Slop in a cup

have

before





This post was inspired by Mr Noodles of Eat Love Noodles who is better at rants than me.

Poking the surface gingerly, I spot bright green edamame beans and carrots. The Burmese only eat edamame that's been dried and then deep-fried, and carrots are very hard to come by (and we only use them in Chinese dishes anyway). Strike 2.The carbohydrate under the slop is wild rice. Now Burma may once have been known as the rice bowl of Asia, but we have never produced wild rice - a Burmese person in Burma wouldn't be able to tell you what it was. Strike 3.Sighing, I bring a spoonful to my mouth and chew. It tastes like a cheap, overly sweet Japanese curry, with the stringiest chunks of chicken breast.Weirdest is the hit of chilli throughout. And guess what - the Burmese don't put chilli in our curries.I'm done.You might be thinking - what's the big deal: people have been tweaking recipes for centuries?The big deal is that such tweaking ends up eroding the cuisine,if the tweaking is an improvement (and thisisn't - it's more of an insult to said cuisine).Burmese food isn't remotely well-known enough that it can withstand this kind of mucking about. The majority of punters won't know how the dishesto be, and so will take it as gospel that eg the Burmese dish mohinga uses cod (it doesn't), or that Burmese duck egg curry uses shrimp paste (it doesn't), rather than realising that the ingredients or methods have been changed at the whim of the chef.Cuisines which are arguably well established in the UK have already suffered in this way - you wouldn't get Spaghetti Bolognaise, Chop Suey or Chicken Tikka Masala in their supposed countries of origin.But at least those dishes and their names exist in their own right, and most people realise that they aren't authentic.Whereas EAT. is declaring that Ramen IS Udon, and thus wilfully misleading the masses who aren't yet as familiar with Japanese (or Vietnamese or Burmese) cuisine.I'm all for experimentation, but if EAT. are going to claim that a dish is a dish, theyto get that dish right (with exceptions for ingredients that are genuinely obscure - though in that case, they shouldn't be seeking to mass produce that dish).