Kale, ketchup and cancel culture

Trigger warnings from your salad

Dear reader, it disturbs me to write this but my last post was triggering to many in Substack’s culinary community.

I received a fair bit of hate mail including the following notes:

Subject: Harmful Bio-Essentialism in the Produce Aisle

As a Ph.D. candidate in Critical Alimentary Studies, I am literally shaking. The author’s insistence on ‘biological reality’ regarding the tomato is a violent erasure of the tomato’s lived experience as a salad-adjacent entity. To suggest that a tomato’s placement next to kale is ‘masquerading’ is a dog-whistle for botanical gatekeeping. We must move past these colonialist taxonomies and embrace a fluid, flavor-based spectrum of identity. Your ‘ketchup’ threat has been reported to the Nightshade Safety Council.

Holding space for your accountability, Radish Al-Root (he / they / yam)

But Mr. Root wasn’t the only person who had complaints.

Subject: Do Better.

I’m disappointed. As someone who has spent the last six months protesting the systemic oppression of ro…