“They way you slice into okra and it’s crunchy and ooshy-gushy — a lot of people think it’s weird,” said Ms. Sasha DuBose, a nonbinary transgender lesbian who will soon graduate from the food studies program at New York University. “But okra is queer.”
I’m not really sure what more I can add to that, but I’ll try.
About a week ago, there was a Queer Food Conference in Boston. It got covered in the New York Times because of course it did.
It was about food that “challenges binaries and normativity,” it was about reading recipes with a friend who was “recovering from top surgery” (that’s getting your breasts cut off, by the way,) and it was about tasting “gay clam chowder” – sorry, but you can tell your own jokes in your head about what that recipe may entail - at the parallel Big Queer Food Fest.
But what struck me the most was the typically non-food related issues and constructs discussed: “160 food scholars, writers, students and industry professionals who paid $45 apiece to gather online and in classrooms and a cookbook library. The mostly Millennial and Gen Z attendees considered food (pie, seaweed), food culture (potlucks, cookbooks) and food spaces (a co-op, clambakes) through queer, Marxist, feminist and anti-colonialist perspectives.”
While I cannot be sure, food could have been at the heart of the largest empire the world has ever seen, the British Empire. I’ve long been convinced that the driving point of the empire was to go looking for edible, tasty food – you know, not English food like toad in a pig’s hole or whatever and certainly not haggis.
At least no one protested the event, or, in the case of so many campus Hamas Hangouts, glowtested.
Like “glamping,” there seemed to be a surprisingly large number of nice new tents and truckloads of other supplies that just happened to appear at college campuses across the nation.
By this point, we all know the truth: the protests were largely bought and paid for, using the, well, you know, morons
to fill out numbers and provide sheen of intellectual patina film as cover for a very professionally, very well-organized, very terrorist-friendly international show of force.
Now, a lot of people have poked fun at the Columbia student who demanded bottled water and pizza:
But I’m not going to do so. I’m not going to point out that the building they were occupying had sinks and taps from which they could get NYC water – the best city water in the world and why the bagels there taste just that much better – really, that’s true.
Actually, I feel for the woman, at least a bit, because there is no possible way that a girl growing up with the last name of “King-Slutzky” ends up even remotely rational.
What is much more than remotely rational is the announcement of a new non-stop flight from China to Mexico City. In 16 hours without stopping you can be whisked from Shenzhen to the Mexican capitol on a China Southern Airlines Airbus A350.
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