I Munch ado about nothing
Extremists are trying to convince us that every food we eat is evil
T’S time for lunch. Whose side are you on?
If you’re at the giant new Chick-fil-A at 144 Fulton St., you’re in league with fundamentalist, gay-hating Christians on a secret mission to convert you to their rotten faith.
Welcome to the demented world of Food Politics.
When globetrotting TVstar/ author Anthony Bourdain proclaimed at a New York Times forum last year, “There is nothing on this planet that is more political than food,” he wasn’t entirely wrong.
“No Reservations” host Bourdain celebrates world cuisine while illuminating the often ugly realities of its production and consumption. “Why are we eating the things that we eat?” he asked at the October symposium. “What got us to this point where we are eating a lot of pickles or dried and preserved food? What does this tell us about, you know, ourselves?”
But in proclaiming his socially aware, “woke” bona fides, the chef egged on a hysterical radical claque who believes that almost anything we eat, think or say about food puts us on board with colonial oppressors.
Once PC culinary sages merely condemned what Americans ate as factory farm-driven, profit-mad and highly caloric. Twinkies and highfructose corn syrup would kill us all, unless we gave up steaks and fries for low-fat, plant-based regimens.
But in the last year, the agenda’s lurched far, far leftward. Kit Kat bars are making people fat in South America, part of a “marketing juggernaut that is upending traditional diets from Brazil to Ghana to India,” The New York Times moaned on its front page as far back as Sept. 16.
At the new downtown Chick-fil-A, you’re buying into “creepy infiltration” of the chain’s “pervasive Christian traditionalism,” gay-hating views of its founders and the sinister undertones of cow portraits hanging on the walls, which “glorify God,” according to Dan Piepenbring in the April 13 issue of The New Yorker. (He doesn’t mention that Chick-fil-A’s NYClandlord is a Syrian-Jewish family who seemingly wasn’t offended when they leased the site to the Jesus freaks.)
The New Yorker has cornered the market on extreme “food politics.” A feature in the current issue about a South Carolina eatery founded by a deceased white supremacist wants us to know that barbecue “is America’s most political food,” when most of us thought it was merely the greasiest.
The favorite target of political foodies is of course Donald Trump, whose tacky taste is regarded as disqualifying him from his role as Leader of the Free World. According to Suzy Swartz in the April 18 edition of The Atlantic, Trump’s craving for McDonald’s and pizza demonstrate a “willful rejection of facts about food and nutrition.”
Burgers, fries and milkshakes stand for “a flimsy myth of a time when things were more wholesome than they are now — when the American project was perfectly executed and when your body was impenetrable to the effects of greasy, fatty food.”
Trump’s taste in food also came in for a beating from Helen Rosner on Eater.com on Feb. 28, 2017 (appropriately, she’s since joined the The New Yorker), attacking the president’s love of well-done steak. “A person who won’t eat his steak any doneness but well is a person who won’t entertain the notion that there could be a better way . . . Aperson who refuses to try something better is a person whowill never make things good,” Rosner wrote.
Every radical cause invariably turns back on those who embraced it. In Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown” show on Lagos, Nigeria, last year, many viewers likely found a loving take on one of the world’s most chaotic and violent cities, where Bourdain extolled “perhaps the hardest-working, most enterprising, most optimistic population I’ve ever encountered.”
That didn’t do it for Nigerian-born, New Orleans-based chef/author Tunde Wey. In the San Francisco Chronicle last month, Wey dismissed Bourdain as “America’s patron saint of obscure cuisines” who guides viewers “a step past their discomfort into a scarier world.” (Ahem, isn’t that what an American TV food host is supposed to do?) In Lagos, where Bourdain seeks out the city’s fabled spicy pepper soup and other delicacies, Wey described him as “striding through a tumble of black bodies with the selfawareness of Moses at the parted Red Sea. His usual brand of charm, which plays well in an American context, only read as imperial.”
It turns out when you make food about politics, it bites back.