Yesterday I looked at statements in Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s Independent column where I think she stepped over the line into simple racism against the “indigenous British” (as she calls them). This is a line-by-line examination of Ms Alibhai-Brown’s illogical leaps and bounds, with some statistics and citations. And with a bit of ranting.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Quantum Leaps?

For those not familiar with the reference, Quantum Leap was a TV series where our heroes are moved to different times in history by a peculiar man in a white suit pressing a button on a souped up TV remote control. They then make sure that Archduke Ferdinand gets shot (or whatever) and the world is saved for another week. A sort of Scooby Doo with technology.

I am used to a similar experience at the tender hands of Ms Alibhai-Brown. We will be trundling along with a sensible and logical argument in the early paragraphs of a column, then suddenly there will be a flash, a bang and a wallop - and Yasmin has spontaneously translated us all to Planet Clanger and an entirely unrelated point.

Local Food Enthusiasts are Closet BNP Sympathisers

A vivid headline, but also a good seven word summary of the sentiment in Yasmin Alibahi-Brown ’s column last Monday. Suddenly people buy their vegetables locally have became fellow-travellers of the BNP - and I’m still struggling to work out how.

I think she’s mainly having a go at Gordon Ramsay, for suggesting that restaurants not using seasonal food should be fined (this wouldn’t catch the British food flown in for the Ramsay Dubai restaurant).

On Saturday night I committed untold crimes – against the nation, the planet, my grandchildren, and theirs. I should feel contrite and shabby, but I don’t. Fourteen dined at our table and were fed patties of cassava and sweet potatoes, spicy Kenyan beans with tindola – vegetables like cucumbers the size of a baby’s fingers. Also tilapia, a freshwater fish from East Africa, and a gruellingly difficult dish made with eight kinds of lentils, meat, oats and cracked wheat. Finally, almond and orange cake and raspberries in saffron cream. None of the ingredients was produced locally. This unrepentant sinner even chose Spanish raspberries, so sweet and more concentrated than the English variety.

Untold crimes? A bit of hyperbole there. But good stuff if you are trying to self-generate a lather.

Please don’t tell Gordon Ramsay, he might come over and shout obscenities, maybe throw foodstuff out in a testosterone surge. He has just called for the banning of imported, “unseasonal” produce from restaurants. Some diners at his fancy restaurants say that this would make him a hypocrite; it would also make him one of those crusader environmentalists whose organic piety promotes unwholesome nativism and conservatism.

Don’t worry. It’s only Gordon Ramsay in a tizzy. Bet he’s terrified of you. You are right on that point - it does indeed make him a hypocrite.

Indigenous Britons are in a mighty sulk over strangers on their shores, our weird languages, strong colours and tastes, and “unBritish” ways.

What ??? Quantum Leap alert .

Apparently Gordon Ramsay in a strop about Italian broccoli (or whatever) is a symbol that all of us 50 million plus indigenous Britains are xenophobes who hate foreign languages and foreigners. That would presumably be why of the 5.5 million of us choose to live abroad, perhaps 2 million are in non-English speaking countries. Count them - there are 41 countries with more than 10,000 permanent British residents.

Keeping out Kenyan beans and Caribbean pineapples is a sop to cultural paranoia, rising nausea.

Er … no. Ground control to Major Yaz - please come back down to Planet Earth.

The country can’t stomach any more foreignness and wants old simplicities back again.

Er … no, Yasmin. It’s Gordon Ramsay making a fuss about Californian oranges because his brand is tired, and you making a fuss about something completely unrelated. For information, 10% of Asian women in the UK have a white partner.

The rightful inhabitants think they want nothing but turnips and potatoes through our long winters, and in the summer, asparagus of genetically proven Englishness.

Er … no Yasmin. It is Gordon Ramsay the sweary TV Personality having a rant about Danish sausages and African fish because he wants us to pay him some attention. We have already observed that he is a hypocrite, so you can safely ignore all the rest.

Do you really have to try and ramp this up into a big political thing? It will only encourage the silly sausage to make more noise.

