A company is facing accusations of cultural appropriation after it claimed to have improved and modernized congee, an Asian rice porridge, and its owner, who is white, called herself "the Queen of Congee." For centuries, the dish has been a staple in many Asian cultures and has as many names as it does variations across countries, but congee most commonly refers to the Chinese version. Often eaten at breakfast, the dish is made by boiling rice in a large amount of water for a long period of time. But now Oregon-based The Breakfast Cure finds itself in hot water of its own. The company has apologized after facing social media backlash and accusations of whitewashing congee, exoticizing Asian food and ignoring the dish's Asian roots. "She's stealing our culture but does not honor it," said Chinese-American writer Frankie Huang. While other companies have sold variations of congee, much of the controversy hinges on how the owner of the company, Karen Taylor, claimed to have improved the food. "I've spent a lot of time modernizing it for the Western palette — making a congee that you can eat and find delicious and doesn't seem foreign, but delivers all of the medicinal healing properties of this ancient recipe," Taylor said in a post on the product's website entitled "How I discovered the miracle of congee and improved it" that has since been deleted. In a video interview that has been taken off the site but remains on YouTube, Taylor refers to congee as "this sort of weird thing." Anita Mannur, a professor in English and Asian American studies at Miami University, said Taylor's words send a false message that Asian food is improved when it is adapted to whiteness. "What is this white nonsense?" Mannur said. "Why do you think our foods always need improvements?" When someone says they're improving the food of another culture, Mannur said they're suggesting that the original food is lesser. She added that saying an Asian dish must be modernized suggests "Asians are lagging behind the rest of white America, and so apparently it falls on some white woman to save Asian food from Asian people." She also said referring to congee as "weird" furthers the exotification of Asian food. "When you call foods weird, you're accessing a whole history of racist stereotypes that what is white American is normal and normative and everything else is weird or foreign," she said.