By Noah Rothman
Tuesday, June
21, 2022
Kooks Burritos—a food truck that served
patrons in Portland, Oregon—was a smashing success. Its proprietors became
local celebrities. In one interview with a Portland journalist, the truck’s
owners, Kali Wilgus and Liz Connelly, confessed that they had the idea for
their little food truck following a trip to Mexico. There, they fell in love
with the cuisine, asked local chefs to share their recipes and techniques, and
brought them back to the Pacific Northwest. Soon enough, the phenomenon’s
origin story became a subject of outrage. The two women were accused by the
city’s identity-obsessed press of being “white cooks bragging about stealing
recipes from Mexico.”
In 2017, the Portland Mercury placed
their names on an ignoble list of “white-owned appropriative restaurants.”
Exclaimed the Mercury: “Because of Portland’s underlying
racism, the people who rightly owned these traditions and cultures that exist
are already treated poorly.” Wilgus and Connelly were accused of “erasing and
exploiting their already marginalized identities for the purpose of profit and
praise.” Kooks’s online reviews went south and business dried up. The truck was
soon forced to fold—not because the food these two women made was bad, but
because it was good.
In 2018, Abe Conlon won a James Beard
Award for Best Chef in the Great Lakes Region for his work at Fat Rice. The
restaurant had been a local favorite since it opened its doors in 2012. In
2015, it was proclaimed by Chicago magazine “the most
universally beloved restaurant in Chicago.” It specialized in cuisine from the
Chinese autonomous region of Macau. Situated across the Pearl River Delta from
Hong Kong, Macau was a Portuguese colony from 1783 until 1976.
In the summer of 2020, the restaurant’s
proprietors sought to convey their support for the anti-police protests that
had erupted across the country with some Instagram activism. So the restaurant
posted a few anodyne images of protests and a message: “We remain dedicated to
our values, we oppose all forms of racism, and we stand with those fighting for
justice and equality in our communities in Chicago and across the world.” A
former employee savaged the restaurant for what he deemed its insufficient
gesture of support for racial justice. “You’re not going to say
#BlackLivesMatter, even though you take from Black culture ALL the time?” he
wrote.
With that, the dam burst. A handful of
former restaurant employees took to social media to allege that Conlon was
abusive and his business practices were racist. The New York Times described
the chef as the “restaurant-business archetype: a tantrum-prone chef who rules
by fear and bullying,” and said the outrage that was consuming his business
showed a “growing intolerance for a type of verbal mistreatment that has long
been accepted as routine in the industry.” These are two explicit admissions
that what Conlon was accused of was, in essence, standard chef practice.
Perhaps they are standard in a way that should not be tolerated. But they are
standard, nonetheless.
And none of this mattered much anyway.
After all, it wasn’t the claim that Conlon was a prima donna that did him in;
it was the allegation of “cultural appropriation.”
“They don’t give any cultural context to
the origins of their ingredients,” wrote the former employee, who was outraged
over Fat Rice’s failure to name-check “BlackLivesMatter.” “They hike up the
prices and sell it back to people of color.” Conlon apologized for his abusive
conduct and for failing to accurately represent the culture his cuisine was
supposed to reflect. But no one was looking for an apology; a sacrifice was
wanted.
This social-media uprising, layered on top
of 2020’s pandemic-related restrictions on commerce, proved too much to bear,
and Fat Rice closed its doors forever. In an interview with Eater, the
disgruntled employee who started it all took a victory lap: “I’m not surprised
that he is not reopening Fat Rice,” he said of Conlon. “I don’t think people
would have allowed him to. I know I wouldn’t have.”
In Toronto, Canada, the athletic-apparel
store Permission tried to set itself apart from the competition by offering its
clients access to a chic “broth bar” while they shopped. In partnership with
Ripe Nutrition, the store sold “superfood bone broth” along with other
“wellness” products. Some enterprising agitators soon noticed that the shop’s
proprietor was white, and there was something unseemly about a white woman
profiting off the sale of “bone broth” and “turtle pho.”
“Also sexualizing ‘jerk’ sauce and pho hot
sauce and making ‘superfood dumplings’ for profit?” Toronto Star columnist
Evy Kwong contemptuously wrote of this “white-owned” business. “Y’all, I’m
sick.” We can agree that sexualized jerk sauce does not sound at all
appetizing. But transforming it and the revenue from its sale into a racial
contretemps was innovative.
The “cultures they are taking from literally
fight daily for legitimacy,” Kwong added. Her outrage caught the local press’s
attention, and emulators soon began to mimic her aggravation on social media.
