Cultural exchange is in the air today, and one American has brought the traditional streetside staple of jianbing home to Portland, Oregon. It’s like an authentic little slice of China for the city’s gastronomically curious. Pretty great, right? Apparently not.
Alisa Grandy and her food cart Bing Mi! (warning: they seem to have gotten the characters for 'jianbing' tragically mixed up) have been catching flack on the internet. When Chinese users got wind of the cart, they took to social media to express their contempt.
“So how is it that US citizens don’t care about intellectual property rights in this case?” asks one resident of the world’s most prominent counterfeiting nation.
“I’m guessing the sweet fermented sauce has been swapped out with ketchup and salad dressing,” wrote another inhabitant of the country that brought you the Red Bean McFlurry.
Portland’s own critical response to the cart has been overwhelmingly positive, but Chinese netizens remain sour over what they perceive to be the stealing of Chinese culture. Grady discovered the food while abroad in Beijing, and learned the cooking technique through YouTube research. Given the current popularity of lesser-known hipster dishes in the bubbling food cart market, Alisa and her husband Neal found it “only logical to introduce it to Portland.”
China’s cultural purists are still none too happy about the thievery, despite living in a country that now has more KFCs than America. As the old proverb goes, haters gonna hate.
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