When Making The Wrong Kind Of Ice Cream Leads To Death Threats
A look at the ube ice cream discourse.
LSAT Logical Reasoning Question 1: A white person who writes queer science fiction makes a social media post about developing a vegan ube ice cream recipe for work.
Which of the following statements can be properly inferred from the passage?
A. The white person hates Filipinos and is trying to erase their history.
B. The white person is guilty of gentrification.
C. The white person is ignorant of the colonial resonances of making a Filipino recipe as a white person.
D. A, B, and C
E. The white person works in an ice cream shop.
If you answered “D,” you’re not alone.
The Ube Ice Cream Discourse
X user Julian K. Jarboe posted this (now-deleted) tweet Tuesday: “I worked really hard on developing a vegan ube ice cream recipe for work and look how pretty she is! Zero artificial colors or flavors, and maybe the perfect special to bridge AAPI and Pride months.”
Accompanying the post was a photo of a tub of purple ice cream, with some neatly scooped into a cup.
Obviously, the post merited thinly veiled enticements to suicide.
A male X user going by “girl” suggested Jarboe eat raw kurot instead of ube. Eating raw kurot has a good chance of killing you.
Other responses to Jarboe’s post were more evenhanded.
One person observed that Jarboe was condescending to Filipinos and was pandering to “white allies.”
Another persisted in misunderstanding what the word “development” means in a culinary context:
Yet another person saw fit to reply to a post about making ice cream with a photo of a Filipino toddler tied to wooden poles:
That same person claimed comparing ube-flavored items to matcha-flavored items was a false equivalency, because “japan is a first world country. japanese workers who produce matcha are not exploited the way ube farmers in the philippines are exploited. hope that helps.”
One X user’s takeaway from the “ube discourse” was that “filipinos need to be meaner to white americans actually.”
But, X user “Monica” assures us, “Nobody was attacking [Jarboe] for making ube ice cream. Filipinos were simply pointing out the historical context so presenting it like a newly ‘developed’ vegan concept[.]”
Like a delicious developed ice cream, the discourse is still churning. I encourage you to go look for more tweets on the topic if you feel like throwing away five or thirty minutes of your life.
Why Does Any Of This Matter?
In the first place, because it’s funny.
Jarboe was clearly signalling left-alignment with the phrase: “the perfect special to bridge AAPI and Pride months.” It backfired so spectacularly.
In the second place, because “white person makes non-white-origin food and gets taken to the woodshed for it” is a very mid-to-late 2010s flavor of “woke.”
Two white women closed their pop-up Mexican food cart in 2017 after being accused of “stealing” their recipes and techniques from a Mexican lady.
Food writer Alison Roman (a white woman) apparently engaged in “colonialism as cuisine,” according to a 2020 diatribe. Several essays decried Roman for cooking with turmeric as a white woman.
“Only whiteness can deracinate and subsume the world of culinary influences into itself and yet remain unnamed,” wrote Navneet Alang for Eater in 2020.
Also in 2020, Roman made some unflattering comments about Marie Kondo and Chrissy Teigen, which were taken as evidence of anti-Asian racism. Roman then apologized and acknowledged that her “white privilege” blinded her to the fact that she had “singled out two Asian women.”
When a white woman showed off her mac and cheese on TikTok, some speculated she had stolen the recipe from her black mother-in-law.
Later, the woman became pregnant with twins and lost one of the babies in-utero.
“[S]eems like that some sort of karmic debt she or her husband had to pay off. But she had years now to address the mac n cheese and instead of just giving the folks credit and checking her fans for being racist and aggressive, she stayed silent. Did her babe deserve to die? I mean no but if that’s in Gods plan for her that so be it,” a Facebook user wrote of the baby’s death.
Why are certain people so territorial about food?
It’s an easy way to score points against people you don’t like. If you have broad disdain for whites, and specifically liberal whites who desperately want to win your favor, “culinary appropriation” is the perfect cover for your vitriol.
With regards to Filipinos in particular, I would venture that X selects for younger people who’ve grown up immersed in online fandom, and have been socialized in the norms of Tumblr-derived “discourse.” These are catty people who know their cattiness will be rewarded.
That is to say: #NotAllFilipinos.
The Filipinos who feel wronged by a white person’s ube ice cream are uber-nationalistic and uber-leftist. In this case, “uber-leftist” (or should I say, “ube-leftist”) just means a seething resentment of white people expressed in the language of justice.
Jarboe did not display the proper deference to these very online Filipinos. Jarboe had the temerity to take credit for “developing” a recipe (which Jarboe did). So Jarboe had to be taken down a notch, and quickly.
In any case, if you find yourself at the center of culinary controversy, remember: never apologize. Instead, double down. Make the ube ice cream. Break spaghetti in half before you throw it in the pot, and make sure you boil it well past al dente. Make a taco without acknowledging you’re on unceded Aztlán land, then retweet a video from Homeland Security.
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Why is our world so insane?
There is only one race: THE HUMAN RACE!!