- Satire -

In the winter of 2016, Liz Connelly and Kali Wilgus took a road trip from their home in Portland, Oregon to Puerto Nuevo, Mexico. They fell in love with the tortillas they ate on the beaches there. Liz told a reporter from the Willamette Week, "I picked the brains of every tortilla lady there in the worst broken Spanish ever, and they showed me a little of what they did."

Liz and Kali came back to Portland, and they opened a food cart from which they sold burritos comparable to what they had tasted in Puerto Nuevo. Alas, Kali and Liz did not realize they were committing a great wrong in selling delicious burritos culturally appropriated from Mexico. Fortunately, this wrong was halted (along with their food cart business) when some brave Portlanders went to battle on their computers and, with death threats and tweets, stopped this outrage.

When I read about this heroic fight against injustice, a sudden uncomfortable question popped into my head. If selling food from other cultures is cultural appropriation, then isn't eating it cultural appropriation as well? I couldn't sleep worrying about this. I had been going to Indian restaurants and Chinese food trucks for years, not knowing I was committing a crime against foreign cultures.

The stress was too much. I already was feeling guilty about my white privilege, and now this! I flew all the way out to Seattle to take Laura Humpf's Undoing Whiteness yoga class to reduce my stress and rid myself of my toxic whiteness. Imagine how disturbed I became when I learned that yoga too is cultural appropriation. I first realized this when a free yoga class was shut down in a college in Canada by students especially attuned to these issues.

I decided to stop going to ethnic restaurants and to live off the Israeli salad I make at home and the American hamburgers and corn I eat for dinner, along with cereal and milk for breakfast. I figured that since I am Jewish, Israeli salad is OK...until the day that I passed a banner on the University of Pennsylvania campus. That banner condemned Israel for appropriating Israeli salad from the Palestinians. I immediately stopped eating Israeli salad. I'm confused, though. I don't know how Palestinians can eat salad. After all, the cucumbers in them originated in India, and the tomatoes originated in the Andes, and until the Jews made the desert bloom, the main thing that grew there was olive trees and cacti. Could Palestinian salad be culturally appropriated?

I decided to switch to corn. Oh, no: That's an American Indian vegetable. I would be culturally appropriating from the Americans Indians. What about my easy to make spaghetti and tomato sauce? I can't eat that — that's an Italian dish, and I forgot I can't eat tomatoes. I know: I'll buy French fries from McDonald's...except that's French. French fries are really a Belgian food, so even the name is culturally appropriated, and anyway, how can I eat from a store that appropriated the Scottish name McDonald?

With relief, I finally settled on the good old American hamburger. And then the awful truth descended on me. Hamburger comes from cattle that produce methane that results in global warming. I learned from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that global warming will finish off the planet in 12 years. That means I can't have milk in my cereal for breakfast. Well, at least I can eat the cereal without milk. No, wait a minute — the wheat my cereal is made of was culturally appropriated from southeast Turkey.

I'm getting very hungry. Maybe I'll read a book to take my mind off my stomach. I just took out of the library Orphan's Tales, a fantasy novel that draws on myths and folklore from many cultures. Could that be cultural appropriation, too? I looked online to see what the Left's social justice arbiters say and found out that it is.

I'm hungry, but at least I'm woke. Actually, going without food for so long is making me want to go to sleep. I think I'll put on my cotton pajamas and take a rest. Wait — cotton was appropriated from India and Pakistan. What about polyester? Polyester is made from fossil fuels, and the use of fossil fuels results in global warming!

I hope you will all follow my example: stop wearing cotton and polyester, and stop eating culturally appropriated foods, and stop doing yoga, so that together we'll end cultural appropriation, reduce overpopulation, end toxic whiteness, and save the planet.