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From Texas comes the hottest political scandal of the afternoon: Former congresswoman Mayra Flores (R-Texas) who’s running to return to Congress next year, has been caught posting to social media photos of delicious meals that she couldn’t have cooked herself, because the photos were copied from the internet and from places nowhere near Texas.
This, dear readers, is nothing less than STOLEN SABOR!
The phrasing of the captions in Flores’s posts certainly imply the food is her own creation, just down-home good Mexican food from a very authentic Texas Republican. Example: this yummy-looking dish in a photo with the caption “The Ranch Life with family is the best.” Someone in the replies asked her if the flatbread was pupusa (from El Salvador or Honduras), but she replied “No, Gorditas de masa.”
But as social media food sleuths revealed, the “ranch” in the photo isn’t in Texas, or even the USA! The photo is from a Facebook page called “visit Guyana,” where maybe ranch life is the best, but it ain’t the former congresswoman’s. As Current Revolt points out, “The meal in the photo is not even Mexican food, it’s a Guyanese dish likely of stew with sada roti. Guyanese people are not even considered Latino.”
The website posts example after delicious example of food porn from Flores’s Xwitter account that was more a matter of copy and paste than of kitchen wizardry.
She captioned a post from September with “Prayer and a good breakfast reduces stress. Enjoying the simple things of life [heart emoji],” and was even happy to explain what kind of cheese was in the photo — queso fresco, not brie — implying again that she knew first-hand, from making the food. Of course, that image was also from Facebook, back in 2021. It’s unclear whether her morning prayers came from there, too, or if perhaps the Almighty heard Flores’s prayer and blessed whoever originally cooked the food and took the photo.
And so on; the unidentified website author dug up at least three other examples before saying they had to stop because the project made them too hungry to go on. Among them, a January 2023 Instagram photo of eggs and tortillas cooking on what was almost certainly a wooden stove, but which she relabeled to reflect the latest stupid rightwing snit of that month: “As a proud Latina who knows how to cook, homemade Mexican food tastes better from a gas stove.” HA! HA!
Yep, Facebook again.
On Twitter today, Texas Tribune reporter Robert Downen passed along the story, then noted an hour later that Flores had blocked him, because clearly he was an enemy of the people. He wrote about the silliness for the Tribune, and found a few new examples, including
one post from July in which she shared a photo of meat and tortillas on a grill with the caption, “Joe Biden is not invited to the carne asada” in both English and Spanish. A reverse image search found that the exact photo was posted a year prior by a Facebook page for tourism in Tamaulipas — the state in Mexico where Flores was born.
Eventually, Flores did respond, texting Downen to say she certainly has no “intention to mislead” and explaining it was all just a simple misunderstanding born out of what must have been repeated cases of nostalgia over the last year or so:
“The photo simply reminded me of my upbringing in Mexico and childhood,” she said. “I deleted the tweet to clear up any confusion. I actually spend my Christmas at ranch with my In-Laws. Happy New Year!”
Asked to specify which of the photos she was referring to, Flores suggested that the Tribune focus on “the border crisis.”
Also, just as a person does when they haven’t done anything petty and embarrassing, Flores changed her Twitter handle and continued blocking anyone who mentioned the photos.
The campaign of Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas), who turfed out Flores in 2022 and is being challenged by her again, tweeted that Flores is “The George Santos of the RGV [Rio Grande Valley],” and the “Grubgate” saga continues, with blue-checkmark people defending Flores by pointing out she never said she’d made the food, so where’s the lie?
In other news, we’re hungry, and it’s your OPEN THREAD!
[Current Revolt / Dobert Downen on Twitter / Texas Tribune / Photo: Robert Howington, Creative Commons License 2.0]
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