________________________________________________________________________________
The Ologies podcast did an episode on this. It is an enjoyable listen.
https://www.alieward.com/ologies/gastroegyptology
As fascinating a listen as it is, though, I do find his refusal to share with anyone other than the people currently living in Egypt bizarre and off-putting.
I strongly approve this use of excessive, decadent wealth, connections and so forth. This is fantastic.
Beats the hell out of most indulgences I see people pursue using the kinds of resources someone like this has access to.
I'm not convinced this is excessive / decadent, those words I'd associate more with the tech CEO's, Saudi royalty, etc.
It's bread, not a gold plated lamborghini.
I was homeless for nearly six years. I got myself off the street by moving into an SRO. I still live in an SRO more than three years later.
Most people in developed countries on planet earth today have completely decadent levels of wealth compared to literally billions of the people alive today, much less historic kings and queens. Yet many of us spend far too much time, money and effort on having walk-in closets full of clothes, getting cosmetic surgeries and similar.
I mean the Kardashians basically make millions off of playing to the crowd and sharing their lifestyles of the rich and shameless lives with people who are paying their bills and have zero hope of ever living that way. It is mind boggling and pointless and I am appalled the world is okay with that while also being okay with widespread poverty.
There are some incredibly perverse things going on in the world today and if people like the Kardashians did anything that was one tenth as interesting and useful as this experiment, the world would be a vastly better place. Instead, they sell clothes and makeup as if dressing up like them will make you a millionaire like them instead of just keeping them in comfort.
Edit: which is to say my idea of decadent wealth, connections, etc is different from yours and I'm not apologizing for that and I don't feel compelled to agree with your set point for "decadence." This was like some kind of movie Quest where you gather rare and ancient artifacts to make magic. He literally did that and you're dismissing it as merely _bread._
(Also also: How many people could start with an argument on Twitter and end up with "So help me make bread that hasn't been made in 2000 years."? This is "decadent" for reasons having nothing to do with financial cost, though there is real cost involved. Not everyone has a backyard to bury pots in and try to figure out how you bake like they did in ancient Egypt.
Etc.)
It would be nice to pursue interesting and useful things like this, where someone bakes bread from 4,500 year old dormant yeast, but coming up with these ideas isn't usually very easy, even with a decadent lifestyle.
Not a whole lot of low hanging fruit these days, a lot of it has been picked. The amount of things we 'know' now is staggering, and has built up some boundaries on what's possible or not. Those boundaries might actually be wrong, but the more you learn the more boxed in your mind can get.
Sometimes it takes an outsider that's ignorant of those boundaries to break through them, try the thing that other people just think would be impossible and it works. I wouldn't be surprised if these people didn't even consider it a possibility that you could bake bread from ancient dormant yeast until this amateur Blackley claimed he did it the first time (and was mistaken).
I had no idea yeast could survive in a dormant state for 4,500 years in ceramic pots. I have yeast that doesn't always reactivate that's only a few years old, let alone 4,500 years. It would never even occur to me to even try, as I had a now clearly false belief that yeast doesn't last that long in my head.
I've probably spent most of my life thinking about games in one way or another, and coming up with new game ideas, but even still I never really come up with something truly genre-breaking. And yet board games have done that a few times in recent years, with someone coming up with deckbuilders, another person coming up with the idea of legacy board games, another a hidden traitor mechanic, etc, and creating a whole new genre out of it.
But even then, it's not super common. Most board games coming out now are a mix of established things, with a bit of a twist or an unconventional theme.
Thank you for your reply. I have to continually remind myself of this truth, and it's great when someone slaps me in the face with it.
One definition of _decadence_ is "luxurious self indulgence." How much more self indulgent can you get than "I think I would like to do some lock down baking. I'm going to ask a couple of Egyptologists to source me ancient yeast cultures from museums and help me authentically recreate ancient Egyptian baking methods for funsies!"
It's basically insane. It's not like this was part of some lab project sponsored by government grants. But I heartily approve and I hope the world moves more in this direction.
Honestly it reminds me of the Enlightenment, when most research scientists and mathematicians were bored rich guys who were looking to impress other bored rich guys.
Yes, I completely agree. To take it one step further, he didn't even need the bread. He could have just thrown it away and not even notice.
Suppose Kim Kardashian disappeared tomorrow. How would my life better? If this man _wasn't_ able to ask his question about bread, would there be more cars/houses/doctors/food in the world?
