Unveiling Food Appropriation: A Trader Joe's Revelation and the Quest for Authenticity

A few weeks ago, I started a conversation about food appropriation and mentioned how much of a pet peeve of mine it is when recipes cite “island appeal” without an actual frame of reference for the culture it’s borrowing from. As a result, I often do my very best to be true to other cultures’ cuisines when preparing them.?

That said, I have a fondness for Korean cuisine, particularly noodle dishes, and make my favorites often. One dish in particular, jjajangmyeon (Korean noodles in black bean sauce), poses a challenge with securing ingredients to make it authentically—specifically when living in a middle-class Black Caribbean and Southern neighborhood.?

When I worked at Whole Foods, one of my favorite things is whenever I got the craving to make something that wasn’t in a Caribbean repertoire, I could shop (with my discount) when I got off of work, and feel comforted that I’d be able to prepare what I wanted, as close to authentic as possible. During this time, I discovered the ‘magic’ of Trader Joe’s—a place where I could buy the same bronze-cut pasta or even some Korean gochujang paste for a fraction of the cost.?

A single mom on a budget? I’ll take the discount.?

One day, fairly recently, I went grocery shopping in person for the first time in a while. The pandemic made me comfortable with virtual shopping on Instacart, but I wanted to do a Trader Joe’s run and they’re not on the digital platform. Galbi (meaning “ribs” in Korean) was on my dinner menu for the evening, and has become a dish synonymous with Korean barbeque. One of the ingredients in the marinade is gochujang paste. I grabbed it and a jar of their chili crisp and reveled in only spending $6 for the pair of items.?

I felt like a responsible adult—until I got home to cook with them.?

As I built the marinade for the meat, I did what I always do when I use a new ingredient—taste it. The ‘it’ being the gochujang paste in this case.?

I was gravely disappointed.?

To this day, I only use authentic gochujang. If I can’t get it—-I don’t make it.?

Other ‘foodie’ shoppers may not have the same discerning standards with the ingredients they use, and I don’t mean that with any snobbery in my tone. I’m intentional about what I use because again, authenticity and staying as true to the dish as possible is important to me.?

I also recognize food affordability and accessibility play a role in why people make the shopping choices they do. This is the reason why places like Trader Joe’s are so popular—even for me. It’s why, even as a professional chef, I fully understand and relate to anyone who opts to swap out or substitute their ingredients for something more accessible and affordable. I’ve had to do it myself on more than one occasion.?

To me, the bigger problem is corporations using the guise of accessibility to hide a more insidious motive, which is to garner bigger profits by cutting corners and not acknowledging the source.?

Taste Cooking contributing writer Adam Reiner takes a deep dive into this very piece of food appropriation—and his findings are nothing short of astonishing. In it, he confers with several small business owners in the consumer packaged goods industry where he uncovers, “Trader Joe’s commonly solicits product samples and even asks for potential recipe adjustments—a revealing and time-consuming exercise for bootstrapped founders—before inexplicably abandoning the negotiations and releasing its own private label versions of similar products at lower prices.”?

I was stunned.?

Private labeling in consumer packaged goods is a common practice, one that larger retailers do often. It is the practice of producing products for specific retailers by a third-party manufacturer, and then selling it under a retailer brand. It provides a two-fold service—retailers become a one-stop shop for consumers by expansion of their catalog, and it creates a more competitive advantage because of the lower price point.?

Walmart, in particular, has come under fire for this on more than one occasion, first when a peanut butter recall revealed their private label practice, and then again during the pandemic, when a Juneteenth-marketed ice cream caused a huge uproar in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The latter instance jumps right to the core of how food appropriation directly impacts small businesses of color.

The Great Value branded red velvet ice cream directly competed with a Black woman-owned ice cream of the same flavor that the retail giant agreed to stock. Aside from the glaringly obvious racial overtones of capitalizing on a history fraught with devastation for Black people across the diaspora, the other piece of the problem speaks directly to the underlying issue of food access and insecurity. With the small business ice cream retailing at $5.29 and the Great Value counterpart retailing at a fraction of the price, it becomes almost a no-brainer who most consumers will support.?

And now, here was Trader Joe’s doing the same thing!??

Reading this information about one of my favorite grocery retailers shocked me—but it did not surprise me. There is often a fine line between ensuring that a business remains profitable and using compromising ethics in order to attain profitability. In delving into the ‘friendly’ retailer’s practices, Reiner goes on to share the story of one NYC-based gourmet food producer in particular, who pointedly notes, “Ethnic foods are specialized items: there’s so much history and culture and tradition that you can’t do simple knockoffs like you do with everyday items like ketchup or mayo.”

The allure of low pricing and accessibility is often another major ingredient in food appropriation. It becomes easy to overlook cultural “thievery” when it rings in at $3.99 and the originator taps out at $11.?

It’s all a part of the cycle that continues to be perpetuated, on account of the other factors that often take precedence over authenticity and honoring origins. While the country’s economy currently boasts a 2.8% GDP growth rate last year, the number of people either working below the poverty line or currently unemployed is still growing. The statistics and the reality don’t match, which then trickles down to how people purchase their food.?

Does this mean don’t shop at Trader Joe’s anymore? No. That’s not what I’m saying, necessarily.?

Truth is, there is no wave of the wand that fixes this problem for everyone. Food appropriation delves deep into the systemic psyche of the country we live in, and intertwines collective issues, food insecurity and access being at the top of the list. Preserving cultural authenticity is not a top concern for many. That said, there are baby steps to be taken for sure. I began building my Food.Noire app, hoping it will be a small but significant way of leveling the playing field, but I am just one part of a vast system.?

I have some other ideas. Stay tuned for them.