(New York Post) — If you’re looking for something to get needlessly angry about this week, may I suggest salad names?
That’s what got Bonnie Tsui in a tizzy last week in The New York Times after she saw an “Asian salad” on a menu and felt micro-aggressed by the micro greens. She writes that the “Greek salad has some integrity” and can be found in Greece, but the Asian salad is a wholly American creation.
Six hundred words in, Tsui asks, “So what’s my problem with Asian salad?” The next line is not, as you may imagine, “I have too much time on my hands.”
Tsui also asks, “Am I taking this too seriously?” Uh, yes, ma’am, you are taking the name of a dish that exists in chain restaurants far too seriously.
That’s the nature of our current “everything is offensive” cultural moment. The week before that piece appeared, the music festival Coachella spawned dozens of think pieces, as it does every year, as to whether various outfits at the show constituted “cultural appropriation.”