Agree. This is much more interesting than yet another charter to Antarctica.
My favorite part of the entire article is where he asks the two people who gave him the most crap to team up with him and help him do it right. It's brilliant and gutsy and I admire his dedication to excellence.
I'm so glad they both said "Yes." They also deserve respect for their dedication to excellence. No, they weren't just dogging him to be mean or something. They share his dedication to excellence.
My big question with all this is, how does he know it is ancient yeast? Yeast mutates rapidly, so simply noting that it didn't taste like modern sourdough isn't enough for me. There are a couple of scenarios, contamination of the starter and there seems to be no guarantee that the yeast he used for his initial culture were from ancient times.
As a homebrewer, I've done experiments collecting found yeast and the different strains vary...wildly.
It seems like all of these questions are answered in the article? Hell, they've even got a geneticist working on sequencing the genome of the dormant yeast they extracted from the ancient pottery, so once that's finished I think we'll know pretty conclusively what we're looking at. But that the yeast would only grow when fed emmer flour, not modern wheat flour, already seems to suggest that something unusual is going on here that you wouldn't be seeing if it were truly modern bread yeast.
This was the source of my bemusement, as well. In that light, it just reads like a branding gimmick.
Friendship bread and other hereditary sourdoughs don't last more than a reculture against local wildtypes. Unless they're culturing and preparing the yeast and bacteria by strain and handling this industrially to prevent cross contamination, I don't have any hope they'll be able to do what they claim.
They actually discuss this at length in the Twitter 'thread'. Basically, they're pulling yeast spores from within the pottery, not from surface. Then they try to keep everything as sterile as possible after that (kitchen autoclaves, sterile handling with gloves, UV lights, etc.)
Appreciated, Twitter is universally blocked for me.
Even back then some guy said, "I just can't get this sourdough to come out looking like anything but a frisbee", shelved the hobby, and forgot about it for 4,500 years.
Unasked for baking advice:
When shaping the dough you need to fold it in a few times and put a lot of tension on the top side before letting it rest (upside down) for the final time
Right before putting it in the oven, it's important to cut it deeply and at an angle with a sharp blade (I use a razor blade)
I think we have different definitions of 'deep.' If you cut too deep, the entire loaf will split. My wife just posted this to facebook today:
Not gonna lie that bread is so freaking weird and creepy looking. No offence to your wife.
No offense taken. It was a post showing what happened on both when a cut was too deep(which she does quite often, on accident) - bottom left on left image, center on right. Curious what you mean by weird...the design? She usually just messes with design. The white top is just flour for the soul purpose of design. I don't care if it looks like a squid, I'm just in it for the eating!
They had conical vessels for baking, so it would be more like a warhead. And haven't invented frisbee yet.
Not 4500 years old, but you can get a 150 year old "Oregon Trail" starter.
All that's needed is a self-addressed envelope -
+1 for the Carl Griffith starter. I eventually baked mine by mistake (and replaced it with one from a local bakery in my city), but it was great and very robust for a long time. Tolerated being in and out of the fridge so I didn't need to be feeding it constantly.
If you are a home brewer or even just interested, Patrick McGovern's book Ancient Brews: Rediscovered and Re-created is a must-read, he re-creates a number of beers and alcoholic beverages some of which have gone into production from the Dogfish Head people. The original recipes were analyzed from residue and remains on potsherds and historical accounts, then he provides a home brewer's guide at the end of each chapter so you can make something at least quite close to the brew at home.
That sounds like a fun read. Thanks for telling us about it!
“they were much sweeter than ours, you could eat them like apples,” she says.
I like sourdough plenty, but can we revive that?!
Salad onions? Like this:
https://gardenseedsmarket.com/salat-zwiebel-globo-groswuchsi...
Wunderbar
Look into Walla Walla and Vidalia onions. They don't keep as long as the average onion, but some people with a sensitive palatte use Vidalias in place of yellow or white.
Totally tangential.. But as you mentioned Vidalia onions, do check this post out -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728132
Not tangential at all. Actually directly answers the question, above. Had you not posted it, I likely would have.
From the article:
_They’re classified as a sweet onion, and because of their mild flavor (they don’t make your eyes tear up), some folks can eat them like an apple. Most of my customers do._
I grew up hearing stories of the long lost Amelia Bedilia onion that you’d eat like an apple. As the story goes that variety was lost.
