On Wednesday, June 22, a day before the referendum for or against Brexit in the United Kingdom, a group of people boarded the Eurostar at Paris’s Gare du Nord, carrying trays full of hot croissants bound for Kings Cross, a train station in London. With an initial agreement with the legendary French bakery Poilâne, the idea was to distribute these croissants with a small handmade card containing various anti-Brexit messages. Among these were notes explaining how a young English woman, thanks to the EU, could receive free bakery education in France, just like any French youth, and could distinguish between a straight croissant made with butter and a crescent-shaped one made with margarine. Other handwritten messages from the French included slogans for the English such as: “We love you, we love your music, your humor, please don’t leave.”
British law prohibits distributing food or drink for political purposes, so the English activists decided to donate the croissants to a shelter to avoid arrest. Nevertheless, they managed to hand out the handwritten cards, which caused a stir among some citizens who received this message as a different kind of campaign. Although most Londoners voted to remain, we now know that the results of Friday’s election were determined by other districts.
It is interesting to note that among the pro-Brexit voices, one of the main demands was anti-immigrant ideology. As an example, they claimed that English cuisine had been distorted to make way for Indian cuisine as part of the famous and increasingly overrated national identity. Those English should remember that the fact that Indian food is the number one cuisine in the UK is not accidental, nor simply because a group of Indians decided one day to emigrate to the UK. Like almost all national cuisines, it is the result of continuous exchange and culinary reconfigurations, largely a product of the UK’s centuries-old colonial politics and ideology.
Analyzing the eating habits of the English, today they are also shaped by products from all over Europe. It is interesting to see how eating salads with raw vegetables dressed with olive oil dates only from the postwar era, when more of these goods began arriving from Italy. To illustrate with another example: in 1957, pasta was still considered an exotic product; so much so that a BBC April Fool’s Day mockumentary showing Swiss families harvesting “spaghetti bushes” managed to fool many English people about the origin of this food.
What should be worrying the English, for example, is where they will get their seasonal cheap labor to harvest their prized apples and pears, which are the basis for the famous Bramley pie filling, protected by European denomination of origin laws. Speaking of laws, they should already be concerned about how they will protect their products with EU-granted denomination of origin, like cheddar cheese, to prevent cheaper copies from being made elsewhere. Or how to keep their crops free from pesticides, which until now have been strictly regulated by the EU and which many English farmers resent not being able to use.
Beyond this, the UK restaurant industry is largely made up of migrant labor. The major discount chains where the working class buys its food, like Lidl, are of German origin. In addition to the financial market speculation provoked by Brexit, there is undoubtedly a deeper concern that affects all citizens of the world: little by little, extreme nationalist ideologies are taking the global stage in a world where the last thing we need are divisions and ideologies of false nationalist supremacy.
Originally published in El Economista
@Lillie_ML
— This article was originally published in Spanish by Liliana Martínez Lomelí. Translation generated with AI from the original text.