History from the Gilbert and Sullivan Playbook

For centuries, our island nation has been seafaring and roaming, restless and lusty, hedonistic and insatiably curious, mercantile and capitalist, unable ever to stay put.

Oooh-aaar missus ! Come here and I’ll splice your mainbrace for you, with me lusty and trusty British parsnip ! Would you like to come and have some stewed rabbit for tea?

Is there - maybe, just maybe - a slight attack of wish-dreaming and stereotypes here. Or perhaps we are all characters out of Hornblower and DH Lawrence without knowing it, and Yasmin is a calico-knickers and pinafore eccentric?

Through that history, the land periodically goes through cycles of self-pity and dread of the very things it seeks, withdrawing into itself, its cliffs becoming fortresses.

Yay! Pop historical psychology as well. I wonder if the Anglo-Saxons knew that their problem would be authoritatively diagnosed by a newspaper columnist a millenium and a bit later?

Sybaritic excess is followed by puritanism; internationalism is pushed out by petty patriotism.

Examples? Evidence? That sounds to me like postmodern assumptions inserted back into the medieval / reformation / trading / Empires / the EU in-out hokey-cokey narrative - Henry VIII as a summary of our history.

Who says patriotism is petty, anyway? Delighted that you seem to approve of Empire (”Internationalism”), though !

One thing for sure, this zeal will not be followed through to its logical end for that would mean the closure of Carluccio’s and tandoori houses, and even the most fundamentalist food purists would not dare tread that far.

Er .. what zeal? You haven’t demonstrated any. It’s just bloody Gordon Ramsay throwing a tantrum in a teacup. Oooh sorry - tea is foreign and I forgot that you had told me I hate it.

Mathematics from Planet Yasmin

(Quantum Leap 2 approaching)

OK, maybe I should take more seriously the green arguments. So I do, and the calculations make no sense.

You haven’t actually opposed any arguments that I have seen any Greens making. You have set up a caricature to rant at - that’s all.

(Quantum Leap alert 2)

Take a typical middle-class, UK family. They go on Ryanair trips and weekends abroad many times a year; drive hideously big cars, have umpteen gadgets and limitless consumer goods.

Errr. I thought you just said we were weird xenophobes. That would be apart from the tens of millions who you now say like visiting foreigners, then?

OK. The numbers. Remarkably I can’t find a figure for the size of the middle class, so let’s call it 15 million (which should be about right). Holiday trips to mainland Europe last year by air of 1-3 days come to just over 10 million. Hardly your “typical” middle class family taking “many” weekends away. And that’s completely ignoring the oiks and the toffs, who do their own bit of travel. (Source: International Passenger Survey 2006 - description, PDF report).

Perhaps Ealing is a different world. Can I recommend the odd research trip outside the M25 or inside the North Circular to add perspective?

But being conscientious, they will not buy corn sugar snap beans from East Africa. Big deal. Really do their bit, don’t they just?

Er … irrelevant, Yasmin. We’ve already shredded the basis of your stereotypes. Please stop building up a spurious head of steam, just to make it sound louder when you blow your whistle.

Crackers from the Iowa Cornfield

Writing in Time Magazine, Joel Stein …

Ooooh. You’re quoting a BLOGGER - you tease you.

… incisively questions “locavores” who are “deeply Luddite, part of the green lobby that measures improvement by self-denial more than by actual impact”.

No he doesn’t . His case against using local-food is based someone in the middle of a 100 mile wide cornfield in Iowa. All that shows is that Iowa is a corn-desert, and that Joel Stein is an unbalanced polemicist. Hardly a good example for a reasonable discussion of local food diversity; hardly comparable with the UK; hardly a sound basis for an opinion column in a UK newspaper.

His other point is that “buying foreign food is the only way we Americans learn about foreign countries”. As you just pointed out, millions of us go abroad all the time.

Furthermore, he implies, the injunctions encourage isolationism in the USA: “I’m going to keep buying food from my foreign neighbours. Because that is the only way Americans learn about other countries, other than by bombing them.”

Did you spot the tell tale? Let me hint: “U.S.A.” This is E.u.r.o.p.e.

Extreme, I agree, but indicating a link between politics and food that has gone missing in this Age of Environment.