Sitting here in Walla Walla, I approve this message. Our onions are delicious. There's a reason the "sexy onion" on Facebook recently was a Walla Walla Sweet.
A little bit disappointed that they didn't have a photo of cutting open that bread.
Here's a picture from his Twitter in case anyone is interested:
https://twitter.com/SeamusBlackley/status/125480798709855027...
Yikes! Every slice is a different size. How do you make a sandwich with that?
Well, the Egyptian loaf would have been 4,200 years old before sandwiches were invented...
https://www.britannica.com/topic/sandwich
Well it looks like it didn't rise properly, maybe needs a better starter...
Huh? It looks great to me? There are plenty of modern breads denser than this. What exactly are you expecting here?
Great? It's a brick! Just put "sourdough" into Google images
I'm not an expert baker, but when you type "sourdough" into Google images, 99.9% of the results you are getting are photos of bread made with refined (white) flour.
As far as I know, you are never going to get a big, airy crumb with 100% whole wheat bread. Based on the article, I believe the Emmer flour used is not refined. The bread will always be denser than when using refined flour, but that doesn't mean it didn't rise properly. I bake whole wheat bread (100%) exclusively at home, and the crumb looks exactly like Blackley's.
Even if you type "whole wheat sourdough" into Google images, you'll notice that virtually all of them are only half whole wheat.
100% whole grain:
https://youtu.be/Uj9nfkpS2u8?t=682
https://youtu.be/jd_r69WauPk?t=812
A few things to note here are that Foodgeek's bread is 80% hydration and still a bit dense, and that einkorn has a much lower gluten content than common wheat. The differences in hydration and gluten content will yield a denser loaf.
Neither of those are ancient Egyptian recipes.
I bake sourdough bread and have had a starter in the fridge for several years now (way pre-pandemic).
What's your point? They didn't bake sourdough. They baked a different bread using an entirely different type of flour. So why are you expecting it to look like modern sourdough? This is a reproduction of an ancient Egyptian bread! And there are plenty of other breads that are even denser than this one (and delicious too, I might add).
Wow... I thought _I_ used a lot of butter! (Probably less than a fifth of that!)
these 4500yr old yeast cultures are somewhat misleading. Your starter will adapt to your local environment, picking up whichever yeasts are in the air / grain you use.
The twitter feed has a load of info and this article talks to it a bit more, but great care went into preventing that
https://www.sbs.com.au/food/article/2019/08/14/would-you-eat...
They sterilized the flour with an autoclave before feeding it to the yeast.
https://twitter.com/SeamusBlackley/status/124116036901332172...
> picking up whichever yeasts are in the air
I'm not sure this is actually true to the extent it is usually mentioned e.g.
"Yeast grow on grain and arrive with the flour. One gram of flour contains about 13,000 yeast cells. I don’t deny that there are a few yeast in the environment that find their way into the starter, but by and large the yeast that will survive in the starter are the ones that like the menu there, i.e, the ones that have a taste for grain. Sure enough, they’re the ones that were on that grain in the first place. "
http://www.wildyeastblog.com/sourdough-stories-myth/
or more discussion:
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/37259/mythbusters-grain-yea...
I'm sure I read about some kind of experiment involving creating a sourdough starter with sanitised air but I can't find it... Does anyone have something more scientific?
Not if you take the kind of measures they're taking to maintain a fully sterile, sealed environment.
Threads about this from last year:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20624396
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20649495
I want to try the bread. I wonder if they will end up making it available, as a kit or something.
From the end of the article:
_And Blackley fantasizes about one day selling ancient Egyptian bread commercially._
So keep your eye out. You may get your wish.
If you are interested, look at this site:
Ed Wood did more or less the same thing in the 90s, it was covered in Nat Geo in Jan 1995. He sells the sourdough culture he got in Egypt.
"Xbox Creator" is an odd title/identifier, sure he was head of the project, but they are just slightly modified PCs. As if he did all the hard work, personally.
But what about the wheat? modern wheat is different for sure. I know because wheat products even in Europe have a different taste than here in North America
They use Emmer wheat, which is the variety that would have been used at the time. It's still grown commercially on a small scale, so you can buy some to try out without too much cost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmer
It's mentioned in the article that they couldn't use modern wheat to grow the extracted yeast cultures.
He's actually really fun to follow on twitter and uses the hashtag #YeastMasters for things like this.
