Counter-Currents
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Jordan Peterson was asked by journalist Camilla Tominey about his views on multiculturalism during a recent exclusive interview with GB News, Britain’s nominally Right-leaning news station. In a refreshingly scathing tirade, the Canadian public intellectual branded the idea of mixing incongruous population groups together as “a miracle of stupidity,” correctly making the link between diversity of cultures and the potential within multicultural societies for civil conflict. Predictably for him, given his positioning on the establishment-approved center-Right, he eschewed ever mentioning race and its interrelationship with culture as a determining factor of that stupidity, preferring instead to emphasize the importance of assimilation into a dominant culture over cultural pluralism.
Jordan Peterson uses the restaurant argument in praise of multiculturalism, citing a trip to a comparatively less diverse London in the 1980s during which he was served tinned spaghetti. pic.twitter.com/999sZ7pVZt
— Wyndham 🏴 (@WyndhamVortex) November 5, 2023
In a particularly funny part of the interview, Peterson, in his typical habit of steelmanning his opponents’ viewpoints, resorted ill-advisedly to the oft-derided “restaurant argument,” citing “diversity of cuisines” as a putative benefit of the mass import of foreign peoples into Western societies. Given that this is a man who, for the purposes of keeping a myriad of self-diagnosed and likely imaginary ailments at bay, purports to subsist entirely on a diet of steak, I, along with many other users of Twitter/X, where the clip of him went viral, found this all rather amusing.
Peterson then reflected upon a trip he had taken to a comparatively less diverse London in the 1980s, during which time he claims to have been served “canned spaghetti” in a “reasonably good restaurant” — something my own mother, who grew up during the ‘80s on the St. Luke’s estate right in the beating heart of the city, refutes as either a flat-out lie or, in all likelihood, a confabulation of a mind addled by an oppressively dreary all-meat diet and a past reliance on benzodiazepines. Unless, of course, he, the Alberta yokel that he is at heart, wandered obliviously into a greasy spoon and mistook it for some sort of fine-dining establishment, it’s highly unlikely that even the world-weariest of cooks would’ve served, of all things, tinned spaghetti. When Peterson said that calling the food in the pre-Blairite and still relatively homogeneous England “dismal” would be a “compliment,” I, an inveterate lover of traditional English culture and cuisine, couldn’t help but chafe against the blithe assertions of this increasingly unhinged Canadian rube. Even if some of the wider points he made about the negatives of multiculturalism were a boon to our side, the mere fact that he dropped his moral standards low enough to denigrate English cooking in as facile a manner as your average low-brow American TikToker, is itself worthy of ridicule.
You can buy Jonathan Bowden’s Extremists: Studies in Metapolitics here.
Despite the grey image of boiled meat and potatoes and the grim, utilitarian post-war attitude the English are perceived to have towards food, English cooking is, I would argue, among the best on Earth when prepared correctly and with the reverence it deserves. From the traditional to the nouvelle, English cooking is characterized by its simplicity, its austerity, and its elegance, celebrating, above all else the quality and seasonality of ingredients both fresh and artisanal. George Orwell, in his essay “In Defence of English Cooking,” references the superiority of English cheeses, particularly Stilton, a delectable blue cheese produced in Leicestershire, and Wensleydale, a crumbly Yorkshire cheese (saved from extinction by the popularity of Wallace and Gromit), the wonderful soft sensation of a fresh-baked English cottage loaf, and the juiciness of English Cox’s apples.
The famous proponent of “nose-to-tail dining,” Fergus Henderson, proprietor of the legendary St. John restaurant in London’s meat-packing district of Smithfield, has done perhaps more than anyone in the last two decades to revive England’s culinary reputation. His focus on old-school English country cooking which makes use of local, seasonal produce and every part of the animal, from tails to trotters, is deeply reactionary in its unapologetic traditionalism and steadfast refusal to synthesize influences from the myriad other cuisines imported into England over the last 70 years or so. His iconic roasted ox heart with traditional green sauce was popularized by the late celebrity chef, Anthony Bourdain, and epitomizes his ethos of radical English simplicity. It also hearkens back to an era in which the English were known throughout Europe as master roasters of meats, hence the French appellation of les rosbifs, immortalized in Hogarth’s “O the Roast Beef of Old England,” which depicts scrawny French soldiers transporting a great hulking side of British beef to the English inn in Calais.
Gloriously hearty meat pies made with hot water crust pastries have always been a popular repast among English working, middle, and upper classes alike. A great egalitarian leveler, the humble pie has the ability to transport virtually every Englishman, from Berwick to Bermondsey, back to a halcyon period in his childhood. Pie, mash, and liquor (parsley sauce), a quintessential dish of the now sadly diminishing indigenous East End of London, is a veritable health platter fit for a Pearly King and remains a personal favorite of my kin and I who’ve retreated to the surrounding home counties of Essex and Kent. Cockney traditions remain alive there in spite of the encroaching enrichment and London multicultural overspill which, again, threaten to push this once-celebrated but now disprivileged urban culture further into England’s deepest rural recesses.