Permission eventually agreed that its partnership with a purveyor of soups
contributed to the pain endured by those of Asian descent. “We acknowledge the
hurt this has caused and apologize sincerely,” the apparel store’s owner
confessed in a statement. “Our pop-up was not in line with community values or
our company ethos, and we have decided to part ways, effective immediately.”
Customers will have to be satisfied with bottled water from now on as they
browse for athleisure wear.
These episodes and others like them are
revealing of some shared principles on the activist left. Inclusivity and cultural
sensitivity, yes. But also, a level of judiciousness sufficient to establish
boundaries for oneself and others. Those boundaries are designed to put you in
your place and preserve social constancy as a result. And while this principle
is ostensibly informed by the wisdom that comes with cultural competence, its
practice is often accompanied by extravagant displays of self-denial.
***
What is it that the progressive left gets
out of gratuitous demonstrations of their own capacity for self-deprivation?
What satisfaction does any practitioner of a demanding doctrine derive from the
rejection of baser temptations? In denying our own desires, we undertake a
journey with a far-off goal, which should end—if it ever ends—in a fuller
understanding of ourselves and our neighbors. By ignoring our own hungers, we
can focus instead on our external conditions and maybe make some improvements.
By abstaining from earthly pleasures, we practice restraint, good judgment, and
discretion. This is the heart of Puritanism. And it’s worth noting that the
term “Puritan” itself was originally intended to be insulting.
When it first emerged in England in the
mid-16th century, it was used to lampoon an emerging religious zealotry. A new
form of fanatically reverent Protestantism was on the rise. Its members didn’t
just hold themselves to unusually exacting standards—they held you to them,
too.
It’s hard to blame the Renaissance-era
English who rolled their eyes at these strange new fundamentalists. The moral
offenses they campaigned against ranged from drunkenness to theater, from merry
dancing to the celebration of Christmas. The Puritans were, to say the least,
exhausting.
As Michael Winship has observed, that
which invited “idleness, gambling, drinking, and ‘wandering up and down from
town to town’” was a cause of great concern among these devout Protestants.
“They needed to demonstrate their faith by unceasing obedience to God’s stern
and demanding law.” That obedience often manifested in public displays of
self-imposed discomfort.
“Fasting, a great ritualized drama of
alienation and reconciliation with God,” found its way into Puritanism’s
16th-century instruction manuals, Winship recounts. So, too, did humiliating
exhibitions of “physical abasement.” Swearing off earthly pleasures reinforced
what Winship called “a deep sense of sinfulness and unworthiness” among the
faithful. “For whom the Lord loveth,” reads Hebrews 12:6, a passage favored by
puritanical thought leaders, “he chasteneth.”
God saves those who suffer for their
faith. And few suffered quite like 17th-century Congregationalist minister
Jeremiah Burroughs.
Burroughs was practically obsessed with
unity. The well-known preacher dedicated his life to mending the bonds of
religious kinship across Britain’s fractious Protestant denominations. He
proposed to achieve that through both spiritual exercise and politics, which he
practiced as a member of the Westminster Assembly. Burroughs’s prolific
writings provide us with a window into the thought process of a figure who
believed it was his mission to unite the faith.
One of his better-known works, The
Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, gives us some idea of what Burroughs
believed would reunite quarreling puritanical factions: their own nauseating
disgust with themselves. Burroughs reminds his reader that self-denial and a
sense of helplessness before God’s awesome might are the pathway to salvation.
The acceptance of Christ’s teachings demands nothing less than abject
supplication. A handful of the maxims to which the aspiring must submit gives
you some idea of the exacting nature of Burroughs’s theology:
“I am nothing, and I deserve nothing.”
“I can do nothing.”
“I am so vile that I cannot of myself
receive any good.”
“I am not only an empty vessel but a
corrupt and unclean vessel.”
And: “If we perish, we will be no loss.”
This was not an uplifting read.
By wallowing in contempt for his own
desires, though, Burroughs taught his congregants to find fulfillment in
deprivation. “No-one ever denied himself as much as Jesus Christ did,”
Burroughs recalled. “And the nearer we come to learning to deny ourselves as
Christ did, the more contented shall we be, and by knowing much of our own
vileness, we shall learn to justify God.”
Burroughs’s sentiments crystalized a
strain of puritanical thought that captured the imaginations of his
co-religionists long after his untimely death in 1646. As one of America’s most
prolific Puritan philosophers, Cotton Mather, said: “By loathing of himself
continually, and Being very sensible of his loathsome Circumstances, a
Christian does what is very pleasing to God.”
