The Food Wars Are Coming To America

Editor’s Note: By all accounts, Farage loves to drink and Salvini is a foodie. Neither of them are faking it. Donald Trump also eats like that.

I hadn’t given any thought to the issue until recently.

It is one of those things like “trans” or gender fluidity. You grow up in a world where everyone agrees that men are men and women are women and there are mothers and fathers and it was common sense and a nonexistent issue until progressive activists started agitating the issue a decade ago.

Here in the South, we all love our food. There is nothing in our culture that is less controversial and more unifying than Southern cuisine. Evangelical Christianity and sportsball aren’t as unifying as grilling and chilling in the summer. Blacks and Whites both love their fried chicken and barbeque. It is so deeply woven into the fabric of everyday life that no one really notices that we enjoy and continue to develop our traditional foods. The Hispanics who live here also enjoy their traditional foods and so do the natives. Until recently, progressives used to celebrate food as the most successful example of integration.

Now, progressive activists have changed their minds. They don’t celebrate gumbo and local culture or talk to voters in plain English about issues they care about anymore like James Carville. They don’t believe in colorblindness or integration or free speech or civil liberties or law and order anymore. The libs don’t even believe in equality or live and let live anymore. Today, they have become self-righteous moral puritans who believe that eating a cheeseburger or a chicken sandwich is a moral catastrophe.

CARR:

“Few everyday items have the ability to stir up feelings of patriotism than a country’s national food and drink. Political leaders are well aware of the potential food has to connect them favourably with the experiences of ordinary people.

The British prime minister Boris Johnson and most of his government ministers were all privately educated at one of the country’s most elite schools. Johnson also allegedly earned more money in a few hours than most people in the UK do in an entire year. Yet, despite this, he has managed to successfully construct an image of himself as ‘one of the people’ – and food has been an important feature of his public profile. …

Farage has often been photographed drinking in pubs as a way of showing how he is similar to ordinary people. Following a victory for England’s rugby team against New Zealand, for example, Farage posted a picture of himself on Instagram celebrating by drinking a pint of beer called England’s Glory. In this case, the exclusionary nationalist undertones typical of Farage’s radical right-wing politics were clearly visible. …

It’s not a coincidence that on the final day of his victorious 2019 election campaign, of the 11 photos and videos posted on Johnson’s official Instagram account, eight were related to food. One image showed Johnson in a roadside café enjoying a classic English breakfast of sausages, bacon and eggs, next to regular people who were preparing for another busy day at work. The caption said “Getting breakfast done!”, but the picture said: “I might be running the country, but really I’m just like you.” …

Orbán’s new-found affection for homely foodstuffs may be just another way to prove his authenticity, but it may also have been inspired by a phone conversation with one of his good friends: former Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini.

Barely a day goes by without Salvini – leader of the radical Right party Northern League – posting a picture of some fresh Italian produce. As Italy struggled to recover from the devastating impact of COVID-19, Salvini uploaded several images of himself on Instagram enjoying locally harvested strawberries, while reminding his followers that it has never been so important to buy and consume Italian goods. …”

Is barbeque a rightwing nationalist and populist cause?

Once again, I never really thought of it that way. Who has a problem with barbeque?

It has never occurred to me to be offended that working class people are buying meat in the grocery stores and cooking and preparing their own meals or that they are immoral and destroying the planet by doing so. I’m not obsessed with controlling thoughts and words either. The people who say I am an “authoritarian” are obsessed with controlling these things: what other people are allowed to say, what they are allowed to read, whether they are allowed to speak on the internet, what they are allowed to eat. They’re now saying that we have to go through a “global protein transition.”

Common Dreams:

“The image of Biden in the kitchen evoked fears about the administration’s totalitarian overreach, and suggested an inversion of gender roles—Biden, and all vegetarians, were not real American men. Boebert and others repeated talking points by Larry Kudlow, the Fox Business host and former Trump adviser, who argued the Green New Deal would be the end of grilling and traditional July 4 celebrations, stoking a panic about the end of the most masculine form of cooking and the most American of holidays with casual racism. …

Food ideology helps shape right populist discourse against liberal “cultural elites,” a white working-class authenticity, in opposition to a liberal search for cultural distinction. Although an enormous steak is expensive, it is given value as an ordinary man’s food in part through a simple or oversized presentation that makes it seem everyday and authentically American. It is also populist in contrast to liberal foods, such as sprouts, and liberal food ideologies.

This vision of traditional utopia is also maintained by the tradwives, the women in their 20s and 30s who celebrate “traditional femininity” and actively promote submission to men, homemaking, and having large families. Researcher Annie Kelly notes that this vision of nostalgic femininity is linked to white supremacy. Central to the women’s production of anti-feminist and white nationalist nostalgia are ideas of bodily and racial purity and fertility, such as home cooking as a performance of traditional lifestyles and gender roles.

