Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Snog a Tory

It's better to be challenged by unfamiliar tastes, ideas and opinions

Ew! Are you squeamish? Are you grossed out by meat, by fish, by eggs, by scales and suckers and shells and bones? We live in fastidious times. Now we pick, we prod, we send dietary requirements by return of post. ‘Super excited to see you guys! Btw I’m vegan, non-gluten, non-soy, no-nuts. Sorry to be a pain!’

Last year, Sainsbury’s launched chicken pieces in ‘no touch’ pouches for millennials who won’t handle raw meat unless it’s sans teeth, eyes, taste, everything. And at Somerville College, Oxford, students were served octopus terrine at a matriculation dinner, and a fresher complained that they had been ‘surprised’ by the dish. The college conceded that cephalopod ‘was not quite right for everyone’ and that the kitchens should in future serve something ‘everyone is comfortable with’.

In April, the Ukrainian cook and cultural historian Olia Hercules posted a picture of an ox heart on Instagram. She wrote about double standards — our willingness to eat neat tubes of cooked sausage, while shuddering at raw hearts — and about the need to eat more offal, to throw nothing away that could be eaten. She said it was almost impossible in this country to buy cow’s udder or blood. A few days later she posted a photo of pigs’ ears and trotters from Pipers, an all-grass family farm in Devon.

When I saw the photos my first thought was: beautiful. Chardin, Rembrandt, still-life lives! My second thought was: brave. Because I knew as soon as I saw the pictures, red in tooth and claw, that someone would shop the photographer. Someone did. Instagram covered the images with a banner: ‘This photo contains sensitive content which some people may find offensive or disturbing.’ This is the same Instagram that fails to censor images of young girls cutting their arms, whose parent company Facebook hosts jihadi beheading videos and footage of the Christchurch mosque attack long after calls to take them down.

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