We should all be free to call each other ‘coconut’

I asked my local greengrocer for a couple of blood oranges last weekend. They were to go with an orange cake I’d baked for some left-wing friends who were coming over — a nice left-wing cake, I thought. No flour or butter in it (both right-wing ingredients, historically), just ground almonds, eggs, sugar and oranges. A cake eaten in parts of Spain which were implacably opposed to the Falangists, and also enjoyed in Morocco which is, de facto, a left-wing place because it’s in Africa. Or that’s what I thought at first. Then I noticed a line in the recipe that said I had to examine the cracked eggs with a magnifying glass to make sure there were none of those tiny red bits of embryonic chicks which you sometimes get with eggs. That’s a bit scrupulous, I thought, but didn’t get why it was so scrupulous.

Turns out it was a Sephardic Jewish recipe for Passover and my left-wing friends wouldn’t touch it — this cake was directly implicated in the oppression of Palestinians, occupying their lands, building large walls across the country, machine-gunning Turkish peace flotillas etc, shouldn’t be consumed and shouldn’t be given tenure in British universities. I might as well have made a Linzer Sachertorte, Hitler’s favourite — except I had no apricot jam. And then there was the problem with the blood oranges. ‘They’re out of season,’ the greengrocer said. ‘Also, you’re not allowed to call them blood oranges any more. You have to call them blush oranges.’ I wondered about this, thinking maybe it was a racist thing — as in yo, blud oranges, ras-claart motherf***er — a perceived slight at people from an African-Caribbean background. But that wasn’t it.

Apparently the vigilant EU has decided that you can’t call them blood oranges because there’s no real blood in them and people might be confused, believing that they’d bought an orange/black pudding hybrid and ending up disappointed.