Topics to Lose Your Lunch Over
Food has become the latest battleground of today’s hyper-partisan atmosphere, and the Disgusting Food Museum in Malmo, Sweden, is trying to bridge the divide.
The pop-up exhibition is offering a buffet of questionable flavors in an effort to challenge the notion of what is appetizing. It includes 80 items from 35 countries, including fruit bat soup from Guam, a maggot-infested cheese from Sardinia, sauerkraut juice and Chinese mouse wine.
Samuel West, the museum’s curator, said the exhibition was partly inspired by his concern about the ecological impact of eating meat. “We can’t continue the way we are now,” he told The Times. “I was asking myself why don’t we eat insects when they are so cheap and sustainable to produce? The obstacle is disgust.”
William Sitwell, the editor of Waitrose Food, a magazine run by the British grocery chain Waitrose & Partners, probably isn’t in favor of a future where chicken is replaced by crickets.
In response to a reporter’s idea for a series on vegans in Britain, Mr. Sitwell responded: “How about a series on killing vegans one by one. Ways to trap them? How to interrogate them properly? Expose their hypocrisy? Force-feed them meat? Make them eat steak and drink red wine?”
The email appeared online and was met with scorn. Mr. Sitwell quickly resigned.
“Just the fact that the Brits have made vegan fish and chips show that veganism is being accepted by the mainstream,” said Dan Butler, who traveled across London to visit Sutton and Sons, the city’s first “vegan fish” and chips shop, which opened in October. “There has been a shift in attitudes.”
Politics were at the center of a different food fight in New York, where The Tom Cat Bakery is facing scrutiny from activists after cooperating with an immigration investigation in 2017 that led to 21 employees being fired or charged with crimes.
The pretzel bun produced at Tom Cat became the “Trump presidency of high-volume bread-making,” The Times’s Ginia Bellafante wrote.
There were protests at the bakery and at restaurants that served the bun, and several switched suppliers. But Matt Hyland, who owns four Emily restaurants with his wife, told The Times the protests had actually hardened their resolve to stand by Tom Cat.
“We were willing to make our signature item different for their cause,” Mr. Hyland said, referring to his restaurants’ burger and the protesters’ concerns. “But they went over the line, and I have no sympathy for them anymore.”
Nowhere is the polarization over food more pronounced than the farright corners of the internet. White nationalists are posting videos of themselves drinking milk to draw attention to their ability to digest lactose, a trait more common in white people than others.
It’s part of a growing trend where genetic research is being distorted on far-right forums. “You have to make a judgment when you have powerful information that can be misused,” David Reich, a Harvard geneticist, told The Times.
Its prevalence has led John Novembre, a University of Chicago evolutionary biologist, to end his seminars with slides that illustrate how the field is being misrepresented.
In one, a social media account called “Enter The Milk Zone,” urges individuals of African ancestry to leave America. “If you can’t drink milk,” it says, “you have to go back.”
“Studying human genetic diversity is easier in a society where diversity is clearly valued and celebrated,” Mr. Novembre told The Times. “Right now, that is very much on my mind.”