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Your Food Is Not Racist
You there. Yes, you, standing between your pantry and refrigerator. It is time for a “conversation” about race. We’ll start with your food. Open your pantry. Look on the shelf. That one. There.
See that five-pound bag of white granulated sugar? Do you know the racist history of sugar plantations and cultivation in our hemisphere, from Haiti to the southern slaves who were forced to cultivate it?
Open your fridge. What’s that, a half-gallon container of milk? Racist. Don’t you know that white milk has not only become a symbol of white supremacy, but if you put dairy milk in your coffee (I saw those bags of your coffee next to the sugar in your pantry), that is immoral. This is your reminder that dairy milk is the product of imprisonment, forced impregnation, reproductive control, kidnapping, and abuse of female cows. And that’s just for starters. Just ask our friends at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).
Oh, I see you have an apple pie in the ‘fridge. That’s racist. Just ask Raj Patel, writing for The Guardian, and more. We’re talking food injustice here. Take notes. There will be a test. And you do not want to fail.
Not that the recipe for apple pie is uniquely American. It’s a variant on an English pumpkin recipe. By the time the English colonized the new world, apple trees had become markers of civilization, which is to say property. In Virginia, apple trees were used to demonstrate to the state that land had been improved. John Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed, took these markers of colonized property to the frontiers of US expansion where his trees stood as symbols that Indigenous communities had been extirpated.
We’ll spare you the indignity of opening your closet to expose your cotton clothes. Maybe not. More from Patel:
Columbus recorded cotton being used and worn during his first voyage by his Indigenous hosts. The gingham pattern likely originated in south-east Asia, the word deriving from the Malay genggang, a striped cloth that arrived in Europe as Europe colonized Asia. Cotton from India became central to the British East India Company, representing three-quarters of the corporation’s exports by 1766. As Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton tells, this war capitalism enslaved and committed acts of genocide against millions of Indigenous people in North America, and millions of Africans and their descendants through the transatlantic slave trade. In the process, cotton laid the basis of finance, police and government that made the United States.
Is your head spinning yet?
Food and Agriculture have become a major front in our cultural war between “woke” proponents of “critical theory” (legal and race) and traditionally-minded realists, and both presentism, along with strawman arguments and “whataboutism” are their weapons of choice. It was inevitable. Food, with which everyone connects and all depend, is always on the front lines of any cultural battle. Milk absorbed the first volleys around four years ago. I’ll let HuffPost tell the story:
(A) group of men were gathered to protest an anti-Trump video installation, “He Will Not Divide Us,” in Queens, New York, in February 2017.
Following the protest in New York, depictions of milk alongside white nationalism went viral. Figures affiliated with the alt-right, including Richard Spencer and Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet, added milk emojis to their Twitter display names and the hashtag “#MilkTwitter” was used as a dumping ground for racist trolls. Later in 2017, Lucian Wintrich, a former correspondent for the right-wing news blog Gateway Pundit who has appeared on a white nationalist podcast, drank from a glass of milk as protesters heckled him during a speech.
These and other incidents have been described as evidence that some white supremacists are co-opting cow’s milk as a symbol of their belief that white people are wholesome and pure.
Some food companies saw an opportunity to use their products to highlight awareness and promote racial diversity (and make a profit). Not just in the United States but also in India, specifically around their Independence Day in 2019. Cadbury produced a multi-colored chocolate “unity” bar. It did not go over well, at least in social media. This tweet came from a restaurant critic for the New York Times.
Pepsi tried something similar a few weeks earlier when Kendall Jenner was featured during a mock protest handing a Pepsi to a police officer. Black Lives Matter (BLM) protestors felt this was an “appropriation” and using “social justice” to sell soda. Pepsi dutifully confessed that they “missed the mark” with that.
But today’s big new tactic is the use of the word “exotic” to describe food. And not from an organization like PETA, but a food writer for the Washington Post, G. Daniela Galarza. We can always count on the very woke newsroom of my local paper of record to signal the newest attack from the woke in our culture war. As described by TheBlaze:
Essentially Galarza argues that the word “exotic” is historically rooted in white dominance and colonialism, and we need to put its use out to pasture once and for all.
