alright well now I am #goingoff because I am #stillthinkingaboutit

To the white ppl who have commented on this post, here is some more you can “learn so much” about: 

Maybe u didn’t realize: rice cookers are an Asian invention. They exist to fill a need that is common in Asian communities. When you act as though rice cookers are frivolous kitchen accessories (like tomato knives or personal juicers), you are shitting on that need and on those (my) communities. When you “joke” that they were invented “so Roger Ebert could write a recipe book for them,” you are slapping a white face onto something that does not belong to white people. You are erasing the needs and cultures and experiences of people of color everywhere.

I have strong feelings about rice. When I first started living on my own, I struggled over how much rice to buy to feed only one person. At my home in San Francisco, we have a 50 pound bag that just gets replaced whenever it runs out. I had to google how to cook rice in a pot, because at home we used the rice cooker. The most effective way to cook rice for a family of four, while you are cooking other food, after you come home from your full time job, is to use a rice cooker. My grandmother taught me how to wash the grains of rice in the rice cooker bowl “the right way.” I am a fourth generation Japanese American. Rice cookers are a staple in my family’s all-American kitchen. My relationship with rice cookers is one of the things that reminds me I am not white. How dare anyone suggest rice cookers “might seem weird at first.” To me, the presence of a rice cooker says, a family lives here. To me, the presence of a rice cooker says, welcome home.

So when you, young 20s, New England living, white, radical queers cannot find a use for a rice cooker, maybe that is because rice cookers were not made for you. Maybe everything was NOT MADE FOR YOU. Don’t waste your time finding white vegan “uses” for rice cookers like “steaming seitan sausage.” They weren’t made for that. They were made to feed families. And maybe you should think before you so callously dismiss something that might be important to somebody else.