I would definitely love to try bread from a 4,500 year old yeast culture.
(Copied from a sibling comment of mine): look at this site:
Ed Wood did more or less the same thing in the 90s, it was covered in Nat Geo in Jan 1995. He sells the sourdough culture he got in Egypt.
If you make your own wild yeast culture you might have a much older one.
I guarantee it tasted exactly the same.
Off-topic:
“People assume they were primitive because they didn’t have iPhones,” says Blackley. “They were potentially more sophisticated because of that.”
Didn't Egyptians have tablets? :-)
With full support for Unicode! And contrarily to the Mesopotamian tablet, the calculator app supports base 10!
Their tablets also lasted much longer than ours.
One of the detractors was an archaeologist with a background in Egyptology from the University of Queensland, Dr. Serena Love. “I was like, ‘Who is this guy?’ I don’t have an Xbox, I could care less about Xboxes,” says Dr. Love.
Couldn't care less.
Dr.
...
Perhaps the only thing he cares less about is pedantry.
Webster says either are acceptable now:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/could-couldnt-...
Quoting an authorities opinion on this matter is kind of oxymoronic when their opinion is that this isn't something to be dictated by authority. One wonders if it isn't slightly self-sabotaging of them to take this position.
But if it doesn’t square with the rest of the language, especially since negating it somehow still means the same thing, can we really accept it even if some grand institution like “Merriam Webster” adds it to the collection?
I guess I’m a soft prescriptivist
You’re assuming the level of care the Dr. has. Maybe she specifically means to say that she _could_ care less.
No, because then there would be no need to point out how much she cares. She specifically said that to highlight how little she cares for it, but said the phrase incorrectly.
Probably in the same way as people specifically mean 'you're' when they write 'your' ;)
Whenever I hear this I automatically think "Oh, so you have stated you care a certain amount. This amount is greater than zero. Therefore, you are stating you do care?"
"could care less" is sarcasm.
It's also a nonsensical expression which some English speakers (rather good-naturedly) find bothersome, as comedian David Mitchell explains:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw
I know what it means and it could be interpreted as a sarcastic expression - so there's nothing to be bothered by.
I was going to post that video. but got distracted with work. I absolutely love David Mitchell.
important?
test
yes
testy
What part of the XBOX was invented? It was just Windows 2000 running on storebought PC parts.
That's literally the invention -- the idea that a real, competitive gaming console could be built from commodity hardware.
The Gamecube predates that by a few months and also used commodity hardware.
Did gamecube also run windows 2000?
People already were building custom windows gaming computers before xbox. And some companies even sold prebuilt windows gaming computers before xbox. They ran at higher resolutions than xbox, with higher framerates, online connectivity. Plus many PC games did have and continute to have mod tools that gave users near total control over their games.
Hi,
Seamus Blackley worked on the hardware team and is primarily remembered for developing the XBox controller. I didn't work with him but I am a former XBox team member.
Rtgf
For a second, I was afraid it was going to be Nathan Myhrvold.
I thought it was going to be Irving Finkel, but his speciality is Mesopotamia. He went up to college to study Ancient Egypt, but then the egyptologist died and he switched to the Ancient Middle East.
I'm sure it has nothing to do with stolen / looted Egyptian artifacts residing in museums around the world.
Modern Egyptians have almost no dna connection to ancient Egyptians. They are descendants of migrants and invaders. They are also poor custodians of their own treasures. The Malawi museum was looted and wiped out in 2013 in Egypt. When I visited in 2016 I had people offering to take me to climb or explore the pyramids by bribing the guards.
https://www.cnn.com/2017/06/22/health/ancient-egypt-mummy-dn...
>Modern Egyptians have almost no dna connection to ancient Egyptians.
That's just false. Modern Egyptians are quite clearly and cleanly descended from Bronze Age Egyptians. There's quite a bit of African and Arabic input, but not to the point of the population being unrecognizable.
It's nearly impossible to replace a settled, agricultural population with immigration. There needs to be active, systemic policy of ethnic purge.
It would be a fair point to say they have little to no cultural connection to pre-Islamic Egypt, but bringing genetic into the mix is specious.
Did you read the linked article by parent poster? There could be maybe made an argument that Copts are the descendants of ancient Egyptians:
https://mobile.twitter.com/bewilderedcopt/status/10817763566...
All the linked article showed is that they gained 8% sub-saharan ancestry. That's not much of a shift.