“The first problem with the word is that, probably within the past two decades, it has lost its essential meaning,” she wrote. “The second, more crucial problem is that its use, particularly as applied to food, indirectly lengthens the metaphysical distance between one group of humans and another, and, in so doing, reinforces xenophobia and racism.”
She also noted an observation from Chandra D. L. Waring, professor of sociology at University of Massachusetts Lowell: “I have never heard the word exotic used in reference to something that is White. You know that exotic means ‘other’ or ‘different’ from a dominant-White perspective because no one ever says, ‘I’m going to go on an exotic vacation, I’m going to Lowell, Mass.’ No one ever says, ‘Let’s go to that exotic new restaurant, let’s go to McDonald’s.'”
It isn’t going to stop here or anytime soon. That’s because, as the leftist Roots of Change organization says, our entire food system, including food access, is racist, and they have just the agenda to address it, including reparations.
It’s not hard to see what this is all about: money and power. And they’re not really hiding it anymore.
This is all rooted in Critical Theory, which emerged first in the legal profession from Harvard University in the 1970s. It is best described as a disfiguring lens applied to selective events in American history in support of a false notion: that America was founded on white supremacy, that its institutions were created to preserve the dominance of the white race, and that the system must be torn down. They seem to do this by dividing Americans into groups of “oppressed” victims, in contrast to their white, capitalist, colonializing “oppressors.” It rejects the Civil Rights movement’s vision of a color-blind society and instead pursues not “antiracism,” as they assert, but neo-racism.
It’s always seemed to be in the American DNA to resist and reject efforts to lump us into groups under herd mentalities that force us to live under very legalistic rules, especially the ones that say “don’t eat that!” “Don’t read that!” Here, our founding documents enshrine individuals with certain unalienable rights. In the words of Joe Biden, you know the thing.
However, this thinking has captured several American institutions on a relentless march. Fortunately, as we’ve seen in school board meetings spontaneously and organically across the United States, parents and others are waking up and fighting back. The “woke” versus the “awakened,” if you will.
Some now claim that the “awakened” are trying to cancel or censor the teaching of our complex and sometimes awful racial history (often ignoring great achievements). That’s a strawman argument. We’re all for teaching history openly and honestly, and no book does it better than Dr. Wilfred McClay’s “Our Land of Hope.” I’m reading it now. It is the most elegant and powerful survey of our nation’s history in one document, rooted in realism and honesty. It is distinctly nonpartisan. And it is an enjoyable read.
I’m often asked whether it is too late to fight back. People are scared to challenge this woke new orthodoxy sweeping corporate offices, including, it seems, the leaders and managers who one might think are empowered to bring sanity to their cultures. People are literally in fear of their jobs and livelihoods. It seems to own most of academia, the entertainment and media industry, and now has grabbed a beachhead in our military. I don’t need to provide you with examples. You know them. But no, it is never too late.
And we are not alone. Most Americans reject the woke agenda. They certainly don’t like woke companies engaged in cultural issues. In big numbers.
One of America’s greatest essayists, Joseph Epstein, said it best in the Wall Street Journal this week:
Those of us who sense that the greatness of the U.S. is dwindling feel that a good part of the reason is the defeat of traditional values and their replacement by woke ones. Identity politics may be the rule in the Democratic Party, but its origin is in woke culture, which accounts for why the country is filled with so many angry people, for whom no evidence of progress lessens the intensity of their grievances.
Although the culture war would appear to be over, to surrender to the dreariness of woke culture—which tramples on art, is without intellectual authority, allows no humor, and is vindictive toward those who oppose it—is unthinkable. So praise the Lord and pass the ammunition; it’s back to the trenches, for there isn’t any choice. The culture war must continue.
Agreed. So go ahead, for starters, kick the food police out of your life, and defund them. Enjoy that apple pie, put dairy milk in your coffee, and add as much sugar as you want. It’s your life, it’s your liberty, and it’s your pursuit of happiness.
And vote with your dollars. You don’t even need to show ID.
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Well done!
