US scribe apologises after facing Twitter flak for saying Indian cuisine is based on 'one spice'

Those who love food know that Indian cuisine has something to meet everyone's taste buds. So when a columnist from the Washington Post openly thrashed the cuisine in his opinion piece, readers had a hard time gulping down the review. However, after receiving ire online for his column, the writer, Gene Weingarten, has now offered an apology for his piece.

"I should have named a single Indian dish, not the whole cuisine, & I do see how that broad-brush was insulting. Apologies," he wrote on Twitter. He also corrected himself and said the opinion piece wasn't about food but him being a "whining infantile ignorant."



How it all started
The opinion piece titled 'You can't make me eat these food' published on the US news website Washington Post by writer Gene Weingarten counts different types of food that he doesn't like and refuses to eat, including Indian cuisine. The column starts with Weingarten complaining about his editor for pointing out the lack of taste in his food palate, which the writer calls "unusually sophisticated" before he starts whining about different kinds of food such as Old Bay seasoning, Balsamic vinegar, Hazelnut before arriving on Indian food.

"I don’t get it, as a culinary principle. It is as though the French passed a law requiring a wide swath of their dishes to be slathered in smashed, pureed snails. (I’d personally have no problem with that, but you might, and I would sympathize.)," he writes in his column, which is making a lot of noise on Twitter.

In his original piece, Weingarten had said that the entire Indian cuisine was made up of only "one" spice.

"The Indian subcontinent has vastly enriched the world, giving us 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," wrote Weingarten in the article published on August 19.

Of course, the lack of accuracy and the sheer confidence in his ignorance towards Indian cuisine rattled many, who didn't hesitate to call out the columnist on his Twitter feed.

"You called curry “one spice” and they let you write about food?," one Twitter user pointed out.

As the author of the article indulged people on his Twitter, many then pointed out that the problem wasn't with him disliking Indian food but him blatantly saying that Indian curries were made of one spice.


"Gene, nobody cares that you dislike Indian food. The issue is that you said the entire diverse cuisine was based on one spice," another used replied.


Among the many thrashing Washington Post writer for his opinion piece was also American author, activist and model Padma Lakshmi, who had a simple message for him on behalf of 1.3 billion people, adding that he needs an education on spices, flavour and taste. The author then shared the link to her book 'The Encylopedia of Spices & Herbs'.

As the voices correcting Gene Weingarten's big blunder got louder, the writer quickly fixed his article and changed the word 'spice' to 'spices', which invited another round of trolling on the Internet.

Seeing the fire raging on Twitter over Weingarten's recent piece, the food section of Washington Post which publishes reviews on foods quickly posted a clarification on saying that the article wasn't done by Washington Post food and nor did they edit it. After all, who'd want to be on the sinking ship?