I've seen a lot of ethnonationalist rhetoric online by middle eastern christian groups stating that they are the true heirs to the region, and that this is justifiable by genetics. I would take such claims with a large wheelbarrow of salt.
Looking further up that thread, someone else said:
>And BTW the Coptic Christians in Egypt are the REAL Egyptians not Arab invaders.
It seems to be the scientific consensus. I personally don't think genetics carry any hereditary claim to a thousand years old culture but it always bothers me to see people go against state of the art scientific conclusions (unless they have good evidence of their own).
>Copts share the same main ancestral component than North African and Middle East populations (dark blue), supporting a common origin with Egypt (or other North African/Middle Eastern populations). They are known to be the most ancient population of Egypt and at k = 4 (Fig.3), they show their own component (dark green) different from the current Egyptian population which is closer to the Arabic population of Qatar.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4446898/
Ah I get it, the savages don't deserve it.
Who said anything about DNA?
Regardless, it's heinous to justify a crime like this. It also leaves an extremely bitter taste to come across a museum in Europe with artifacts stolen during some more blatantly colonial period that they forgot to return.
There's nothing to return. Europeans are doing a service to humanity by preserving the history of our collective past. Look at what happened with the artefacts that were left behind: destruction at the hands of invaders, sometimes sponsored by the polity of the time.
Look at what ISIS did to the pre-Islamic artefacts present in the territory they controlled.
Look what Saddam Hussein did (even with somewhat good intentions) by trying to "modernize" the remains of the Ishtar Gate for the consumption of the local people, while ignoring pleas from archæologists to let them thoroughly review the sites beforehand.
I, for one, am thankful that I can go to the Louvre and learn about our shared ancient history, rather than these artefacts ending up as a paper weight in some oligarch's office, as would have been bound to happen otherwise.
I had this same discussions with a group of New Zealand'ers a few weeks ago on reddit. I was so surprised that the vocal commenters thought it best to return all artifacts to their rightful owners. I tried to point out that one person's rightful owner is another's despot, and what about all the examples of things being destroyed at the hands of poor stewardship? The main retort was "New Zealand is not some backwater country" which of course I agree but where do you draw the line? That's when I backed away slowly realizing the frothing mob was not interested in preserving shared history as much as revenge/retribution for colonial slights.
Europeans are the reason why these artifacts are in danger to begin with.... capital wants their ancient trinkets to play with. It'd be much more effective to rebuke capital directly. This is just whitewashing the whole affair by assuring the rich white folk that their continual destruction and looting of the world is noble.
I mean, it's a completely different story if the region _willingly hands over their precious items for preservation_. How is the concept of consent so difficult to grasp?
I'd like to add something:
We went to Iran for our holiday and we went to Persepolis and often enough it was mentioned that certain items (small and very big) are not here but you can see them in London or Paris ...
It is quite irritating to be honest traveling from Europe to Iran and realizing how much actually is at home.
Nonetheless, while i think this is not an easy topic, we europen were who traveled there and realized that this thing is actually worth digging out and saving. Before those stones got taken away slowly and steadily.
God forbid we share bread between countries
And yeast culture.
> Blackley fantasizes about one day selling ancient Egyptian bread commercially.
I'm so glad he's taking a stand against cultural appropriation!
I had a “Hawaiian” pizza the other day from a Thai manufacturer which used thousand island sauce and was advertised as having “Korean Fried Chicken” making up the crust. This idea of cultural appropriation of food is very American-centric.
I quite enjoy the concept that the Hawaiian pizza uses “thousand island” sauce. Though I’m not sure if I’d like the flavor.
Wash it down with a shot of Jose.
There comment is sarcastic
Pretty much all of the rest of the world (look outside America) does not follow this "cultural appropriation" idea.
https://ec.europa.eu/info/food-farming-fisheries/food-safety...
This is not about cultural but brand appropriation.
Selling it commercially would be pretty much the exact opposite of cultural appropriation.
Cultural appropriation would be “posting a shitty, burned, flat loaf saying, ‘Welp I guess this is what the ancient Egyptians had to deal with!’”
I don't know what definition of cultural appropriation you are using where using someone else's culture for profit doesn't count.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_appropriation
Cultural appropriation doesn't mean appropriating things from another culture. It's an actual term with a specific meaning.