Milk in my coffee? Never. If there is no cream available (heavy preferably, but whipping cream works) I’d rather drink it black. Milk is insipid stuff to add to coffee. My nephew even puts 2% milk in. You might as well dilute it with water.
2% milk is mostly water.
But then, so is coffee.
Food has for thousands of years been subject to borrowing, trading, combining, and imposing bits across cultures. My favorite is that although today the spice paprika is principally associated with Hungarians, Hungarians have paprika only because invading Turks brought it with them several hundred years ago. We tend to think of pizza as Italian, but most of the American forms of pizza bear only minimal resemblance to pizza obtained in Italy. And in broad terms, pizza is yet another variant of flat breads that are prepared in an assortment of forms all around the Mediterranean Sea.
A woman I worked for who was of Eastern European ancestry and grew up in south Texas was horrified by the extend to which Mexican and Eastern European food items are combined into new dishes. My son who lives in south Texas thinks such culinary mash-ups are some of the great features of life in south Texas.
Trying to isolate individual food components to symbolize anything (racism, oppression, colonialism, cultural appropriation, whatever) is a hopeless exercise that depends entirely on ascribing never-before-imagined meaning to things. How far back are you going to go to find a basis for offense? You have to be absolutely determined to find something objectionable to complain that any particular food is racist, oppressive, colonial, impermissibly appropriated, or whatever the woke complaint of the moment is.
Have you met the Left?
You me and Jesus Christ were also mostly water.
Wow! I had no idea. I will now commence self-flagellation.
The difference between you, me and Jesus Christ is that He can turn water into wine when He chooses. The best the rest of us can do is turn water into whine.
It is 104 degrees out right now in Northern California.
If I step outside for more than ten minutes, I can turn me into a tepid puddle.
There’s a romantic 19th-century quote in there some place.
I’ve always believed in the power of laughter, and possibly ridicule. Every time these people open their mouths, can’t we just laugh them off the stage? No counter-argument is necessary. All that is required is a hoot, a loud “There for a minute I thought you were serious – you almost got me!”, and then howls of derisive laughter.
Some ideas aren’t even wrong, they’re just noise.
Or else a title for a grunge rock band of the ’80’s.
Sure, if it’s an original grunge band, with aging musicians, Tepid Puddle may be the perfect brand.
Sometimes, I feel like my white rice is trying to “other” my brown rice.
And I mix my white and brown rice together on the plate, and when I come back with my water, the brown rice has self-segregated.
But my food is sexist.
Brown rice needs a safe space.
I can turn wine into water. In fact, I do this most every evening.
Orange veggie bad . . .
Which reminds me of this:
(Hat Tip Misthiocracy, who introduced me to this on Ricochet,)
I’ve been seeing them congregating near the peas, but I don’t know what is going on.
My rice identifies as asparagus. It’s now a protected vegetable.
It may identify as asparagus but dollars to donuts it won’t make my pee smell funny.
You under estimate the lengths something will go to in order to make You think it’s something else.
Good one Kelly. The coffee thing really got me going. So in my memorial trip back to Viet Nam in 2015 learned about weasel coffee. Must have been the French. Turned weasels loose on the coffee plantations. Ate the seeds. And then ejected them. You know, bowel movements. Harvested them anyway. You know how productive the French are. Anyway, some protein stuck to the coffee seeds. Somehow allowed them to brew better. Lots of Weasel coffee was selling in Saigon (sorry, Ho Chi Mihn City). Actually tasted pretty good.
You should give peas a chance . . .
Visualize whirled peas.
99% of this nonsense comes from the left but I have reads comments by conservatives who think eating avocado toast is a sign that one is a Marxist or something.
Not only is food racist, just having enough to eat is privilegist-Americanist and thus white-it’s and thus WRONG. A well-fed middle class is a sign of an extractionist empire-ist anti-collectivist hive of parasites!
Just like every luxury, dining-out is something we should all be able to do without. Canned snails are available at Walmart and if I need to satisfy that craving I can – saving me plenty.
Once the restaurants start hitting-back at the Satano-Communists ruining their businesses, sanity might return.