When political correctness meets food... and wins

I'm very glad I don't have to put up with this crap when selecting a restaurant.  The New York Post reports:

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.

. . .

Eater.com recently posted a “socially conscious shopper’s guide” to coffee and tea and noted, “Our daily cup owes everything to our colonial, slave-built economy.”

San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Soleil Ho banned from her vocabulary any number of innocuous words that might be taken as “microaggressions” — for example, “addictive” for anything delicious, because it might somehow offend minorities for who knows why.

The most unforgivable sin is “cultural appropriation.” If you’re a non-Guatemalan who dares to cook Guatemalan, you’re dead meat.

Last year, the well-meaning, non-Chinese owner of a small Chinese cafe downtown saw her career ruined by the woke mob. Eater.com accused her of “racist positioning” over the wording of an ad about lo mein. The Twitter mob piled on. Her apologies weren’t enough to save the restaurant.

The editor of Conde Nast title Bon Appetit was forced out this year over a 16-year-old photo that purportedly showed him wearing “brownface” at Puerto Rican-themed 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 it’s “convenient.” Intersectionality must be made a primary theme.

The great chef Thomas Keller was excommunicated for calling it an “honor” to be named to the White House’s Economic Council for Restaurants, formed to support the coronavirus-ravaged industry. There was much chortling when the pandemic forced him to close his Hudson Yards restaurant TAK Room. While Eater.com critic Ryan Sutton was careful not to cheer its demise, which caused “scores of hardworking people . . . losing their livelihoods,” he wrote that it “shouldn’t have opened in the first place.”

Chefs who are in vogue tend to be political and racial provocateurs. New Orleans-based Tunde Wey, whose stunts have included charging white customers twice as much as nonwhites, recently posted an Instagram essay in which he rooted for the death of the whole restaurant industry for its “racist” practices.

There's more at the link.

What a load of culinary codswallop!  The only important thing about a chef, a restaurant or a cuisine is that he/she/it produce food worth the eating.  Tastes differ, but quality always shows.  I don't give a damn about the chef's personal politics, or where he/she stands on issues of the day, just so long as I find their food appetizing and interesting.  That's what I'm paying for, after all!

For the benefit of the terminally politically-correct and race-conscious, let me close by admitting that I generally prefer brown gravy to white gravy.  Nevertheless, I'm an equal opportunity masticator.  I chew on them, digest them, and dispose of their remains without discrimination.  Does that make me a saucy SJW?




Peter