Your Food is Not Racist.
From Apple Pie and Dairy Milk, the New Woke Food Police are In Your Kitchen
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 5 lb. 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 rhetorical 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 4 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 “awake,” if you will.
Some now claim that the “awake” are trying to cancel or censor the teaching of our complex and sometimes awful racial history. 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.