England, as the anti-Brexit forces in their smug complacency found out to their dismay back in 2016, isn’t multicultural London, with its smorgasbord of foreign cuisines and cosmopolitan biomass of humanity. In provincial market towns with names such as Bicester, Biggleswade, and Bishop’s Stortford, an older, whiter England lives on, the dominant culture of which is still conspicuously Anglo-Saxon. Traditional fayre like shepherd’s pie washed down with good English ale still reigns supreme over the unlovingly served plates of greasy, cornstarch-laden Xi’an-style noodles and unearthly-colored bubble teas hipster-whites pay over the odds for at Spitalfields Market. But even the trendy white-left gentrifiers, in their neurotic quest to seek out the novel and the exotic, revert invariably, as all humans do, to the comforting and the familiar. Recently, during a brief sojourn in the East End, a part of London in which the local Bengali population evinces a perverse nativism towards the influx of well-to-do white gentrifiers from the shires, I was heartened to see a general waning in interest in foreign cuisines and a revival of the old English traditions of pie making, real ale brewing, and the new-fashioned takes on the beloved Sunday Roast.
Food and the dishes that we remember most fondly from childhood are inextricable from who we are as members of ethnic and national tribes. When we yearn for that quintessential taste of home, it’s the food that our ancestors have bequeathed to us, not the dishes that newcomers have brought to our shores, that we crave most. A shared love of home-cooked bangers and mash, that most comforting of indigenous dishes, will transcend the divisions of class and politics among ethnic Britons in a way that fusion Thai burritos and Jamaican curry goat simply will not.
The reason Peterson’s callous dismissal of English cuisine as “dismal” on a national news channel felt like a personal attack is because that it was. Peterson, even in spite of his gestures towards conservatism, remains an old-school liberal at heart. His inability to recognize the importance of tribe and its core markers of identity, including cuisine, is why his individualist philosophy remains both unsatisfying and undignified. In the unlikely case that the self-proclaimed “professor against political correctness” happens to be reading this, I invite him to have a home-cooked meal at my family home in Deep England where he can have his bigotries and prejudices against English cooking challenged and hopefully changed — that is, if I can convince him to ditch his ridiculous fad diet first.
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18 comments
Peterson is certainly lying, all other evidence aside, since “ordered x and got y” is a well known trope, like the talkative cabbie or “my [non-White or ethnic] friend.” It’s been a standard tool of “journalists” even before Hunter Thompson was canonized and “New Journalists” used fictional techniques to convey the “real truth.” Lazy bastards.
If he did get canned spaghetti, he was luckier than Henry Hill. One of the things that irks me about the otherwise glorious movie Goodfellas is Henry’s penultimate line, about his new home in witness protection: “I ordered spaghetti and marinara sauce and got egg noodles and ketchup.” A half minute later we learn this was likely in Seattle. Are we supposed to believe that Seattle was so benighted that this was all they could come up with at a restaurant? The infamous Chef Boyardee’s canned spaghetti and meatballs was a favorite of children all over the USA since the 1920; couldn’t they have bought a can?
I am reminded of a story, possibly an urban legend, about a restaurant in Nepal that decided to cash in on the tourist boom in the 50s by serving “western” food. They had no proper ingredients, and had never cooked or tasted such food, but they did have pictures in magazines, so they crafted dishes from local ingredients that looked like the pictures. I’m told it was quite an experience.
According to some, Chef Boyardee’s commercial 1966 commercial with children running through Venice singing “Beefaroni!” was the inspiration for Coke’s iconic hilltop commercial; although, according to Mad Men, it was Don Draper’s inspiration while meditating during his stay at Esalen, which I discussed here: https://counter-currents.com/2015/05/don-drapers-last-diddle/
Aberdeen Angus beef and Herefordshire beef.
Free range corn fed chicken that is a beautiful, yellowy, golden flesh colour and tastes exquisite.
Welsh lamb, salt marsh lamb.
Irish beef.
English lamb and pork.
Venison, veal.
Seafood around the year and so good most is sought after on the continent such as langoustine, scallops, monkfish and many others.
Cheese – you name it, my favourite is Cornish Yarg.
We now have English fine sparkling wine, thanks to the chalky soil and terroir of the south and check out which big champagne houses are buying up that land.
A plethora of beers, ciders, lagers, gins, red wines, white wines, rose wines, single malts, et al all to help wash down meat and seafood with seasonal veg that when prepared locally and fresh are as tasty as plants come.
Some of the best charcuterie in Europe and esoteric products such as mozzarella made by buffalo.
Distinct DOP foods such as Melton Mowbray pies, Arbroath smokies, Red Leicester, faggots (no laughing at the back) haggis and such like, don’t forget Cornish pasties and Cornish & Devon cream and jam scones.
Judging by the company Peterson is keeping recently, the best he will be served will be goat from the desert.