Harsh as it is, submitting to this sort of
merciless self-flagellation has its merits. Through abnegation, we might make
ourselves aware of the needs of others that are going unmet. Through
abstinence, we learn satisfaction with and gratitude for that with which we
have already been blessed. Through self-restraint, we can take some small
measure of God’s plight. After all, as Burroughs wrote, “he has to deal with a
most wretched creature”—namely, you.
What Burroughs describes is an extreme
version of an otherwise valuable code of conduct. Circumspection, the skilled
management of scarce resources, and governing one’s appetites with
discipline—these are prudent life skills. Prudence is something we expect from
all functioning adults. In practice, the sort of discretion we demand from
society’s contributing members often involves self-denial—or, in the parlance
of modern psychoanalytical discourse, delayed gratification.
Quite unlike their hedonistic predecessors
on the left, today’s New Puritans are enthusiastic practitioners of
self-denial. But we’re not talking about something as quaint as the Marshmallow
Test. The denials of the self toward which the modern progressive activist is
inclined are not dissimilar from those that tested the faith of the 17th
century’s Protestant reformers.
For modern progressive activists, what you
should be revulsed by are the cravings and desires that arise from deep within
the subconscious mind. Those visceral appetites of the body and the mechanical
response they produce when satisfied are unbridled by reason. These pleasures
generate involuntary reactions. The uncurbed sigh of contentment you exhale
after a sinfully epicurean meal. The uninhibited laugh that bursts from your
gut after a ribald joke. Your body betrays you when you succumb to these
temptations.
Prudence requires that your every action be
carefully curated to maximize virtue. Nowadays, that starts with what you eat.
***
In late 2018, the United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that humanity had only about a
dozen years left to stave off a runaway greenhouse effect that could raise
global temperatures by as much as 1.5 degrees Celsius. “There is increasing
agreement that overall emissions from food systems could be reduced by
targeting the demand for meat and other livestock products,” the report read,
so the solution to the problem would be to reduce the amount of meat consumed
in the West by as much as 30 percent.
Nonsense! Thirty percent is for cowards
and quislings, a study led by Oxford researcher Marco Springmann and published
in the journal Nature concluded the following month. Real
crusaders for the new nutritional paradigm know that only cajoling most of the
planet into giving up at least 90 percent of their meat-based diet will avert
catastrophe.
Ideally, the globe would trade 75 percent
of its beef, 90 percent of its pork, and at least half the eggs it consumes on
a regular basis for beans, peas, lentils, nuts, and seeds. The restrictions on
relatively well-off Westerners should be even more onerous. The industrialized
world must all but eliminate beef and reduce milk consumption if the human
species is to survive.
By the time these studies and their
draconian recommendations were published, a consensus around the need to
curtail the developed world’s protein intake had already become accepted dogma on
the left. “Our changing climate is already making it more difficult to produce
food,” Barack Obama declared shortly after leaving office. He noted that the
obstacles before reformers were numerous and went beyond policymaking. “Because
a lot of people don’t just eat for health,” Obama observed, “we eat because it
tastes good, too.” We’re left to wonder whether that’s a dispassionate
statement of fact or an articulation of the problem nutritional reformers face.
If the environmentalist argument against
eating meat doesn’t move you, what about your health? “Consuming lots of meat
is also making people in the United States and other affluent nations
unwell,” New York Times journalist Kendra Pierre-Louis
claimed, citing research published in the Lancet. And your wellness
is not yours alone anymore. Given our increasingly collectivized conception of
health care, your individual choices contribute to the overall risk pool. Your
personal consumption habits are, therefore, a problem for us all.
“We are facing a growing epidemic of
diet-related chronic diseases, and a climate change crisis, both of which are
linked to high meat consumption,” Harvard University’s Nutrition Department
chair Frank Hu insisted. Any “blanket recommendation that adults should
continue their red meat consumption habits is highly irresponsible.”
A scratch at the surface of the facially
compelling scientific arguments against eating meat soon exposes the
philosophical and moral arguments at the movement’s heart.
“We cannot go about our lives as if they
were only ours,” wrote We Are the Weather author Jonathan
Safran Foer, who talked about his personal struggle against meat’s temptations
in almost revelatory terms. “I ate meat a number of times,” he confessed.
Worse, it “brought me comfort.” Foer ached over his misdeed. “How could I argue
for radical change, how could I raise my children as vegetarians, while eating
meat for comfort?” he asked. “Confronting my hypocrisy has reminded me how
difficult it is to even try to live my values.”
“Rational morality tugs at us with the
slenderest of threads, while meat pulls with the thick-twined chords of
culture, tradition, pleasure, the flow of the crowd, and physical yearning,”
the journalist Nathanael Johnson wrote, “and it pulls at us three times a day.”
