No, really! Britain’s most liberal daily newspaper, The Guardian, has declared Apple Pie to be racist!
One professor may have just ruined apple pie forever by linking it to slavery and the “ongoing genocide of indigenous people.”
Raj Patel is an award-winning author, filmmaker, and academic. He is also a Research Professor in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin—and recently, he’s making himself known for his controversial article in The Guardian regarding his stance on America’s favorite comforting dessert.
In his featured article, Patel mentioned that contrary to the belief of Americans, apple pie is not actually theirs as the fruit first came to the west from central Asia 4,000 years ago.
Patel, also an activist who participated in the World Trade Organization protest in Seattle in 1999, noted, “Apples traveled to the western hemisphere with Spanish colonists in the 1500s in what used to be called the Columbian Exchange, but is now better understood as a vast and ongoing genocide of Indigenous people,” before questioning the “uniquely American” recipe of the dessert.
He claimed the cooking process is “a variant on an English pumpkin recipe” and said English colonizers had used apple trees as “markers of civilization”.
“John Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed, took these markers of colonized property to the frontiers of US expansion where his trees stood as symbols that Indigenous communities had been extirpated,” the 49-year-old British Indian journalist added.
Not just that, Patel also called pie’s crust not “uniquely American’, given the fact that sugar is made of sugarcane, which was brought by Jesuits to the US in 1751.
He then explained, “When enslaved workers seized the French colony in 1791, European capitalists sought new sugar cane fields and workers. French merchants of sugar and slavery landed in Louisiana in the late 1700s. Within 50 years, the US produced a quarter of the world’s sugar cane, and New Orleans had become a concomitant hub of the slave trade.”
Patel’s hard-hitting words also slammed the traditional cloth on which an apple pie is kept to cool down. Calling British Empire’s cotton trade “war capitalism”, he said that it “enslaved and committed acts of genocide against millions of Indigenous people in North America, and millions of Africans and their descendants through the transatlantic slave trade. In the process, cotton laid the basis of finance, police and government that made the United States.”
“In the drama of nationalist culture, the bloody and international origins of the apple pie are subject to a collective amnesia,” Patel concluded. “The apple pie is as American as stolen land, wealth and labor. We live its consequences today.”
So, is apple pie officially canceled? Not according to many who’ve read his article, and think it’s a bit of a stretch.
“According to The Guardian newspaper(London), apple pie is racist too. These people are nuts,” one person tweeted.
“The ‘woke’ #CancelCulture mob seeks to destroy everything that is American and/or good,” another said.
Sources: AWM, TheGuardian