This really takes the cheese
AS a journalist, I have been called a lot of things, but never a racist. At least not up until now. But it is hard today to be politically correct and ignore the silliness surrounding the renaming of iconic Aussie brand Coon Cheese.
I am sure even discussing the issue in this age of irrationality will throw petrol on the social media bonfire of vanities.
Good.
The owner of the popular Coon Cheese brand, the Canadian conglomerate Saputo, has decided to drop the label “Coon” to help “eliminate racism”.
A social media campaign was insisting the product name was a racial slur offensive to indigenous Australians.
The Coon brand was in fact named after its developer, American cheesemaker Edward Coon. Almost 100 years ago, he patented a faster ripening process, enabling cheese to be made more quickly and more cheaply.
The racial insult is much older and is a contraction of raccoon. The raccoon is a possum-like North American native, grey in colour with a ringed tail and a black eye mask. The raccoon is noted for its intelligence. Just how the word became a racial slur is debatable, though it was in use by the mid-1700s in America, regardless of race, to refer to a sly and agile person.
All that detail is just to elaborate the almost satirical silliness plus the sheer waste of time and energy behind a camnouncing: paign to change the name of a product that has nothing to do with racial prejudice and only the most coincidental and archaic linguistic connection.
For brevity, I need only quote Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “For there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”
I suppose none of this matters much in the long-term history of the universe, but surely there must be, in the here and now, so many more important wrongs to redress.
The campaign for change was driven by an Aboriginal activist, Stephen Hagan, who has spent 20 years lobbying against the Coon name. In 1999, he unsuccessfully took his complaint to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission.
This week, finally in victory, Dr Hagan conceded his cause might not have gained universal support.
“I know some people don’t understand why I’m making a big fuss about this word, but they probably also have no idea what it’s like to be called that as a person of colour,” he said.
Dr Hagan makes a fair enough personal point here, with which we can all sympathise. But hasn’t he used a sledgehammer to crack a macadamia? He might indeed have alienated many more hearts than he has won.
It is not at all clear what such a small pedantic victory will do for Aboriginal Australia. How will it address the vast and systemic inequality, the alcohol and substance abuse, imprisonment, illhealth and shortened life spans, family violence and the nation’s highest rate of sexual abuse of children, all of which characterises the lives of indigenous Australians in northern communities, where incidentally a block of Coon (or any other cheese) costs almost double the price in cities to the south?
There is a little-known but tightly run rip-off in grocery outlets across remote Aboriginal communities resulting in indigenous people paying much more for food than most Australians.
Even in this year of Black Lives Matter, we have done so little to abolish any of that long list of cruelties.
This week, can we seriously congratulate ourselves that we have finally changed the name of that block of outrageously priced cheese?
Dr Hagan’s personal motivations are understandable.
More perplexing is how so many disinterested people will eagerly search for outrage in the wrong places and, readily finding it, will righteously beat it to death.
“What’s in a name?” That’s the question now exercising the minds of the cheesemakers at Saputo. The company’s big cheese is its chief executive, Lino Saputo, who probably knows nothing of the outrageous over-pricing of his products in the Australian Outback.
After a century of Coon, this week Lino finally tasted the hard cheddar of defeat, an“After thorough consideration, Saputo has decided to retire the Coon brand name.”
The company is now working to develop a new name that Mr Saputo optimistically hopes will “honour the brand affinity felt by our valued consumers while aligning with current attitudes and perspectives”.
Good luck with that, Lino. Watch out for the vegans and the animal rights folk. Not to forget the food fascists.
Cheese is, of course, a source of artery-clogging fat.
A quick and scary squiz in the medical department of Google warns that cheese is a high-calorie product deliberately loaded with all our favourites: mountains of fat, sodium and cholesterol.
Maybe social media should agitate NOT to be allowed to eat it.
“Ban the Cheese” is surely a slightly more rational and compelling argument than changing its name.
Heart disease kills 17,000 Australians every year. That is more than 40 deaths every day.
It turns out that those cheesemakers might be so much worse than unconscious racists. They could be mass murderers.
Paradoxically, then, it is fortunate that whatever we call the contentious product, indigenous people in remote Australia cannot afford cheese.
Surely, they have enough problems already and no one’s doing anything practical to help.
DR HAGAN’S PERSONAL MOTIVATIONS ARE UNDERSTANDABLE. MORE PERPLEXING IS HOW SO MANY DISINTERESTED PEOPLE WILL EAGERLY SEARCH FOR OUTRAGE IN THE WRONG PLACES AND, READILY FINDING IT, WILL RIGHTEOUSLY BEAT IT TO DEATH.