He noted that the ethicist Paul Thompson recommends popularizing veganism “the
way religious traditions treat virtues.” Echoing Jeremiah Burroughs, Johnson
concedes that “Jesus-level self-sacrifice” might be out of reach to us mere
mortals. But that doesn’t give us license to stop trying.
In 2021, New York Times opinion
writer Frank Bruni sampled a variety of “fermentation-derived proteins made
from microorganisms” marketed by an alternative-meat company. He was apparently
wowed by the reasonable facsimiles on which he dined. Bruni reported “ample
flavor and appeal” in fungus repurposed as meatballs, sausage patties, and
chocolate mousse. “Eating them,” he wrote, “I felt I was doing good without
sacrificing all that much.” The sacrifice of organic protein, he confesses, is
measurable. But it is outweighed by the feeling of “doing good.”
“Consider a steak,” the academics Jan
Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg pondered in the New Republic.
“With the aroma, the texture, and the savory juices coating your tongue, you
will be absorbed. This is what it feels like to eat a perfect steak,” they admit.
Moreover, “it feels good.” And that’s bad.
These researchers forecast a future in
which animal protein is artificially grown in a lab, which will present
consumers with a stark moral choice. “By uncoupling the pleasure of meat from
suffering and death, cellular agriculture will force us to be more precise
about the nature of the pleasures we crave,” they contend. “Consumers need only
opt for cellular meat over conventional meat: a choice between a moral right
and a moral wrong that are otherwise indistinguishable. It is also an answer to
the intransigence and passive cruelty of the everyday meat consumer.”
Thus, meat consumption is revealed to us
as sin. It is an affront to the Eden in which we were conceived. It is a
callous pleasure that makes you into a burden your family and neighbors must
bear. It is a display of wanton cruelty toward animals, especially when there
are alternatives. This is the language of morality.
What’s more, it might all be wildly
overblown. A Virginia Tech study published in early 2021 determined that the
sudden disappearance of all dairy cattle from the United States would reduce
greenhouse gas emissions by a staggeringly small 0.7 percent, all while
dramatically reducing the available supply of essential nutrients for human beings.
Indeed, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that all greenhouse
gases from meat and dairy production account for just 4 percent of domestic
emissions. If every man, woman, and child in America turned vegan tomorrow,
estimates suggest, the United States would produce just 3 percent fewer
emissions than it does at present.
Most global emissions are generated by
burning fossil fuels, not the production and consumption of biomass. While
livestock’s global contribution to greenhouse gas emissions is not negligible,
much of it is produced by livestock cultivators in the developing world. It’s
one thing to berate relatively well-off Westerners for their standard of
living. It’s quite another to lecture a herd owner in the developing world that
his pathway out of subsistence living is killing the planet.
And what of those concerns about your
health? In late 2019, researchers published a study in the Annals of
Internal Medicine evaluating the claim that red-meat consumption
results in elevated risk of heart disease and cancer. Their research examined
61 past studies involving over 4 million participants, and they concluded that
reduced red-meat intake had little effect on your relative health risks, much
less that someone else’s diet will show up in your increased health-insurance
premiums. “The certainty of evidence for these risk reductions was low to very
low,” Bradley Johnston, an epidemiologist at Dalhousie University in Canada,
observed.
Most advocates of a meat-free diet concede
that not everyone will be enticed by the prospect of living on legumes alone.
The more reasonable among them admit that animal protein is a dietary staple
that cannot easily be replaced by vegetable matter. But they have a solution
that they are eager to impose on you: Eat more bugs.
There is nothing objectionable about
adding (well-prepared) insects to the Western diet. Two billion people
regularly consume creepy crawlies, and a minimally adventurous palate should at
least be able to conceptualize appetizing insect cuisine. Yet, proponents of
this sort of thing seem constitutionally incapable of arguing in favor of a
bug-heavy diet that you might actually like. Enjoyment seems to be beside the
point. The point is, always and forever, the satisfaction you will get from the
sense that you are contributing to a perceived social good.
“It is hoped that arguments such as the
high nutritional value of insects and their low environmental impact, low-risk
nature (from a disease standpoint) and palatability may contribute to a shift
in perception,” read a 2014 UN Food and Agriculture Organization report. That
hope springs eternal.
“We should be eating bugs to save the
world,” the entomologist Phil Torres told the Atlantic that
same year. His arguments are familiar: Bug farming uses less land. It produces
far fewer greenhouse gas emissions. Bugs are better for you, though 100 grams
of insects provides about half as much protein as the same amount of chicken,
so you’ll have to eat a ton of bugs. Finally, it’s an exciting change of pace!
