One of the basic tenets of liberalism is that everything is racism, but since there are so many things in existence it’s a monumental task to detail and catalog them all. Thankfully one of them finally got around to letting us know that using forks is racist. Yup, in fact all silverware is representative of colonialism, Eurocentrism, and white privilege. That’s the trifecta of racism, so you know this is serious.
Joshna Maharaj is a Canadian celebrity chef of Indian descent and here’s what really pisses him off:
Why the way we teach kids table manners is actually kind of racist
Maharaj starts this stupid thing off by writing how his Indian father taught him and his brother to eat food with their hands, which is the way he thinks it should be. Upon learning that non-Indian people teach their children to eat with forks and knives, he lost his curry:
Recently, I chatted with someone who told me a story about her young niece, who goes to a prestigious preschool and was eating rice with her hands at lunchtime. The feedback her parents received was that this child needed to work on her table manners and use proper cutlery to eat. I immediately felt a rush of anger bubble up inside me when I heard this.
If this is what causes anger to bubble up, maybe this guy doesn’t have the temperament to be a chef, or even live in civilized society.
The message that eating food with your hands is an unmannered way to eat is a real problem for me because it is dripping with the control and shame of colonization, which is particularly dangerous in an educational context. Suggesting that a child who eats with her hands has no manners is an echo of European colonial powers looking to tame the wildness out of the people they controlled.
Apparently this guy is serious about this.
These European table manners were imposed on conquered people in an attempt to “civilize” them. It’s a damaging message about right and wrong ways to do things. It positions the technique as superior and the people who practise it as setters of the standard, leaving those with a different approach to eating with a status of inferiority.
And finally:
The idea of a single standard of acceptable table manners is just one of a host of strategies used to grow and promote racism. It’s a subtle message but one that is reinforced three times a day, every day, which makes it quite powerful.
So it’s not just that using a fork is racism, but also that teaching kids to use a fork grows and promotes racism. And here you thought it was just a really effective way to transfer food from a plate to your mouth without making a huge mess.
Under these standards, wearing clothing and practicing basic hygiene are also tools of racism, since these are some of the other things Europeans taught to the savages. Does Maharaj reject using toilet paper or washing his hands after using the bathroom? I hope not because he’s a chef who likes to eat with his hands.
And speaking of being a chef, does he use cutlery and utensils to prepare the food he serves? I feel like that should also be racist under his definition. To avoid being a hypocrite, he would have to tear raw meat with teeth, karate chop the vegetables, and stir boiling pots with a clenched fist. It doesn’t really matter to me because you couldn’t pay me to eat Indian food.
We shouldn’t be teaching kids that they’re not supposed to eat with their hands at all or that eating with cutlery is a more refined or sophisticated way to eat. Different people eat their food in different ways.
Well yeah, different people do a lot of things differently but it doesn’t make them all acceptable. Female genital mutilation is practiced in some Muslim countries and honor killings are common in many parts of the world. Does that mean there many acceptable ways to treat females or that some of these places are savage and backwards?
