A time will come when the Guardian declares war on your favourite food. The lefty bible has so far deemed HP sauce to be the condiment of ‘the establishment’, tea drinkers to be on the same level as ‘colonialism and the class system’ and barbecues to be approaching racist.
Now, the Sunday roast has had its comeuppance. In a head to head titled ‘Should Sunday roast dinners still be on the menu?’, Philip Hoare — a cultural historian — writes in the Guardian that the traditional roast is an ‘oppressive outmoded practice’. He says that just the thought of a roast dinner evokes ‘received memories of oppression and an enslaved work force’.
With flawless logic, Hoare argues that because George Orwell claimed the now defunct News of the World newspaper — marred by phone hacking allegations — was as central to a Sunday as the beloved British roast, the meal has developed a toxic association:
‘I think of the pathetic Christmas dinner of the Cratchits in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. And although George Orwell wrote a slightly unconvincing essay on the merits of British food, the very fact that he claimed that the News of the World was part of “the fabric of Britain, as central to Sunday as a roast dinner”, speaks to a reactionary past of set values and set menus, of the exploitation of people and animals, and one which we are better rid of.’
While there is no word on whether the addition of kale — the Guardian‘s vegetable of choice — makes the meal less sinful, by Mr S’s calculations, those wanting to stay on the right side of the publication’s thought police would be best advised to stick with raw food — neither roasted in oppression nor charred with slavery.
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