A Taste of ‘Wokeness’
PC scolds invade America’s culinary landscape
ATTENTION all of you who enjoy eating, cooking or writing about food: The “woke” mob is watching your every bite and every word. This week, the Milk Bar dessert chain caved to a handful of complaints over their Crack Pie — a sweet, oat-crusted confection that’s been their most popular item for 11 years.
Why? “Crack” is a word forbidden to use outside of its literal meaning lest it offend “largely poor, largely black communities” that suffered from the crack-cocaine epidemic and violence of the 1980s.
None of Milk Bar’s 16 outlets in six American and Canadian cities is known to have been picketed, boycotted or otherwise condemned by members of poor and/ or black communities.
The purported fury emanated from a very, very few food critics who evidently believe that the oppressed class needs protection from supposedly racist restaurateurs — notably The Boston Globe’s Devra First, who wrote a piece headlined “There’s nothing cute about Crack Pie.”
Even so, chef/owner Christina Tosi announced that the Crack Pie would henceforth be known as the Milk Bar Pie. She explained, “The old name was getting in the way of letting the gooey, buttery slice bring happiness.”
Her capitulation followed that of Arielle Haspel, owner of a small Chinese eatery called Lucky Lee’s on University Place. She last
week issued a craven apology for “insensitivity.” Her transgression, in the eyes of a mere few Twitter posters who were elevated into pitchfork-waving street mobs by “woke” food sites, was to post online that her lo mein would be more “clean” (a common foodworld term for “healthier”) than traditional American-Chinese lo mein noodles that made some people feel “bloated and icky.”
Since most anyone who’s ever eaten starchy lo mein knows exactly what Haspel was talking about, what, exactly, was her crime? Well, she’s a non-Asian who is “literally and blatantly attacking someone’s culture,” according to a tweet from a Tampa, Fla.-based food blogger who called me a “racist” for defending Haspel. Alas, Haspel — reasonably fearful of damage to her new business — apologized. “We are so sorry,” she said, and took down the “offensive” language.
What harmless terms will fall to the posse next? How about club sandwich? It may, after all, conjure unpleasant emotions in blacks, Jews, women and others who were once barred from private clubs.
But the characterization of certain language as racist is blatantly selective. While it’s a cultural “assault” to factually state that much traditional Chinese-American cooking is fatty, it’s all in a day’s work for respected food organs and writers to falsely associate innocent Italian-American “red sauce” restaurants, and their owners and employees and customers, with mobsters and violence.
They routinely cite “Tony Soprano food” and the voodoo magic of Italian-American cuisine’s “immigrant mysticism.” A 2016 Eater.com guide to Little Italy said that at one place, it was fun to “sit down here hoping not to get whacked.” New York Magazine cheerfully advised that dishes at Carbone “could feed an entire crew of Gambinos.”
The push to make food coverage a “safe space” for certain other ethnicities reaches ludicrous depths in the work of San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Soleil Ho. She says she’ll never use “addictive” to describe a food’s deliciousness. Nor “kaffir lime” for the southeast Asian citrus fruit because it sounds like a derogatory term used in the past by apartheid-era white South Africans for blacks.
Never mind that words may have different meanings on different continents. The lime’s name is most likely derived from a Sri Lankan ethnic group known as Kaffirs who use the term proudly.
But Ho won’t use the word “ethnic,” either, because its “imprecision” gives her a headache. She and her fellow travelers in culinary correctness give the rest of us indigestion.