Dear Mike Huckabee: Hands Off My Tofu!
Tofu-production in China. Image by Getty Images
If you leave your bubble, my fellow tofu-eaters, my fellow consumers of kale and quinoa, my fellow safe-space-trigger-warning-obsessed “Girls” fans, my fellow people who aren’t so much ‘people who actually exist’ as straw figurines constructed in the conservative imagination, you might be surprised to learn that right-wing websites also put “destroyed” in their headlines. In recent metaphorical destruction: “Mike Huckabee just destroyed every whining Liberal in the country with this one Tweet!”
(Looks down. Sees whining Liberal self still intact.)
The tweet in question:
“Friend sent T’giving recipe: How to prepare Tofu: a. Throw it in the trash b. Grill, smoke or deep fry some meat”
Conservative tofu-hate isn’t new, but this was an interesting incarnation. Why interesting?
1) The paradox of anti-snobbery (those elites with their inexpensive protein) and a recommendation to waste food.
2) The bizarre assumption that tofu-eaters and meat-eaters are two different sets of people.
3) The even stranger assumption that enjoyment of grilled meat is what separates the Real Americans from those urban-elite wusses. An assumption that, by the way, sort of mirrors the one you’ll find on the other side of the aisle, namely that if you leave a few select areas of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bay Area, no one will have heard of lattes, vegetables.
Derisive remarks like this, where tofu is concerned, strike me less as anti-Asian xenophobia (culinary ignorance, maybe; then again, in this political climate, you never know) than as a holdover from earlier incarnations of demands that hippies remove themselves from one’s lawn. Tofu means vegetarian, vegetarian means liberal, and Archie Bunker would rather Edith not make a special dish for Mike, thank you very much.
I Googled this, and it appears that 3.4% of Americans are vegan or vegetarian. Meanwhile, over half of the electorate — and not just a bunch of New Yorkers! — just voted for Hillary Clinton. Something’s not adding up.
And that thing above about kale and quinoa? While I’m aware of both, you’ll more frequently find me enjoying the simpler of the carbs. And I definitely remember being taken out for Japanese food a number of years ago, in a red part of a very red state nowhere near the coasts. Was tofu on the menu? I suspect that it was.
This post is not a let’s-all-get-along plea to hear out a relative who voted for Trump because they thought a Muslim ban sounded like a great idea. Rather, it’s a plea to stop overestimating our cultural differences, at least where food is concerned. Also, though, to not make such a thing of them where they do exist. There’s no dietary restriction, no cultural culinary tradition, that can make you any less ‘real’ of an American.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy edits the Sisterhood, and can be reached at bovy@forward.com. Her book, The Perils of “Privilege”, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in March 2017.
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