The Great British Bake Off Faces Backlash Over Mexican Week Episode

Prue Leith is owning up to The Great British Bake Off's mistakes. 

After the Netflix bid faced disapproval for throwing a Mexican-themed week during its 10th Collection, Leith spoke out about the controversy. 

"There would person been perfectly nary volition to offend," she who judges the amusement alongside Paul Hollywood, told The New Yorker in a diagnostic published Oct. 23. "That's not the tone of the show."

Leith noted that the judges are the ones who acceptable the week's challenges, which, during Mexican Week, included cookware dulce, tacos and tres leches cake. Fans successful peculiar took contented with the tacos challenge, which required minimal baking and produced cringe-worthy moments similar 1 evident rootlike faux pas. 

"This woman is peeling her avocado similar it's a potato," 1 idiosyncratic tweeted. "This amusement is disconnected the rails. #GBBO"

Other disapproval of the occurrence included usage of ocular stereotypes similar sarapes and sombreros and mispronunciations of dishes. There was besides backlash to hosts Matt Lucas and Noel Fielding quipping that they should stay away "Mexican jokes" to hazard offending people—"not adjacent juan."

But for now, Leith is focused connected remembering the positive impact of The Great British Bake Off, which she has judged since 2017.

"This is alternatively a cliché happening to say, but I bash deliberation that it is simply a unit for good, astir of the time," she explained. "Everything we bash successful beingness is simply a spot stressful—we are ever abbreviated of time, we're abbreviated of money, determination are each sorts of horrible things happening each implicit the world. And Bake Off is this harmless abstraction wherever the worst happening that tin hap is idiosyncratic volition driblet their bake."