Only in passing does Torres contend that they “taste good,” though he qualified
this aside by noting that you may occasionally “get a cricket leg in your
tooth.”
A 2015 report in the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology’s Angles journal made many of these
arguments with a bit more scholarly flair. Eating insects is an “experience,”
and experiences are nice. Westerners are terribly prejudiced against insect
consumption, to their indelible shame. Additives in many of the food products
you eat already contain insect derivatives or are a by-product of insect life
(e.g., honey). And, of course, a bug-based diet is more sustainable than
livestock production and, thus, represents “the last great hope to save the
planet.” Only once was the word “taste” mentioned—and then, only to describe
hexapods as “yummy,” leaving it at that.
The almost fanatical way advocates for bug
consumption discuss the issue ensures that taste is only an afterthought.
A 2016 interview with a roundtable of
academics and experts hosted by PBS NewsHour journalist Lisa
Desjardins is a case in point. The nearly hour-long discussion with professors,
nonprofit directors, and insect-based food producers touched only briefly on
palatability, and Desjardins’s panelists seemed entirely unprepared to discuss
flavor at any length.
“Quickly,” the PBS host asked of Berkeley
Graduate School of Journalism professor Michael Pollan, “what do insects taste
like?” Pollan confessed to having eaten a few crickets before without
elaborating on the subject. He had also once consumed a single ant in a
four-star Mexican restaurant, which was “very lemony.” Beyond that, “I have a
feeling there’s great variety in how insects taste.” Later, Desjardins admitted
that she had once consumed a raw cicada and found “there wasn’t much taste to
it.”
At no point did the experts and
journalists assembled consider the possibility that being unappetizing could be
a bigger obstacle to the widespread adoption of insect consumption than, say,
thoughtless Western bigotries or our addiction to resource consumption. That
happens a lot.
“Apart from the quick energy boost and
healthier lifestyle, eating insects could also provide an economically sensible
and sustainable way of life,” London’s Natural History Museum insists. Also,
you’re “saving the world.”
“An overpopulated world is going to
struggle to find enough protein unless people are willing to open their minds,
and stomachs, to a much broader notion of food,” professor of meat science
Louwrens Hoffman told the BBC’s Science Focus magazine. The
invocation of overpopulation—a theory promulgated in 1968 by Paul Ehrlich,
which has consistently proven inaccurate but has nevertheless justified almost
every eugenicist abuse of the human species that has occurred since the end of
the Second World War—is a clue that what you’re about to hear is not science.
Nevertheless, Professor Hoffman forged
ahead: “There needs to be a better understanding of the difference between
animal feed and human food, and a global reappraisal of what can constitute
healthy, nutritional, and safe food for all.”
If that doesn’t sell you, the BBC averred,
“eating insects could help us save the planet.”
Even your dog should be eating bugs.
“Animal agriculture is one of the biggest contributors to climate change,” Mic
contributor Susan Shain insisted. Already, we’re off the rails. Still, she
persevered: According to a 2017 study by University of California, Los Angeles,
professor of environment and sustainability Gregory S. Okin, America’s 163
million cats and dogs consume an inordinate amount of the world’s meat supply
and are, therefore, responsible for generating 64 million tons of carbon
dioxide annually.
“So, what’s an eco-conscious pet owner to
do?” Shain asks. Well, PETA recommends feeding these carnivorous animals a
vegan diet. While that would be eco-friendly, it has the unfortunate side
effect of slowly torturing your pet until it dies an excruciating death. If
that sounds unappealing, you can give your pet bug-based foods. It’s markedly
more expensive than the animal by-products that traditionally go into pet-food
production, and your dog or cat is unlikely to derive the same satisfaction
from cricket protein. But it is “nutritious and bioavailable.”
Most of all, “feeding your dog bugs” helps
“save the planet.”
“I think it started as chicken little,
thinking the sky is falling, if we don’t all go vegetarian tomorrow, the world
will end,” the culinary expert, chef, and television personality Andrew Zimmern
told me. “The more reasoned approach with a more, I think, credible argument is
for changing what is available to eat and why.”
Zimmern is far from hostile to the
arguments in favor of reducing the volume of energy-intensive foods on the
market that might also be unhealthy in excessive quantities, such as meats and
sugars. What’s more, he sees a role that governments can play in promoting
healthier lifestyles. But Zimmern cautions against the dangers of “the
community collective,” the “movement from progressive to utopian” conceptions
about the optimal relationship between individuals, their governments, and the
food they consume to survive.
