's own.  They turned up writing critical comments about how their culture was being mistreated in some way which sometimes became quite heated - and I do understand.

But, the thing is drained yoghurt cheese is made all around the Mediterranean - it's found in Syria, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, Cyprus and Egypt and many other places. It's known by different names - it's labne in Egypt for example - and used in different ways in many places. There are even some slightly different versions of drained yoghurt in Asian and southern Europe cultures. Some might even view Icelandic skyr as in the same tradition although it does use rennet as part of its ingredients so maybe not.

This is where my dilemma arises because cultural appropriation is very tricky and as a writer it's something I have to be aware of. The trouble is when is it appropriation? In the case of drained yoghurt cheese I think I come down on the side of no, it's not cultural appropriation because it's a staple in many places and doesn't belong specifically to the Lebanon. I'd be interested to know what you think, too.

While I investigated a lot of things came up that I'm very unsure about. One thing about cultural appropriation seems to be that someone from a dominant culture lays claim to something which is unique to another culture and uses that for profit. So I can see why a fashion designer putting catwalk models in Native American war bonnets is definitely not on. Apart from anything else such headdresses are not merely meant as ornamentation and have other cultural significance. But another example given was of an incident where a manufacturer had used without permission paintings and designs by indigenous Australian artists on items like T-shirts and tea towels. To me this isn't simply appropriation - although it is in part - but more accurately it's outright theft of the artists' work. If someone makes something - a piece of art or written words or whatever - this belongs to them and they should be the one who profits from it. Just like movie and book piracy if you take and use what someone produces for your profit or to avoid paying for it without either the creator's consent or permission in my view you're a thief. Again I'd like to know what you think.