For longer than I’ve been alive, restaurants in North America that call themselves “Chinese” have typically served dishes that would not be recognized in China: chop suey, sweet and sour pork. This North American Chinese food is not one of my favourite cuisines, but I am fond of one of its unhealthier highlights: General Tso’s chicken, chicken deep-fried to a crisp then covered in a sweet and spicy sauce.

In the past two decades there have been a number of essays and articles explaining the history of General Tso’s chicken: how it began with a Hunan-American chef who wanted to make a new dish reminiscent of Hunan court cuisine, which had neither the crisp batter nor the sauce’s sweetness, but then quickly got taken up by other American chefs into something that delighted the American public and became taken up as a typically Hunan dish even though it was nothing of the sort. Perhaps most strikingly, according to one such article, “General Tso’s chicken is now being adopted as a ‘traditional’ dish by some influential chefs and food writers in Hunan”: some people back in Hunan now claim the dish as theirs.

And what this all reminds me of is a significant metaphor used in the study of Indian religions.