The conspicuous removal of taste from the
equation reveals the social-desirability biases informing the entomophagy
movement. If feeling like you’re “saving the world” was the only benefit you
derived from eating a medium-rare filet mignon steak basted in butter and
thyme, you’d see fewer filets on Western menus.
For the New Puritans, a smug sense of
self-satisfaction is the most delicious dish of all.
***
Part of what makes dining an enjoyable
experience are the educational opportunities afforded the adventurous eater. An
ideologue might call the learning experiences savored by those with expansive
palates “the work,” but steeping yourself in the cultural, geographic, and
historical heritage that contributes to unique cuisines is no burden.
There is joy in partaking of authentic,
unadulterated, native cuisines. There is joy in the consumption of amalgamated
plates that combine the best of many worlds—what is still sometimes called
“fusion cuisine.”
There is joy in the artistry of a genius
Michelin-awarded chef whose gastronomic mastery cannot be easily classified,
just as there is joy in the simple but fulfilling fare produced by street
vendors.
Cooking is an art, and the enjoyment you
find in it is subjective. The only wrong way to judge a plate is to believe
your assessment of it is objective and that all other interpretations are the
flawed product of an uncultivated mind.
Somewhere along the way, the New Puritan
has become obsessed with, well, purity. A certain class of activist treats
creativity, composition, and synthesis in cuisine as if they’re an act of
sabotage. Today, within certain circles, the distinction between cultural
fusion and “cultural appropriation” has blurred beyond the point of
recognition.
Food magazines such as Epicurious and Bon
Appétit—the latter a publication whose commitment to woke progressivism is
so total that it has taken to calling the cuisine native to the Philippines
“Filipinx” and confessed that its failure to condemn American sanctions against
the Islamic Republic of Iran somehow “inadvertently delegitimized Iranian
saffron”—recently committed themselves to “archive repair.” It’s as Orwellian
as it sounds. These publications are rewriting their own histories.
“The language that we use to talk about
food has evolved so much from, sure, the 1960s but also the 1990s, and I think
it is our duty as journalists, as people who work in food media, to make sure
that we are reflecting that appropriately,” said Bon Appétit executive
editor, Sonia Chopra.
That mission is a work in progress, and
progress cannot come soon enough for the activist class. In late 2020, one
Twitter user stumbled across a recipe for the traditional Jewish cookie
hamantaschen in an unadulterated section of Bon Appétit’s archives.
The offense becomes clear from the headline: “How to Make Hamantaschen Actually
Good.”
The recipe violated traditional kosher
dietary guidelines, which prohibit, for example, mixing dairy and meat products
such as eggs and butter. The magazine’s editors scrubbed it and apologized for
their cultural insensitivities. But being “good” isn’t something to which
Jewish bakers are wholly allergic.
“One hundred years ago, the crunchiness
and lack of taste was a source of pride for some Jews,” the Takeout’s
Aimee Levitt observed. “Nowadays, kosher bakers, armed with regulated
ingredients and ovens that hold temperature, have written reliable recipes.
(Others of us who don’t keep kosher just throw our hands up and say, the hell
with it, I’m using butter. Or cream cheese.)”
Being “good” isn’t everything, but neither
is it something to be ashamed of. And the existence of alternative preparations
for a particular culture’s favorites does not detract from that culture. It
adds to it by expanding the number of people who wouldn’t otherwise have been
exposed to those dishes. Culture is not a zero-sum game.
“Authenticity” has, however, become an
inviolable standard among anti-appropriation activists, to the detriment of
talented chefs and those who would delight in their work.
Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay’s London
restaurant, Lucky Cat, was savaged for marketing itself as an “authentic Asian
Eating House,” even though its head chef was not, in fact, Asian. Cleverly,
Ramsay put his critics on the defensive by noting that his restaurants “do not
discriminate based on gender, race, or beliefs and we don’t expect anyone else
to,” no matter how much anti-appropriation activists would appreciate it.
It’s probably no surprise that something
as quintessentially American as apple pie is also tarnished in the New
Puritan’s imagination. The Guardian’s Raj Patel informs us that
this comforting dessert is a moral atrocity. The recipe is “a variant on an
English pumpkin pie recipe,” thereby rendering the dessert both appropriative
and sullied by the legacy of English colonialism. It is a symbol of
“domesticity,” harkening back to America’s maltreatment of women with every
tasty bite. It is a ruthless emblem of capitalist exploitation: Sugarcane is a
by-product of the exploitation of black Caribbean laborers, and apples owe
their origins to the Spanish colonists who brought this Central Asian fruit to
North America in their quest to pilfer the continent’s bounty. Every morsel is
a sinful reminder of your place on the wrong side of the struggle for “food
justice.”
