Olive oil being a struggle session is just so frustrating to me. As someone who has a deep love for food and cooking, it hurts quite a bit to see how the internet has pretty much re-birthed cooking snobbery in this entirely new way. I am an exceptionally knowledgeable cook, having worked in a million different types of places and even fully running a place for a little bit, lots of research into food science and such. I like the nerdy side of cooking that the internet has brought out, but the snobbery of olive oil’s smoke point is a great example of when it starts just getting into re-establishing french style elitism based on racism and classism that has kept the true heroes of culinary history out of the public eye. Most of the great dishes we have, some of the smartest food practices around today, were made by illiterate, uneducated slaves and workers, and those people broke a ton of culinary “rules”. Modern internet cooks stand on the shoulders of giants and spit on them. The guy who invented modern barbecue ribs was an illiterate slave making food for his owner, where his owner took credit for everything he did. It wasn’

One of the first widespread foods that had a sauce purposefully stabilized was creole Gumbo, which used okra, a veggie brought over from Africa. The only people who had okra at the time were black people brought to America via the slave trade. However, people like to credit the french with sauce stabilization through rouxs because the french could put it on paper and the slaves couldn’t. It’s why we see white people essentially try to claim Creole food by making some changes and calling it cajun, and they do it by legitimizing and de-legitimizing certain techniques.

Or how historically, Central America uses very little oil in their cooking, preferring the flavor of char over a maillard reaction done with oil. Now the delicious food of Central America is being lost over time because cooks are listening to these online people and replacing unique flavor elements from their cultures with french cooking practice. THAT is why white people can’t make tacos, it’s literally because they’re cooking like white people and have had “cook everything in oil” drilled into them from the start of their cooking. It would be one thing if food was just changing with the times, people having different palettes, but that’s not the case, otherwise those gentrified white people taco shops would be a hit amongst Hispanic people.

I see the whole olive oil debate, and similar discussions as a way to dismiss cooks with unique techniques and their food. People saying you can’t fry in olive oil are implicitly saying that pretty much the entire middle east and medeterranian were just burning absolutely everything they cooked until white people made canola oil. It’s re-establishing elitist cooking standards with bad information. So everybody’s food is becoming more and more tasteless, more Americanized, switching to more neutral oils, all in the name of “not burning” something that isn’t even actually burning. It’s annoying.