I beg to differ from your assessment. My mother was a Brit, and and excellent cook. Although most of her dishes were, ahem, culturally appropriated, she did treat us to some of the fare you mentioned. Shepherds pie is fantastic and so is bangers and mash, but good bangers are hard to come by where I live. A side dish you failed to mention was Yorkshire pudding. An excellent complement to Sunday’s roast.
I have visited England three times and I have only found two dishes to be palatable. The traditional English breakfast, and the fish and chips. The chips loaded with salt and vinegar.
Everything else is awful. That includes the meat pies you mentioned.
My poor cousins have tried to prepare good meals but never succeed. I always found myself doing the polite thing. Cleaning my plate and telling everyone how good it was.
Sorry but the British isles don’t quite cut the mustard.
So, the cuisine is alright but few can make it?
No. Anyone can cook it. There are just very few good dishes. I know that I’m not alone in thinking this. I’m sure many others have traveled there and made the same observation.
I see. I assumed it was the lack of good cooks based on your compliments of your mother’s cooking.
All you’ve actually said is that you don’t like British food. Well, no one can force you to eat it.
As a kid she sure did
I’ve lost all respect for Peterson after this, “think of all the good restaurants” argument. It’s so boilerplate and unoriginal. The problem with multiculturalism is that you end up with a Tower of Babel. The US at this point is just a stretch of strip malls with different facades. It didn’t occur to me at the time because I didn’t want to think I was “racist” but it seemed very odd to me back in college to have been taught US history, essentially /my history/ being a 10th generation American by what was most likely a 2nd generation Muslim woman. She of course had her whole schtick about the evil white man… the same evil white man who built the country your Mohammedan parents came to to escape their Semitic hellhole. It’s just all so tiring.
To be fair, I think Peterson was trying to “strongman” the opposing argument, rather than personally arguing for multiculturalism.
That said, I see Peterson as only a stepping stone – and frankly a kind of weird one – towards saner positions further right. His staunch opposition to identity politics and ethnic consciousness, particularly for whites, is a call to unilateral disarmament in the face of competing groups who have no desire to give up their own ethnic solidarity. It’s like saying a country should disband its military police because violence is bad and instead we should all just get along. Nice fantasy, but that’s not the world we live in…
I cannot resist the urge to comment on Jonathon Bowden’s poor trigger discipline in the accompanying photo. (Purely a tongue in cheek comment, pay me no mind)
A fine article against the particularly soulless and pathetic argument of multicultural food – as though one needs mass importation and can’t just buy a foreign cookbook. English food is amongst the best in the world and I’d rather have a hearty fish pie or full English breakfast than anything from Asia.
That said though I think your treatment of the carnivore diet is unfair. Having done it for a time I know it’s exceptionally good for the body, and many people have had excellent results using it for a myriad of health issues. Peterson simply is not a good spokesman for it.
A lot of attractive words, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I think the author undercut his own argument by talking about nostalgia for childhood dishes, and cuisine as a marker of identity. That’s an appeal to the subjective. I don’t doubt that good English men love their own cuisine as part of their English culture, but is it objectively delicious?
Now, all that said, I agree that the English should love and defend their cuisine, as we should love and defend our family members… even if they aren’t objectively the best. To love one’s people and traditions despite their flaws is the essence of nationalism, and the preservative of the only good and beautiful kind of diversity in the world.
I love this response. Love it.
Twenty-odd years in the UK and I am sorry to say that, apart from very few occasions where the food served was excellent, it is difficult for me to give a positive judgement of British cooking. These occasions were in the homes of people who had the means to purchase good products, and the culture or education to prepare them. Good products exist but they are dear and not that easy to come. Otherwise, it is fish an’ chips and truckdriver’s breakfast for the gourmet in search of some culinary excitement. Puddings are generally very good indeed. And I had once, prepared as ritual, Stilton and Madeira wine which I still remember. Speaking of ritual, afternoon tea can be very enjoyable, some sort of oasis in a desert.
Never thought I’d see the words “English” and “cuisine” in the same sentence. A French chef once quipped that the only sauce the English know how to make is custard.
Regardless, I remain a fan of all the traditional English fare. I even go out of my way to dine at one of the ever scarcer greasy-spoon cafes. If a full English Breakfast was good enough for William Shakespeare, it’s good enough for me.
IN HEAVEN – the chefs are Italians, the mechanics are German, the police are British, the French are lovers and it is all managed by the Swiss.
IN HELL – the chefs are British, the mechanics are French, the police are German, the Swiss are lovers and it is all managed by the Italians.
Peterson mentioned an Italian restaurant in London where he was served spaghetti out of a can. Now, this says more about his gastronomic curiosity than anything else. Why would one go to such a place? The fact is, London has been home to fine and upscale Italian restaurants at least since the 1920s. But Peterson goes to a fry-up juke-joint where he gets canned spaghetti. He’ll never be a food critic.
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