Polly Vernon
THE DUST may have settled on that William Sitwell Waitrose magazine
vegan-journalist-bad-murder-joke email fandango ( know not of what I speak? Google it); but it’s only a matter of time before a new food-related bust-up stirs Twitter’s loins and culminates in the termination of another journalist’s cushty gig ( possibly mine). For these are the times in which we live, my loves: feud-hungry – and food-fixated.
The feud-hunger is grotesque. This desire to whip up internet rows, to pour sticky, viscous shame on those involved… It does not reflect well on our humanity. As for the food obsession, this new compulsion to define ourselves according to the nutritional philosophies we embrace, the foodstuffs we refuse to eat; as for our rapidly evolving tendency to pick our tribes and allegiances, draw our battle lines and ID as victims according to our specific dietary requirements? That’s just weird. I wouldn’t want to pin it all on vegans, mind you (more specifically, the VVS – Vocal Vegans – those who go on and on about their veganism, quite as if veganism takes up so much time and energy, it leaves little room to contemplate anything else). We nonvegans are responsible, too. Those times we tell strangers how fabbo we feel now we’ve given up sugar, for example. Or make a big fat deal of how windy we are, cos we accidentally ate a pulse on Thursday. When I spontaneously explain to people, who didn’t ask and don’t care, how I sort of think I’m gluten intolerant? Because sometimes, after I eat bread, I feel bloatysleepy and have to have a lie-down? And, also? My sister is full-blown coeliac, and some blog I skim-read the headline on suggested it can run in families. I mean, obvs I’m not going to get tested for it, because they stick a camera up your bum (I think), then do a biopsy on your gut ( probably), which would be horrendous; and what if it transpired I am, in fact, perfectly, boringly, gluten tolerant? It’s much more fun to just guess, then tell people, ‘Hey! I live gluten-free!’ ideally during the early stages of the dinner party they’re throwing, so I can make them feel simultaneously guilty and resentful. And the joy of bonding with other self-diagnosed gluten-dodgers over how we suffer when fed wheat! A kind of suffering that means we’re basically entitled to consider ourselves ‘a community’, which also means we’re entitled to look down on, oh, I dunno, the dairy-freers, say, for no reason other than: they’re them, and we’re us…
In conclusion: we seem to have disappeared right up our own arses where food is concerned.