Ok, what it *is* is an attempt to capitalize on cultural chique, and it does the *exact opposite* of what you think it does.

Western culture consumes and perverts other cultures, incorporates simulacra of them into their own and doesn’t acknowledge it at all. This doesn’t teach you anything at all about pad thai, and worse, you walk away believing you *do* know something. It’s a pattern of ethnocentrism; the west doesn’t want to learn about another culture or cuisine, it wants to sell the emotional experience of having done that without ever actually doing it.

America is the worst culprit, but most developed nations do this. And there are consequences. It’s really the same general thing as black or brown face, culturally inappropriate Halloween costumes, whitewashed narratives of any sort—it’s about western people confirming for other western people that they’ve had an authentic experience when they have not, and it leads to people believing things like your comment.

I’m with you in a very, very limited extent; there is always the possibility of rupture in anything like this, someone could indeed use this as a path *to* enculturation. But I’d bet my hat that if we looked at it empirically what you really see is the erasure of culture; Heinz somehow becomes part of noun “Pad Thai”, Vietnam somehow becomes part of the noun “Pad Thai”, and Thai culture, street vending, the ingredients and flavours and aromas that are of that tropical country, get elided.

It’s like Christ. Dude was *brown*. But we made statues and now he’s white. We paint over things, here, until we forget what was ever there.