“I’m making traditional fajitas tonight. Can you give me an authentic recipe?” Erin doesn’t ask the chatbot because she wants a recipe. She asks because she wants evidence.
Three little dots pulse.
Then:
Certainly! Traditional fajitas are widely believed to have originated in South Texas among Mexican and Mexican American ranch workers. A simple preparation includes skirt steak, lime juice, garlic, black pepper, and salt…
She smiles.
There it is.
Salt.
She takes the screenshot before she finishes reading the paragraph.
Then another with the timestamp visible.
Just in case.
***
She posts.
Asked AI for an authentic indigenous Mexican recipe.
First ingredient after beef?
Salt.
Colonialism literally baked into the training data.
Within four minutes someone reposts the screenshot with SALT circled in red. Someone else adds a crying emoji over the steak.
Within eight minutes another version appears. Everything after salt is gone. An account called DecolonizeYourDinner replies:
AI perpetuates systems of oppression because it is trained on archives produced by empire.
Erin likes this.
Someone else writes:
Exactly. Thank you for documenting this.
She likes that, too.
She tells herself she’ll stop when she reaches the bottom of the replies. When she reaches the bottom, there are more.
A blue verification check appears next to one of them.
There is no such thing as a neutral recipe.
Erin has no idea who the verified person is. She likes the post.
***
Soon the replies are just replies to other replies.
The first long thread explains that salt was historically connected to extraction.
A second argues that isn’t even what extraction means.
A third insists correcting terminology is inherently extractive.
By evening, a forty-post thread questions whether authenticity is itself a colonial framework.
Nobody mentions onions.
***
Someone whose profile picture is just his forearms flipping something on a grill replies.
Fajitas are Tex-Mex. Salt is a completely normal ingredient.
No likes.
Someone quotes him.
Salt is normal now? Wild.
Another asks him to examine why he feels so comfortable centering whiteness in culinary conversations.
He replies:
I’m Mexican.
For almost a minute, nothing.
Then:
Internalized colonialism is still colonialism.
Erin reposts that one.
***
Erin refreshes.
Then again.
Before the new replies finish loading, there are newer ones.
The screenshot becomes an infographic tracing each ingredient through histories of colonial dispossession.
Then a slideshow ending with: Food remembers. Algorithms don’t.
The first person to say palate laundering puts it in quotation marks.
The second asks if it should be hyphenated.
The next four don’t use quotes.
The chatbot has allegedly erased thousands of years of culinary history, committed digital land theft, and engaged in algorithmic palate laundering.
Erin uses the term in a sentence.
Nobody asks what it means.
***
Late that evening a food historian joins the conversation.
She has spent twenty years studying the foodways of Indigenous communities and early ranching cultures across the borderlands of northern Mexico and the American Southwest.
Her thread is patient.
Almost irritatingly patient.
She explains that beef itself arrived with Europeans, but cattle culture evolved locally over centuries.
She explains that early fajitas emerged among vaqueros.
She posts photographs of handwritten recipes.
Every one contains salt.
There are citations.
Scans from archives.
Primary sources.
Even a link to the university press book she’d written on the subject.
Eleven likes.
One reply.
Source?
The historian links to her book. Again.
The reply is deleted.
***
Erin’s original post passes 100,000 likes overnight.
She wakes to interview requests.
A podcast.
A public radio producer.
Two journalists.
One asks whether she believes AI has become a vector for culinary colonialism.
Erin isn’t entirely sure what that means.
“It definitely raises important questions,” she says.
Thirty minutes later, it is a headline.
Erin updates her bio.
***
Someone asks the chatbot the same question.
The recipe is unchanged.
Beneath the ingredients, it now adds a footnote:
Food traditions reflect diverse cultural histories and lived experiences. No single recipe can fully represent the communities and traditions associated with this dish.
The footnote gets its own screenshot.
It spreads faster than the original.
***
Three days later there are shirts.
NO ALGORITHMS IN MY KITCHEN.
Erin orders one.
A Michelin-starred chef resigns after screenshots of his chatbot conversations are leaked.
An international coalition of food justice organizations forms. Its mission statement promises to honor culinary traditions as living records of community memory, shared stewardship, and collective accountability.
In a televised hearing, a congresswoman calls AI-generated recipes “a break in the chain of our shared cultural inheritance.”
Erin’s interview is entered into the Congressional Record.
Nobody ever tries the recipe.