For some a traditional utopia reflects an interest in wellness; a farm-to-table cuisine leading to a natural, healthy lifestyle, as well as a pure, fertile body and a slender figure. Often celebrating traditional Western foods or preparing labor-intensive meals that would be impossible for working women, tradwives link wellness to whiteness and anti-feminism. I grew up with this ideology, from a cookbook called Nourishing Traditions, which gave pickled beet and fermented cod recipes, and saw modernity and processed food as polluting to the body and mind—and challenged ‘politically correct’ nutrition.”

I actually love roasted brussels sprouts.

The idea that you are saving the planet by eating asparagus, brussels sprouts or a salad and that this makes you better than someone who eats a steak with it is absurd.

About Hunter Wallace 12390 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

18 Comments

  1. It’s one of those things which get created in academia then percolate through elite channels like the NYT or WP and then get dumped into the mainstream as though they were the obvious truth all along.

    • Globalist plutocrats were talking about reducing meat consumption for lower classes back in the early 20th century. Globalist technocrat Bertrand Russell wrote that only elites will eat real food and plebs will all eat manufactured chemical gruel.

  2. It’s 50/50 which will be demonized first: alcohol or meat. They see the success in the rapid decline of smoking. From that, you would think getting rid of drinking would be next because it’s easier, but if they did that, people might get stronger physically. But if they get rid of meat and keep the alcohol, lots of drinkers would weaken and die. One thing is sure, they want us to weaken and die, it’s just the method of bringing it about.

    • The whole alcohol thing in the US is not about a nice glass of wine, or cooking with it. It’s about getting drunk and eating cheap sports bar food. It’s about living low brow, casual sex, and acting stupid.

      As long as people can numb out, they don’t even bother to look around and see how bad things have gotten, after all…they still have money to buy booze and “go out”.

      • 100 percent truth. I think it would be a great experiment if you could completely take American’s alcohol away. They would probably find another way to numb and dumb themselves, or completely chimp out.

  3. “Alienated metropolitan weirdos are attacking the great culinary traditions of Western civilization’

    They are so idle and out of touch with basick life practices, like taking tomatoes from seed to canning, that they have to create challenges for themselves.

    The soul is like a cell – if it lives unhealthfully it becomes cancerous and vampirick, and, thus, must attack healthy things.

      • I enjoy his comments, but it is very weird to see someone write in an archaic style that ended at least 125 years ago. I know if he was born in the last 100 years, this isn’t how he was taught to write lol.

    • “They are so idle and out of touch with basick life practices, like taking tomatoes from seed to canning, that they have to create challenges for themselves.”

      We read and hear about kibbutzes, farms, in Israel. That’s fine, everyone likes farms, but who does the labor on those farms? Jews are famous for disdaining physical, manual labor. Again, who does the agricultural work in Israel? You?

  4. Coca Cola and Kellogg’s support transgenderism and critical race theory.

    Therefore processed sugar is good, but healthy home-cooked food is evil.

  5. We are ruled by criminally insane psychopaths. The insanity will not stop of its own volition.

  6. Your banner picture at the top of the site today is ruined by the idiot with the selfie stick.

  7. Notice the tone of the two articles.

    Ten years ago there was a feminist author named Amanda Marcotte. She would say the most over-the-top and ridiculous “man-hating” things imaginable, and always found “problematic” any and all male behavior. She got a lot of attention frankly because her tone was so over-the-top hateful.

    Well the feminism thing got less popular and she sort of disappeared. But just last week I ran across a new article of hers. It had nothing to do with feminism, now it was just “Democrats good, Republicans bad” but what was so noticeable was that the tone was just as hateful.

    It dawned on me that she didn’t care about “feminism” and she doesn’t care about the Democratic party either. She is just full of hate and is good at expressing her hatred in print. That’s why they hire her.

    She is literally a hatemonger.

    The reason “the left” is always talking about “hate” is because they are full of hate – that is what attracts them to “activism” or “issues” – and they are simply projecting on to everyone else.

    It’s really no mystery. They are miserable hatemongers and the only people they hate more than their own parents are themselves.

    So now they are getting paid to hatemonger against people eating chicken wings. It’s absurd.

  8. “tradwives want large farmilies,which is linked to white supremacy”.
    You got it right,What are you gonna do? Kill my children?(enguarde bugmen cuck)

  9. “…They don’t celebrate gumbo and local culture or talk to voters in plain English about issues they care about anymore like James Carville…”

    underrated comment.

    I have a theory of surface vs unconscious culture.

    Unconscious culture is how you react to death? Does the community rally around the grieving party having party’s or does the community give the grieving party space to be alone. I see benefits/merit to both but neither group would think they’re making a conscious choice. They would just feel like the only appropriate thing to do would be to either embrace/or distance themselves from their grieving relative and would give it a thought unless the grieving party said “I just wanted to be alone after my mother died or I felt so alone after my mom died”

    But food is the epitome of surface culture. And shitlibs always like to reduce people’s cultures down to commodities that can’t be enjoyed by everyone via the market.

    Sharing each other’s food is the lowest level of diplomatic/cultural exchange… but the inflexibility of modern liberalism doesn’t allow itself to engage in the lowest level of olive branch/cultural exchange/cultural understand/tolerance for [poor] white americans

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