Washington Post Corrects Joke Food Column After Social Media Fulminates: ‘Incorrect’ to Say Indian Food ‘is Based on 1 Spice’
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The Washington Post issued a correction on Tuesday related to a columnist’s joke about Indian food — and edited his initial opinion to match the correction.
“The Indian subcontinent has vastly enriched the world,” The Post’s syndicated weekly humor columnist Gene Weingarten wrote on Tuesday. He said it had given the world “chess, buttons, the mathematical concept of zero, shampoo, modern-day nonviolent political resistance, Chutes and Ladders, the Fibonacci sequence, rock candy, cataract surgery, cashmere, USB ports … and the only ethnic cuisine in the world insanely based entirely on one spice.
“If you like Indian curries, yay, you like Indian food!” Weingarten wrote. “If you think Indian curries taste like something that could knock a vulture off a meat wagon, you do not like Indian food. I don’t get it, as a culinary principle. It is as though the French passed a law requiring every dish to be slathered in smashed, pureed snails.”
The correction made two changes aimed at retracting Weingarten’s opinion about curry. The first was his statement that it was “the only ethnic cuisine in the world insanely based entirely on one spice,” and the second was his assertion that readers who liked curry would “like Indian food.” The Post volunteered a new opinion on Weingarten’s behalf, writing in its revision, “If you like Indian curries, yay, you like one of India’s most popular class of dishes!”
“A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Indian cuisine is based on one spice, curry, and that Indian food is made up only of curries, types of stew,” The Post wrote in a correction appended at the top of the column. “In fact, India’s vastly diverse cuisines use many spice blends and include many other types of dishes. The article has been corrected.”
The correction came after critics including Padma Lakshmi objected to the column on social media. “Is this really the type of colonizer ‘hot take’ The Washington Post wants to publish in 2021 — sardonically characterizing curry as ‘one spice’ and that all of India’s cuisine is based on it?” Lakshmi wrote on Monday.
