The Guardian’s loathing for western civilisation is no secret; it defines the newspaper just as reliance on the British tax payer defines the BBC. But today the rag’s outright contempt for British culture has reached a new low, with a withering attack on the Great, British Sunday Roast.
“I think the ritual of Sunday dinner (never lunch in my family) was invented as a way to consume the deadening hours of a day which, once we’d been to mass, yawned claustrophobically ahead,” writes author and “cultural historian” Philip Hoare.
The Guardian, of course, takes great pride in denigrating the minutia of British heritage. “Tea is a national disgrace,” on the level of “colonialism and the class system,” we were told in May. HP source is too “establishment,” and the “Barbecue is a form of cultural power… made by enslaved Africans,” from July. Oh and let’s not forget the Union flag attack just 11 days ago.
The author’s precious mother, “who hated cooking and would rather have been on the stage,” would cook for young Hoare on Sunday: “A lump of dead animal would fester in a tray of spitting fat, surrounded by the only edible element as far as I was concerned, the roast potatoes. The vegetables would be reduced to degrees of green and orange mush.”
The author is, unsurprisingly, a vegetarian, and he wants us all to know how evil meat eaters are, and how hard we’re making his life: “For vegetarians, condemned to a dry nut roast alternative, the legacy of the meat hegemony is even worse.”
That’s right, “meat hegemony”.
Hoare really hates the “patronising vegetarian recipes” he choose to eat, and the carving utensils, well, they are just “pronged and bone-handled like instruments of medieval torture.”
His whining, thought, goes deeper than the familiar, oh-so-trendy post-modern hatred of anything popular. This left-wing loony really seems to think our much-loved national dish is an instrument of class control:
“For me, the associations of a roast dinner do not evoke pangs of hunger, but received memories of oppression and an enslaved work force.”
See…
“the Sunday lunch is an archaic reminder of a working-class past, a commemoration of an age in which no meal was worth eating if it lacked meat,”
He explains, before taking aim at another cornerstone of our culture:
“Dreariest of all is the prospect of a Sunday pub.”
And then to rap things up, in a spectacularly basic piece of reasoning, the author tells us that because George Orwell thought roasts were alright – and because he is man who thought the News of the World was part of “the fabric of Britain, as central to Sunday as a roast dinner” – by association, therefore, the Sunday roast must be filthy.
“I think of the pathetic Christmas dinner of the Cratchits in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. And although George Orwell wrote a slightly unconvincing essay on the merits of British food, the very fact that he claimed that the News of the World was part of ‘the fabric of Britain, as central to Sunday as a roast dinner’, speaks to a reactionary past of set values and set menus, of the exploitation of people and animals, and one which we are better rid of.”
So there you have it. Our culture is rotten. Even traditional meat and two veg is oppressive, cruel and shameful. Time to import someone else’s then. Who’s for a Sunday Schwarma?
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