When Will White People Get It!? Stop Stealing Burrito Recipes From Mexicans Or Your Business Could Be Shut Down!

You've probably heard the term "cultural appropriation." It's when people (usually white people) blatantly steal the cultural style of another culture (any people of color, basically) without respect for that culture's identity or heritage. Think Kylie Jenner sporting corn rows or all the blondes at Coachella in full Native American headgear. 

Cultural appropriation can take a lot of forms, from copying the hairstyles and fashions of particular relevance to another culture to straight-up stealing another culture's work for personal benefit. (Think Elvis in the 1950s "borrowing" the blues from Black folk.) 

Culinary appropriation is another way this happens - white chefs getting famous off the dishes of brown people, and usually charging 4x as much for them. But sometimes the world has a way of keeping shameless culture-snatchers in check, as two young white women from Portland recently found out the hard way! 

Kali Wilgus and Liz “LC” Connelly decided to open a pop-up burrito shop in Portland, Oregon after visiting Puerto Nuevo, Mexico, where they were "taught" how to make tortillas by the "tortilla ladies" of the town.

And by that we actually mean they outright stole the techniques and basically admitted as much. 

“I picked the brains of every tortilla lady there in the worst broken Spanish ever, and they showed me a little of what they did,” Connelly told Willamette Week. “They told us the basic ingredients, and we saw them moving and stretching the dough similar to how pizza makers do before rolling it out with rolling pins.”

Oh, but that's not all. She also told the newspaper that they “were peeking into the windows of every kitchen, totally fascinated by how easy they made it look,” when the "tortilla ladies" (her actual words) weren't so keen on offering on-the-spot tutorials and handing over their centuries-old recipes.

You better think twice about going down to Mexico to steal recipes from some nice old Mexican ladies and then bragging about it in an interview, because this one unleashed a storm of Internet indignation that led to the burrito shop closing. 

And the name of that shop? Kooks Burritos. Because some things you just can't make up. 

Actually the real kooks of this story are the people who literally sent Wilgus and Connelly death threats over the incident.

Guys. There is culinary appropriation, and there are actual death threats. Chill TF out.