Online commentators have hit back at claims aimed at the burger restaurant over its £4.39 sandwich launched for the festive season. They took to Twitter to laugh off the claims by those who took issue with the sandwich which is packed with chicken selects, bacon, pepper jack cheese, onion, lettuce and spicy jerk sauce.
One man tweeted: “All this talk of #culturalappropriation. We’ve taken the best dishes from other countries for hundreds of years. We eat pizza from Italy, curries from India, French bread, Spanish paella.
“If McDonald’s serve jerk chicken that’s up to them.
“If it tastes awful, well that’s different.”
A second said anyone accusing the global restaurant chain of misusing a cuisine for profit was being “ridiculous”.
They wrote: “The entire claim of ‘cultural appropriation’ is ridiculous.”
And yet a third hit out at those kicking up a stink over the budget chicken sandwich.
The person tweeted: “The ‘cultural appropriation’ garbage has surfaced again over a chicken jerk sandwich being sold by McDonald’s.”
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But some critics were scathing in their assessment of the row and one even went as far as to suggest anyone who ate the sandwich was “complicit in cultural appropriation and racism”.
After one man claimed the sandwich tasted delicious and told McDonald’s it was the “best thing you’ve ever done” another was quick to slap him down.
He responded: “Eating it is complicit in cultural appropriation and racism. At the very least say it was bad.”
One woman who refused to support McDonald’s decision to sell the Jerk Chicken Sandwich questioned “who approved” the item for sale.
Cultural appropriation refers to the adoption of either one or multiple elements of a culture or identity by another culture or identity.
In recent years such actions have been seen as increasingly unacceptable and have caused controversy time and again.
The Jerk Chicken Sandwich appears alongside a double Big Mac and a Celebrations McFlurry on McDonald’s Christmas menu.
A spokesperson for McDonald’s told MailOnline: “Our Jerk Chicken Sandwich uses jerk seasoning in its spicy sauce.
“In the product description, we make it clear that the sauce is the jerk component of the sandwich.”
