Shortly before she quit as home secretary after a record-breaking 43-days, Suella Braverman stood up in the House of Commons and delivered what she clearly thought was a zingy dig at Just Stop Oil protesters who had closed the Dartford Crossing.
“I am afraid that it is the Labour party, the Lib Dems, the coalition of chaos, the Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati and, dare I say, the anti-growth coalition that we have to thank for the disruption we are seeing on our roads today,” she said on Tuesday.
Yvette Cooper, her Labour shadow, collapsed with laughter as a nation groaned. Tofu as an attack line? The early noughties called: they want their diss back. But on the Tory benches, eyes were also rolling. Kevin Hollinrake, the MP for Thirsk and Malton in North Yorkshire, tweeted that the “world’s best” tofu was made in his constituency.
Three weeks ago, Hollinrake was tucking into a tofu wrap at Tofoo, the UK’s biggest tofu brand, which in just six years has grown annual sales from £426,000 to £18.6m last year. It now produces 52% of all tofu bought in the UK from an industrial estate in Malton, where a staff of 160 press soya bean curds into 400,000 charmingly ragged blocks of organic tofu every week.
It would be hard to find a more traditionally Tory town than Malton, which – barring one freak byelection in the 1980s – has elected Conservative MPs since 1885. It’s a Barbour jacket-wearing place with a big foxhunting scene and yet now can also justifiably be described as the UK’s capital of tofu. (Sidenote: next door in Richmond, Rishi Sunak’s seat, is Stokesley, home of Quorn, making North Yorkshire something of a meat-free Mecca.)
Hollinrake is also a traditional kind of chap. Before entering parliament in 2015 he built up a successful estate agents in York and lived in a 15th-century castle, which he sold for just over £2m in 2008. He was a tofu virgin until he was fed it by David Knibbs and Lydia Smith, the husband-and-wife duo behind one of the UK’s fastest-growing food brands.
“It was fantastic,” said Hollinrake, an immediate convert. “I’d never eaten tofu before in my life. I roughly knew what it was but I thought it was very much tastier than I expected.”
A committed Sunak backer, Hollinrake thought Braverman’s tofu barb was “not relevant to her point”. Tofu-eaters came in all political colours, he said: “Whether you eat tofu or not doesn’t categorise you in any shape or form. Lots of people with different political leanings eat tofu. I’ve eaten it and I’m a lifelong Tory.”
At Tofoo HQ this week, Knibbs and Smith said it was too soon to tell if Braverman’s jibe had led to a spike in sales. But they are hopeful, after Nigella Lawson tweeted a tofu recipe and the Daily Star added a packet of Tofoo to its live stream of a lettuce as the tabloid tested what had a longer life span than Liz Truss.
Tofu was widely credited with bringing down Braverman – “Come for the tofu-eating wokerati, you best not miss,” tweeted the Times reporter Henry Zeffman – but Knibbs is more sympathetic. “She’s got what we call tofuphobia,” he said. “It’s a phrase we use a lot: the fear of the white block.”
In Malton town centre, tofuphobes were thin on the ground. The Purple Carrot, a vegetarian cafe, was doing a roaring trade, with its owner, Kate Zaleska, saying that many of her customers probably didn’t even realise she was feeding them tofu, as a binder in her quiches and cheese cakes. “Tofu is not woke. As an ingredient it’s probably older than almost anything else,” she said.
Emma Jackson, serving at the cafe, sighed at the idea of tofu being an insult in 2022. “It’s so boring,” she said. “So old-fashioned. Just the latest thing the Tories are looking to blame for their mistakes.” Plus, she said: “I’m not going to listen to someone who thinks putting asylum seekers on a plane to Rwanda is something to celebrate.”
Tofu is not for everyone, of course. In the greengrocers, David Medd declared himself a proud refusenik: “I’m a traditional English person. Roast beef, yorkshire puddings, bacon sandwiches.” What would it take for him to try it? He didn’t miss a beat: “Fifteen pints of lager.”
