When Suella Braverman, who has just left her post as Home Secretary, stood up at the dispatch box this week to decry tofu, I felt it deep in my waters, namely the milky white waters in the small plastic wrapping of my soul.
It’s a recurring oddity of British politics that such attacks are still made, but even by the standards of such things, this seemed weak. For one thing, its formulation was lacking, like she’d filled her speech with auto-complete suggestions from the IEA. But, also, there is a set chronology to the weaponization of foodstuffs, and tofu simply doesn’t cut the English mustard any more.
Since they’re contrived less from genuine grievance and more nebulous pretence of paranoid anger, ‘fancy foods’ must themselves be moving targets and the inane shopping list of unpatriotic edibles must also be replenished, and has been many times.
Chronologically, the evil Guardian-reading foods go as follows; after a 70s distaste for quiche, came hatred of lentils, hummus, yogurt, and only then tofu, before lattes, avocados, kale and quinoa rounded out the last decade. We are now years deep into jackfruit, kimchi and natural wine. Into that mix you may, should you wish, insert polenta, acai berries and kambucha, but the fact remains: citing tofu is resolutely passé, and embarrassing for all concerned.
It’s tempting to see all of this as thinly-veiled xenophobia, mostly because this is exactly what it is. The foods cited above have almost always been those which were new to these shores or, at the very least, new to the white majorities patronising the high street chains and supermarket aisles suddenly bustling with non-standard English foodstuffs. Then they become more or less standard, and we move on to the next culinary outrage.
What’s essential for any good culture warrior to remember, is that these obsessions do not persist once replaced, and frankly it’s embarassing that Braverman has not been keeping tabs. So, it is that yogurt — considered so outré in 1987 that Hackney MP Brian Sedgemore was moved to decry “yogurt-eating yuppies” in the Commons — is now most famous for being eaten daily by every child in Britain. A fondness for muesli, on the other hand, once signified a very specific type of lefty; the health-conscious university lecturer of the 1970s, who drove a Volvo, wore sandals and, it was taken for granted, tacitly supported the IRA. Nowadays, muesli doesn’t have the same connotations, or any connotations at all for that matter, and Britain’s culinary culture warriors have moved on, well, to every other food stuff they encounter that isn’t chips.
This, at least, marks a form of progress. The potato, first introduced to Britain in 1586, took a while to catch on itself. As late as 1765, the Conservative candidate for Lewes in Sussex stood against the imposition of the tuber on local farmers. He did so with the pithy slogan “No Potatoes, No Popery!”, drawing a clear line between the foreign, virtue-signalling vegetable, and ideas, and people, he found distasteful. It’s a form of comfort, perhaps, that some things never change.
