Think about how much of the conversation over what "authentic" Italian food is, is often just completely gibberish and has been totally muddled by decades of American Italians completely altering/inventing "traditional" recipes that never actually existed on any time scale deserving of the adjective "traditional" or how it was completely re-invented after the reconstruction of the Italian food industry post-World War II.
Without involving the US, I think this is a good opportunity to remind people many of the plants eaten daily everywhere in the world that are considered staples and necessary ingredients in numerous "traditional" dishes, are in fact extremely recent imports in Human history.
Tomatoes and potatoes are native to Southern America. They were first brought to Europe as exotic plants in the 16th century.
Tomato only boomed in Italy during the 19th century, less than 200 years ago.
Around the same time as spaghetti.
Personally, as someone who's lived the first 20 years of my life in Europe, and the next 20 years in Asia, I'd say an argument could be made that it is impossible to "culturally appropriate" a food item - simply because food items create culture.
Someone was talking about Japanese Ramen. Ramen is a huge part of today's Japanese food culture and yet... It is a Chinese dish
Japanese curry is a household favorite for Japanese kids - but Japanese curry is an adaptation of British curry, itself a creation made upon Indian grounds.
When talking about who writes what kind of recipes, there are also practical factors that may influence drastically who reads what recipes.
Continuing with Japan as an example, let's take a look at one recipe that you're 100% certain to find in every single Japanese cookbook: Pot-au-feu.
Pot-au-feu is a traditional French dish that is made around beef and beef bones.
Yet, every Japanese cookbook, every Japanese online recipe will systematically replace those two central ingredients with... wieners, of all things.
(And Japanese wieners, by far and wide, aren't even made of pork, but mostly chicken meat...)
I've seen many French people brandishing their fists, yelling "you are all wrong, here's how real Pot-au-feu is made" - and they usually were lauded for it by the small local audiences they had access to.
But in the end?
Everyone always goes back to the wiener version, because beef is too expensive, and beef bones are hard to come by.
And the French people wouldn't have had enough reach to begin with anyways.
It is far, far harder to source a Pot-au-feu recipe written by a French person in Japan than it is to find a recipe of Maafe in English written by an actual Senegalese.
