'Celebrating Queer Food'
The Parboil Is Political: Woke Totalitarianism Comes For the School Cafeteria
From Live Not By Lies:
One of contemporary progressivism’s commonly used phrases—the personal is political—captures the totalitarian spirit, which seeks to infuse all aspects of life with political consciousness. Indeed, the Left pushes its ideology ever deeper into the personal realm, leaving fewer and fewer areas of daily life uncontested. This, warned
Arendt, is a sign that a society is ripening for totalitarianism, because that is what totalitarianism essentially is: the politicization of everything.
Infusing every aspect of life with ideology was a standard aspect of Soviet totalitarianism. Early in the Stalin era, N. V. Krylenko, a Soviet commissar (political officer), steamrolled over chess players who wanted to keep politics out of the game.
“We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess,” he said. “We must condemn once and for all the formula ‘chess for the sake of chess,’ like the formula ‘art for art’s sake.’ We must organize shockbrigades of chess-players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess.”
At the student chow hall at the University of the Pacific, Woke Totalitarianism has finished once and for all with the neutrality of cafeteria food. Behold:
Let’s click on the link, shall we? What is “queer food”? Carrots, cucumbers, and parsnips that have been on the down low, where they don’t belong? Nope:
Queer food is about challenging the structures of “normalcy” that have come to define cuisine and the food system by offering queer people a seat at the table — both literally and metaphorically. Across the nation during LGBTQ+ Heritage Month, we are celebrating LGBTQ+ chefs, team members, cookbook authors, and food business owners to shine light on the fundamental impacts they have on food culture. And these impacts loom large: Queer food is the way Dominique Crenn creates menus that are poems, how Jeremiah Tower revealed hidden aspects of French cuisine to the world, and how James Beard shifted Americans’ perspectives about food from utilitarian to pleasurable. It is celebrating the recipes of a lesbian chef and the experience of a transgender dishwasher, ensuring their contributions and experiences are visible and valued. Celebrating queer food goes beyond making rainbow cupcakes, it makes room for LGBTQ+ folks in culinary spaces to create and experience the joy of food. Explore more examples of organizations queering the food system to create a more inclusive and equitable system overall.
Seems like if you tell your transgender barista you would like ketchup in your latte instead of hazelnut syrup, you will have had the total Queer Food experience.
This stuff is so absurd and exhausting. Can’t a guy just eat in peace? Does the cultural revolution have to infuse even the mac and cheese with ideology? Yes, yes it does, because it is totalitarian, and everybody must be frogmarched into sharing the same point of view as these fanatics, and thinking about this stuff all the time, just as they do — or else! Soft totalitarianism it may be — nobody’s going to the gulag for refusing to eat their pansexual broccoli — but it’s still totalitarianism. In the religion of Wokeness, queerness is everywhere present and fills all things. The parboil is political.
When is enough enough? When?
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Rod, respectfully, take a deep breath, because I think you're missing the air of desperation about this, and the sense to which "there's a Pride Month angle to everything!" is already becoming a laughingstock, just eight days in.
We know how this conversation went:
"Administration says we need to provide something for Pride Month."
"But we're...Dining Services."
"Yes, so come up with some LGBT content for the daily newsletter."
"Like what?"
"I don't know. Gay food stuff?"
"Like carrots and cucumbers?"
"That's not funny."
"Will people get mad that we have no trans-fats in the cafeteria?"
"That's really not funny."
"Then what the hell do you want? A profile of Paolo back there thawing pizzas in the kitchen? He's gay."
"That's it! LGBT chefs! Google says James Beard was gay."
"Was that seriously his real name?"
In the past 24 hours, the CIA put out its obligatory Pride Month social media post, which has been greeted with 100% mockery.
Have hope, Rod. This stuff is already stumbling under the weight of its own preposterousness.
CHILDREN OF OUR AGE
We are children of our age,
it’s a political age.
All day long, all through the night,
all affairs—yours, ours, theirs—
are political affairs.
Whether you like it or not,
your genes have a political past,
your skin, a political cast,
your eyes, a political slant.
Whatever you say reverberates,
whatever you don’t say speaks for itself.
So either way you’re talking politics.
Even when you take to the woods,
you’re taking political steps
on political grounds.
Apolitical poems are also political,
and above us shines a moon
no longer purely lunar.
To be or not to be, that is the question.
And though it troubles the digestion
it’s a question, as always, of politics.
To acquire a political meaning
you don’t even have to be human.
Raw material will do,
or protein feed, or crude oil,
or a conference table whose shape
was quarreled over for months;
Should we arbitrate life and death
at a round table or a square one?
Meanwhile, people perished,
animals died,
houses burned,
and the fields ran wild
just as in times immemorial
and less political.
-Wislawa Szymborska (1923 – 2012)