It means specifically misrepresenting a cultural practice in order to make another culture look inferior. E.g. if you take something that isn't actually anything like what the Egyptians ate and tell everyone how terrible it is, then that would be cultural appropriation. Making bread the way the Egyptians made it would not be cultural appropriation, nor would selling it.
The term has a broader meaning than you make it seem. According to the link you posted yourself, cultural appropriation appears “[when] cultural elements are copied from a minority culture by members of a dominant culture [and] these elements are used outside of their original cultural context”.
In most cases, those appropriating other cultures actually love whatever they appropriate. That’s why they copied it in the first place. A lot of the flack for cultural appropriation comes not from that it ridicules other cultures, but rather that the artists/entrepreneurs/etc with visibility tend to be those from the dominant culture. They can profit from the ‘cool’ factor of appropriating other cultures, whereas for those from minorities that are being appropriated it is hard to find a spotlight.
Of course the kind of cultural appropriation that you describe also exists, i.e. wearing a native american headdress to a party or something like this. But that would be a subset and is not the generally used definition.
I guess to me using something outside of its original context is just a subset of misrepresentation, in the sense that the value of the practice in question isn't being accurately portrayed.
The link you posted opens with "Cultural appropriation is the adoption of an element or elements of one culture or identity by members of another culture or identity."
I read the top summary and the overview section, and it still looks to me that yes, it does mean appropriating things from another culture.
Any subtlety I'm missing? Would you take a shot at summarizing the definition you hold?
Someone better tell the Koreans who run the sushi restaurant down the street.
_someone else's culture_
Ouch.
Appropriate : “to make your own”
adpropriare "to make one's own," from Latin ad "to" (see ad-) + propriare "take as one's own,"
It means that I take something from culture X and pretend that it is from my culture, and/or in some cases twist it so that it makes my culture seem more superior.
> It means that I take something from culture X and pretend that it is from my culture
That’s literally how new things came to be in every larger culture. Sushi didn’t magically come into existence across all of Japan simultaneously. Rice techniques were continually improved upon and exchanged throughout the hundreds of cultures across Asia.
> Sushi didn’t magically come into existence across all of Japan simultaneously.
Welp. It didn't even originate in Japan specifically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sushi
Exactly my point. Most things gradually get incorporated into a larger culture, like yoga.
If I take yoga, and call it something else without actually changing the fundamentals and say it is superior, that’s appropriation.
Nope, it’s called appropriation even if you credit the original culture and keep the same name:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_appropriation
A restaurant was protested for cultural appropriation because the owner was white and it was serving Sonoran recipes under the original name. It was just the fact that a white person was profiting off of that particular subculture that made it appropriation.
this is some grade-a motte-and-bailey shit
So... you literally just described "progress" throughout all of human history. The Greeks and Roman are a good example of that. The entire back and forth history of the Silk Road (the real one). Even the Crusades had cultural dumps back and forth. Um, Japan is also considered the modern day "Rome" when it comes to taking other inventions and improving on it beyond their creator's imaginations. Like, are we going to yell cultural appropriation against the Japanese for building the Mitsubishi Zero (I don't know enough about sushi to talk about it beyond the california roll being a fucking abomination)? They didn't invent the airplane, but I dare you to find a history nut who isn't going to talk kindly about the engineering and general marvel that plane was for its time, along with how it forced the USA to adapt their learning and counter maneuvers to combat it. It was a super important plane to both military and aviation history, even though it's technically a piece of cultural appropriation.
Ever think the whole thing is just making a mountain out of a mole hill since it's never the "offended culture" that's ever offended, but some random person in San Fran or Los Angeles without a real job?
You take it into to far wide a scope. It is something that is, for the most part a modern notion in the context of taking from somebodies culture and presenting it either as yours to show your cultural superiority, and obfuscating in some cases the origin.
Basically it’s the same as if copied your shiny new app you worked on and declaring I made it, or invented it. I am appropriating your work as mine.
I think your scope is too narrow.
Consider white girls at music festivals wearing bindis as a fashion statement. I don't think this fits your definition, but it is a popular example of cultural appropriation.
It’s bread
"4,500-year-old dormant yeast samples"
You have got to be joking.....
It must be that this guy (or his son/daughter) are about to start a 'Ancient Egyptian Bakery' franchise, and needed something to drum up some interest.
That’s literally the last line of the article. He wants to go commercial
Atlas Obscura know which side their bread is buttered. Its a (yeasty) puff piece.