Yogurt, too, is off-limits. “Using a
transnational and comparative cultural studies approach, this essay
investigates how yogurt, perceived as a strange and foreign food in the early
to mid-twentieth-century United States, became localized through intersectional
processes of feminization and de-exoticization,” reads what I promise you is
the very real abstract of a 2016 study published in the academic journal Gastronomica.
The author, University of Notre Dame professor Perin Gürel, alleges that
yogurt’s “connections to the Middle East” have led to Orientalist abuses of the
product in the West.
Cultural appropriation in food is
everywhere. Nutrition blogger Shana McCann noted that it can be found in
“restaurants with a white [person as] front of house” or in “Asian-inspired”
menu items. It is apparent when white bloggers post their “healthy soul food
recipes,” or in what critics of a particular ethnic background decide to label
“refined” or “elevated” and what they don’t. In general, it is a theory that
substitutes context, taste, and personal experience with race essentialism.
Not all scandalous episodes of alleged
appropriation in the food world result in career-ending controversies. Most
attacks like those above are intended as brushback pitches. It’s a power play
reserved almost exclusively for the successful.
Despite his Caucasian upbringing in
Oklahoma, New York City–based chef Rick Bayless became one of America’s most famous
preparers of and experts on Mexican food. The successful restaurateur was even
tapped by President Barack Obama in 2010 to cater a state dinner for Mexican
president Felipe Calderón. His background has also landed him in hot water.
“Just Google ‘Rick Bayless’ and ‘appropriation’ and you’ll get plenty to feast
on,” NPR advised its readers. “Trust us.”
“I know that there have been a number of
people out there that criticized me only—only—because of my race,” Bayless said
in his defense. “Because I’m white, I can’t do anything with Mexican food. But
we have to stop and say, ‘Oh wait, is that plain racism then?’” For some
self-appointed culture police, the very act of defending himself from
accusations of racial bigotry was itself evidence of bigotry. For others, it
was simply “whiny.”
At least Bayless has had the strength and
support structure to persevere through it all. Andy Ricker did not.
Ricker was an award-winning chef and
bestselling cookbook author by the time he founded the popular Thai restaurant
chain Pok Pok. He studied Thai cuisine for 13 years, lived and worked in
Southeast Asia for much of his adult life, and had become a recognized expert
in his field. But Ricker is also white. For some, that’s what mattered most.
In 2020, Ricker’s restaurant group shut
its doors permanently. In a statement, he blamed the pressures of the pandemic
for the decision, but not entirely. “The ability to focus on the raison d’être
of Pok became more and more impossible,” he said. “And it became more and more
about logistics and putting out fires, less and less about hospitality and
vision.” In an interview with Mel magazine, Ricker confessed
that he would be taking his talents back to Thailand if only to escape the
exhaustion of culinary politics in the United States.
“I knew before I opened the restaurant
back in 2005 that what I was doing was potentially blasphemous,” he confessed.
“The best route for this would be to make the food as I learned it, try to do
the best job I could, present it as it should be, and not take any credit for
the recipe in any way. Or say I’ve discovered this shit.” And just as he
predicted, the mob did come for him.
“Some of the people who are really, really
vocal with [criticism], you know, I’ve been alive and cooking this food since
before they were born,” Ricker said with disdain. He, too, is sympathetic
toward the ideals of a movement that so drained him of enthusiasm for his
life’s work. But his ordeal appears to have shaken some of that conviction.
***
Ultimately, the logic of this ideological
approach to reforming how Americans produce and consume food gives way to an
unavoidable conclusion: Progress is the problem.
The Guardian’s Damian
Carrington summarized the matter succinctly: “The global food system is the
biggest driver of destruction of the natural world,” he wrote. A “vicious
cycle” of “cheap food,” which creates more competition, generates incentives to
export food around the world and contributes to environmental degradation.
A February 2021 New York Times profile
of “activists working to remake the food system” echoed some of these
sentiments. “In the blunt equation of capitalist production,” Times contributor
Ligaya Mishan wrote, we “treat food as a commodity rather than a necessity,”
which “is to accept that there will always be people who can’t afford it and
must go hungry.” That would be a moral atrocity if it were true. Fortunately,
it is not.
Following the global triumph of capitalism
as a theory of human social organization after the collapse of the Soviet Union
in 1991 (hidebound holdouts in Cuba and North Korea notwithstanding),
undernourishment declined worldwide from 19 to 11 percent, according to the
World Bank. That happy condition coincided with the emergence of roughly 1
billion people from the depths of extreme poverty (defined as surviving on less
than $1.25 per day) over approximately the same time frame. This is
attributable to the establishment in 1991 of the first real global marketplace
since it collapsed in 1914 with the onset of World War I.
