Is your matcha latte stealing someone else’s food culture?

Sometimes, when I’m tucking into tacos or pho or macarons, I idly wonder what the Mexicans, Vietnamese or French might think. Do they mind that we’ve turned their foods and treats into international food fetishes?

Surely not. Italians don’t object to our eating pizza, right? And yet they get aggravated if pineapple is involved. They fly into internet rages over cream in fettuccine. Lord knows what they say about matcha tiramisu.

All this seems silly but, talking of matcha, how about the matcha lattes that McDonald’s Australia has sold since last year? Maybe that adds to our flavour bank. Or maybe it diminishes Japanese culture and adds only to a big corporation’s bank account.

You be the judge. The matcha tradition actually originated in China. The Japanese, however, consider it a high-quality, culturally significant ingredient.

What do they think about it being turned into a cheap, unhealthy drink driven by social media hype? Yet, the Japanese themselves don’t always revere matcha, which appears in their sweets, doughnuts and Kit Kats.

So, a bit complicated then, but does it matter? Well, sometimes it does. The international matcha craze has caused price rises and shortages. And when that happens to staples such as quinoa, it affects impoverished communities that rely on it.

Culinary cultural appropriation is when a dominant culture adopts and modifies the food of a minority culture for profit, while the source culture receives no credit or financial benefit. The food’s origins and social significance are often ignored or even concealed, for example by a name change.

In 2024, for example, two white Canadian entrepreneurs claimed bubble tea was no longer an “ethnic” product that had anything to do with Taiwan, and that they’d made it healthier and better than the original. A controversy ensued, sparked by offended Chinese-Canadian movie star Simu Liu.

It would be a boring travel world indeed if traditional recipes were never modernised or adapted. International ingredients and influences infuse every cuisine. Two of my favourites, Thai and Sichuanese, would be nothing without American chillies.

In Australia, we persist in thinking of Asian restaurants as cheap and low-quality, but that’s partly because we demand it. We happily drop $40 on a pasta dish but baulk at that price for noodles, which have a vastly more refined and ancient pedigree. You get what you pay for.

The point is that what matters when travelling is your attitude. You don’t have to be Indian to eat Indian food, and if you want to use a new ingredient in a traditional recipe, go