Even if it would have been as you described: it would have nothing to do with me cooking african food because I love the taste. It's admiration, not theft.
In most cases, Europeans don't live close to the people their countries colonized (though there are some exceptions, like the Basque and Catalonia regions), so there's less of a likelihood for people to want to appropriate them.
And no; cooking African food, no matter whether you belong to a culture that colonized that particular African culture, is not appropriation (unless, as I mentioned in another post, the food is part of a closed religious/ritual practice).
The appropriator needs to get some profit or acclaim for doing the thing, while the people it came from are denigrated for the it.
Clothing is a much more visible identity marker: if you're dressed in clothing from particular African cultures, that's a strong signal that you belong to that culture—so if you do not, in fact, belong to it, that can cause a number of kinds of problems in the right (or wrong) circumstances.
Furthermore, for many cultures, the clothing that most recognizably signals membership is related to some form of cultural or religious ritual, and wearing it outside of that context can be very disrespectful.
Imagine if, for instance, you were in Nairobi (or Tokyo, or Mumbai) and saw someone wearing the traditional robes and cap of a Catholic cardinal—and you saw them partying, being vulgar, doing drugs, that sort of thing. Obviously, the connotations are not the same, because of the overall dominance of the Catholic Church and Western culture generally, but I hope that it gets across the general idea of why clothing can be more prone to appropriation, and why that's a problem.
You're stripping the value of African food from African people, the same as colonialism stripped their resources from their land.
Opening restaurants with food from your culture is pretty much the standard way of doing it and certainly not looked down upon.
All of this sounds racist to me. People are now forbidden to do things if they have the wrong skin color.
I guess I'm sort of old fashioned, when a concept is coined by some person I go with their definition and not what my feelings on it as a Dane might be.
cooking African food because you like the taste would probably not be cultural appropriation as the concept was originally defined, although I guess people may feel that is what it means now.
So if you’d be worried about hiring a black man with dreads, but you wouldn’t have the same hangups about a white woman with dreads, that’s an example. Or if when you make Foul Madras it’s very cultured and experimental and basically laudable of you - but if someone from Egypt brings it in, it’s more like a “oh isn’t your culture quaint” kind of situation, if not flat out “why did you make food that smells so bad.”
Like the enduring nonsensical racist gripe that people from indo/pak background smell like curry… while the UK had simultaneously made tika masala into a national dish. It’s brave and adventurous when white people do it, it’s separatist and foreign when brown people do it, even though it’s what brown people grew up with. That’s the angle.
Food is more of an edge case. I know there have been situations where someone who is white opened up a restaurant that sold food of a particular ethnicity. I'm not familiar with the specifics however. I would imagine that people debated whether or not that was cultural appropriation. Again, I don't know any specifics in that case.
I would say that cultural appropriation is less about individuals and more about the overall taking of something that means something to one culture and removing all that meaning. An example that comes to mind are things like turning Native American clothes into fashion or kids dressing as indians for Halloween.
So eat what you want to eat.