The capitalist enterprise has contributed
to the development of heartier, disease-resistant produce and cereal grains
benefiting almost every region of the globe. In the United States, production
of cereal grains, soybeans, corn, and other aggregate crops has steadily
increased while the price has declined.
That trend—increased yields and reduced
costs—is apparent all over the world. The exception to this rule is sub-Saharan
Africa, where, as National Geographic reported in 2020, the
“use of [genetically modified] crops is less common.”
“Since attitudes toward GM crops tend to
correlate with education levels and access to information about the technology,
there is a concern that sub-Saharan African farmers may be hesitant to adopt GM
crops,” the report continued. Not coincidentally, progress toward a hunger-free
planet has not reached this region, where crop yields have failed to keep pace
with the rest of the world, and child malnutrition remains persistently high.
Global inequalities are less a concern for
the activists profiled in the Times than their chief focus:
the “late-empire hedonism” apparent in Americans’ love of food.
“It’s no coincidence that as Americans
have grown ever more estranged from the sources of their food and the largely
unseen labor required to produce it, food itself has become a national
obsession,” the Times profile continued, “from televised
cooking shows and the deification of chefs to Instagram #foodporn.” Mishan
laments how the modern “food movement” has rallied the public toward
progressive activism with appeals to a “vaguely feel-good mantra” rather than
calls to arms. But some activists are trying to fix that through, of all
things, the selective application of racial discrimination.
For example, “a food stall where white
customers are charged $30 for a plate of food that costs Black customers only
$12, to reflect the disparity in median income between white and Black
households in New Orleans, or a church hall where the gentrification-themed
dinner menu lists a half chicken for $50,000—again for white diners only, with
Black diners eating for free.”
The activists’ goal, Mishan notes, is to
promote a broader understanding of racial disparities in various underexamined
areas of American society. That’s a laudable objective, but it is being pursued
in the most unproductive way imaginable. This sort of activism’s practical (and
likely desired) effect is to remove the possibility that you might forget even
briefly the torment of existence.
As it happens, there is a broad
marketplace for that kind of torture. For all progressive activists’ hostility
toward capitalism’s animal spirits, they’re not above exploiting that economic
opportunity. Enter the organization Race 2 Dinner.
“Our mission is simple,” the organization
asserts, “reveal the naked truth about RACISM in America and UNLEASH YOUR POWER
as white women to dismantle it.” How does this group propose to do that?
Simple: by convincing wealthy white patrons to fork over upwards of $2,500 for
the privilege of being lectured over dinner about their unconscious racism.
“If you did this in a conference room,
they’d leave,” Race 2 Dinner co-founder Saira Rao told the Guardian.
“But wealthy white women have been taught never to leave the dinner table.”
Presumably, Rao’s casual ethnic stereotyping is the enlightened sort.
As the Guardian notes,
the patrons for this sort of thing are unlikely to be those who would most
benefit from the experience. They are mostly “well-read and well-meaning”
Democratic-voting women, some of whom have spouses of a different race or even
adopted black children. Nevertheless, most don’t need much prompting to
“confess” their racial biases, acknowledge “wrongdoing,” and be “willing to
change.”
“Before attending a dinner or seminar,
there is required reading,” NBC’s Today observed. The ice is
usually broken by the conversation leaders, who bring up “a familiar topic,”
only to subject it to critical race theory–flavored dismemberment until it
gives up its racist past. Take yoga, for instance.
“[The dinner] starts off, Saira says
something about yoga and how yoga is cultural appropriation and yoga owners
here in the U.S. do not hire black and brown Indian women to teach,” Regina
Jackson, the organization’s other co-founder, recalled of one especially
productive soiree. In this way, the dinner party’s attendees are guided toward
a recognition of how they are “complicit in a system that hurts Black and brown
people.” Bon appétit!
The spirit of Jeremiah Burroughs is alive
and well in the activism we see on display among the puritanical left. Only by
understanding your own flawed and sinful nature can you learn to appreciate a
gratuitous level of self-denial. The pleasures and comforts of eating good food
around a table surrounded by friends might be gratifying, but not nearly as
much as the spiritual rapture found in ruining that experience.
What do progressive activists get out of
all this? Of course, the personal satisfaction derived from the practice of
self-discipline, but also the sense that they’re contributing not just to their
own salvation but to the redemption of the entire world.
This article was adapted from Noah
Rothman’s new book, The
Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives’ War on Fun (Broadside
Books).
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