I don’t watch cookery shows on the television. In fact I don’t watch competition shows of any kind on television - baking, sewing, decorating your home - none of them. So I don’t know anything significant about Gail Simmons except that she is a judge on one such show. In an article I skimmed online, I came across this statement by Ms Simmons:
“London is a food gateway. It’s a multicultural city like nowhere else in Europe, with its own food traditions, but really, from a food perspective, it’s a story of immigration.”
That’s probably true of most of our big cities. That ”story of immigration” explains why it is quite hard to pin down what we mean by “English cuisine”. Anyway, the article told how she praised our cheese, saying how much better the range of cheese we have in our supermarkets is than what the Americans have at their disposition. That’s nice, I have always defended our range of cheese when people go on about wonderful French cheeses.
Then she turned to chocolate:
“Everybody knows, but I’m here to tell you: candy bars in America are not proper chocolate. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: grocery-store-level foods are just better in the UK. I grew up in Canada and, as a part of the Commonwealth, we had a lot of stuff from England. I didn’t realise how much I’d missed it over the past 25 years of living in New York until I came to shoot in London.”
She particularly likes Cadbury’s chocolate. I find this rather amusing as some time ago there were purists saying that British chocolate is not real chocolate at all. But I have spent time in Spain hunting out supplies of Cadbury’s chocolate and proper Cheese. And Cadbury’s chocolate is good chocolate.
Sometimes it’s just a matter of terminology.
I came across this cartoon on Facebook, with an accompanying comment about Leah Panapa, someone I had never heard of. So I did a little bit of investigating and found that she hosts a radio show, but not one that I never listen to, one of those chat shows. Anyway it turns out at some point recently she got a little indignant in a discussion about the term “pregnant people”, spluttering about the fact that it should be “pregnant women”, not “pregnant people”. I tend to agree with her.
After all, you simply can’t have “pregnant men”!
Except that there has been at least one case of a transperson who stopped their transition from woman to man so that they could have a baby. I remember that case and recall being a little indignant myself that someone could so clearly want to have their cake and eat it. But that seems to be the way of the modern world. And surely while he/she/ they was (were) pregnant he/she/they was (were) actually, physically, still a woman. Goodness, those pronouns are confusing!
Leah Panapa has apologised for what has been described as a “toxic rant about pronouns” and the cartoon seems to have disappeared from Facebook, perhaps because someone in their wisdom decided that someone else might be offended by it. Of course, it might just have disappeared quite innocuously or maybe I just can’t find it but it seems a little suspicious to me.
I find the whole pronoun business very confusing, as I have already said. My two eldest granddaughters (aged 25 and almost 20) just accept it as a normal thing and remember which pronoun they are meant to use for different friends. But when one of tells me about a friend visiting from thenUSA and says that ‘they’ will be hiring a car, I grow confused about how many people are coming, much to the amusement of the aforementioned granddaughters. No doubt the whole business will sort itself out into normality eventually. However, I do wonder what they do in languages which use gender for everything - books being masculine and houses feminine and so on. I must remember to ask my Italian friend.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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