Hard to swallow

There aren’t too many things to prompt envy of the modern left, but an astonishing capacity for needle-focused concentration must surely be one of them. Take Christmas dinner, for example. To normal folk it is a big meal or, if pressed at the table by a socially aware nephew, it might be imagined of necessity as the sustaining symbol of many cultures getting along quite deliciously.

Spuds and tomatoes from the Americas, sweet potatoes once little tasted beyond meals of “yams and clams and human hands and vintage coconut wine“, turkeys from Mexico (not Turkey, as some believe), pasta from China via Italy. As it is the season of goodwill, you might further humour the family leftist by noting how appropriate it is for the vast repast of multicultural goodness to be overseen by a festive salt shaker (above) that looks for all the world like Race Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane.

At Fairfax Media’s Daily Life site, other than the coven of frightful women who write for it, nothing is ever so simple.  The straightforward business of swallowing something tasty must be seen as an exploration of class, race and gender. What else but that could it be?

The headline, “Foods We’ve Discovered Thanks to White People” doesn’t refer to black pudding and bratwurst, souffles or Brillat-Savarin but to menu items snatched with the imperialist ladle from other cultures. “If a dish hasn’t been eaten or re-imagined by a white person, does it really exist?” the item wonders.

…adding to this is the complicated emotional relationship shared by immigrants and food – since ethnic dishes, however beloved, often become a reminder of visible difference.  By contrast, when Ho’s white friends seek out ‘exotic’ foods, they are merely seen as being adventurous.

It’s all there, the left’s perpetual resentment, its masochist’s disdain for joy when pain is possible, the sullen pleasure in yet one more of its never ending victimhoods . We all have our interests and passions, true, but only a fanatic’s furrowed-brow determination could conjure the charge that the West’s pale palate is an instrument of oppression.

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