Wokeness Is a Dish Best Never Served

THE Hollywood Oscars went woke not too long ago, and now, so have the so-called Oscars of the Food World — the James Beard Foundation’s annual restaurant and chef awards. Identity-politics lunacy now rules the venerable organization once devoted to celebrating the great American bounty. The JBF stunned foodies last week when it announced it wouldn’t announce its award winners for 2020, supposedly due to the disruptive impact of the pandemic. But New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells this week uncovered the main reason: Although some black chefs were nominated, there was none among the 23 unidentified winners.

Never mind that Beard winners are chosen in polls conducted among thousands of food specialists all over the nation.

The JBF won’t name any winners in 2021, either, to allow the foundation to conduct “a comprehensive internal and external review to address any bias” and to “align the awards” with “equity and diversity,” according to a news release.

The joys of food and cooking no longer matter much in establishment perceptions of the culinary arts. Good luck trying to learn how to tell one tomato from another. The discourse increasingly resembles a college curriculum built on “intersectionality” and the evils of American capitalism.

It’s worse: The JBF will tap an “outside social-justice agency” to help it eliminate “systemic bias.”

The JBF went into a tailspin after it named Clare Reichenbach as its new chief executive in 2018. British-born purportedly showed him wearing “brownface” at Puerto Ricanthemed costume party. He denied he had altered his face color, but a staff mutiny sealed his fate.

The mob next struck the mag’s popular test-kitchen video site over a pattern of “cultural insensitivity” that allegedly included underpaying nonwhite contributors. Heads rolled. Bon Appetit’s new digital restaurant editor writes that it isn’t enough to talk about “the intersectionality of food, politics, race, class and gender” only when