Since When Is Matcha Cake Indian?
By: Frankie Faunet
Tags: Food, Politics, France, Respect, Culture

Since When Is Matcha Cake Indian?

Orientalism is alive and well in France, as we see in a recent episode of a popular reality tv baking competition Frankie Faunet Dec 11, 2020·4 min read

The cast of the 9th season of the Meilleur Pâtissier, a popular reality tv baking competition in France

In what should be news to absolutely no one, the French are terrible when it comes to other cultures. In this beautiful country where everyone is up in arms about how Emily in Paris perpetuates clichés about the French, my compatriots seem to be absolutely incapable of understanding, representing, or even respecting cultural practices beyond the frontiers of continental France (one could argue that we’re just as bad when it comes to the Antilles, for example, which are technically still part of French territory). French thinkers like Claude Lévi-Strauss may have been at the start of cultural anthropology but — oh, right, he was Belgian.

The current state of French cultural sensitivity was on prime display in a recent episode of Meilleur Pâtissier, a popular reality tv baking competition, currently in its 9th season, where the theme was a voyage to India. As anyone who has eaten at an Indian restaurant in France will be able to attest, we daren’t expect much authenticity!

I should have known we were in for trouble as soon as I heard that the first challenge was to create a cake using tea as an ingredient. To be sure, tea is not a terrible association to make with Indian culture, but you’d be hard-pressed to explain how matcha, for example, or sakurayu fits the theme… No doubt, you can get a matcha in Mumbai, but it strikes me as somehow not particularly Indian to bake with any kind of tea you happen to like.

The episode continued with more missteps, moving on to the technical challenge with a so-called “lotus flower” cake, including lots of references to “zen attitude,” a creative challenge where a colorful elephant illustration was referred to as a mandala, a vaguely Maghrébin (and nostalgic) design cake being referred to as Maharajan, and many deeply questionable uses of curcuma.

I’m not saying the cake above isn’t cute, I’m not saying it isn’t colorful, and I sure would have liked to have tasted it, but can we agree that this is not a mandala or even resembles one?!

Perhaps the worst point, however, was the final segment’s celebration of the “festival of colors.” This was a reference to the Hindu festival of Holi, albeit a diluted, neutered, and — can I say it? — white-washed version. Basically, the contestants were tasked with making a dessert with lots of colors. One contestant got blasted for making a cake that was monochrome — he was off-theme! — but not for presenting a cake in the form of a bust of the Buddha in the middle of a Hindi festival.

Photo by John Thomas on Unsplash

Now, granted, this is not unique to France — all across the western world white people have been proudly showing their thirst for cultural appropriation in the most vividly colored displays imaginable. But even if there is much to admire about the meanings that underpin Holi — love, healing, the triumph of good over evil! — the majority of western imitations are among the most superficial and vapid of thefts.

When we consider that a series celebrating the sweeter sides of culinary arts cannot fully embrace the richness of Indian cuisine — please let us have more flavor than a hint of cardamom— it really is frustrating that Cyril Lignac, Mercotte, and their producers could not do just a little more work. What would it have taken — one intern spending an extra week to do the legwork?

In the end, it isn’t a question of authenticity. Weeding out the inauthentic is something we’ll leave to fascists. Instead, this is about showing a minimum of respect to other cultures and other peoples. It’s about showing them that France is finally going against its orientalist tendencies where the rest of the world is an exotic playground to embellish what is always a French perspective first. It’s also about respecting the French audience themselves enough to acknowledge both their preexisting cultural knowledge and to offer them opportunities to learn still more.

Maybe this is too much to ask from a reality tv show, but considering how much time people spend watching television, considering how important a knowledge-making force television ends up being, and how much of a structural element of our societies it turns out to be, we deserve a modicum more tact and care.

I’ve mentioned before that we never reveal ourselves more than when we are talking about other cultures. France, one of the major colonialist countries of the previous century, and a leading member of those who struggle to undergo meaningful truth and reconciliation processes, needs to do better. Even or especially when it comes to making cakes.