Er … says who? Food seems pretty political to me. Ask a farmer.

(Quantum Leap Alert 3)

Should good people be party to a vociferous movement which wants to refuse entry to “alien” foods?

If it existed we might worry about it. Quote? Evidence? Citation? Examples of national politicians wanting to introduce a “Pineapple Police” to stop cross-cultural invasions by tins of Del Monte Chunks in Syrup? I thought not.

(Quantum Leap is here)

Look at the language used and you realise it is a proxy for anti-immigration sentiments: these foods from elsewhere come and take over our diets, reduce national dishes to third-class status, compete unfairly with Scotch broth and haggis, both dying out, excite our senses beyond decorum, contaminate the identity of the country irreversibly.

Er … bollocks. You are back on planet Clanger again.

As far as I am aware even Alex Salmond hasn’t started complaining about Bread Fruit diluting the cultural importance of Scotch broth and haggises. “Look at the language used”, and you realise that some people might be better off baking fruitcakes. And as for implying that anyone who takes care to buy their carrots from the farm next door thinks that imported food is “contaminating the identity of the country irreversibly” - you sound paranoid in your denunciations.

I don’t think it is your targets who are “excited beyond decorum”?

Turn to the clamour for the west to cut imported foods and a further bitter taste spreads in the mouth.

Clamour? What clamour? Some people insisting that flown-in food should be reduced in order to reduce C02 emissions, you mean? That looks like a no-brainer sensible policy to me.

If we decide – as many of my friends have – not to buy foods that have been flown over, it only means further devastation for the poorest. These are the incredibly hard-working farmers in the developing world, already the victims of trade protectionism imposed by the wealthy blocs.

I agree with you on that one. Partly. But the flown-in foods tend to have the lions share of the value going to supermarkets and importers not the producers. Check the numbers.

It means saying no to Fair-trade producers too, because their products have to travel to our supermarkets.

No it doesn’t. It means saying no to crackpot columnists with their nutty nostrums, while being thoroughly rational about our trade policy.

But that *is* a good question for the Fair-Trade Foundation (wa-hey, a sentence I agree with) - that they hadn’t started thinking about when I asked them 18 months ago. The answer is to extend the scheme to locally produced British foods.

Are we now to say these livelihoods don’t matter because we prefer virtue of a more fashionable kind?

Who said we are saying they didn’t matter, Yasmin? Oh - you did. That would be another straw man in your parade, then.

Shameful are the environmentalists who are able to be this cavalier.

Er … no. Shameful are the columnists who conjure up so many cardboard cutout opponents.

They could only believe what they do if those peasant lives do not matter at all.

A shameful stereotype and a shameful attack. That is the sort of deeply offensive statement that should get you sacked.

The 18th-century politician and gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote: “Tell me what you eat: I will tell you who you are.”

Tell me what you write: I will tell you who you are.

Localists tell us what to eat and turn Britons into panicked introverts just when we need global mutuality.

Once again, Mr Stein was writing about the U.S.A., and millions of us go abroad every year. So much for panicked introversion.

Go buy foreign, spite Gordon Ramsay, and save the world.

We never stopped. Shame on you for suggesting that we did.

Churches and the Homeless !

There was a similar Yasmin Quantum Leap before Christmas last year, where four people Yasmin observed walking away from church past a “young man in a sleeping bag” in an Ealing churchyard, turned into a shrill self-righteous “is this their Christianity?” asked of the entire indigenous population.

She apparently didn’t even enquire whether or not they had spoken to him when walking the other way earlier, before getting up on her preaching podium with her megaphone.

Meanwhile, many of the homelessness services in Ealing - as elsewhere - continue to be provided by the people Yasmin so despised - while doing her annual visit to buy charity Christmas cards.

Wrapping-Up

How does this guff get past the subeditors?

I think it is time for a certain Ms Alibhai-Brown to (be) retire(d) to the home for has-been columnists who can’t be bothered to do their homework, or put two logical thoughts together in the right order.

Final suggestion: what about a column about Corn Dollies not Straw Men next time. It’s far less laughable, and far better for my blood pressure.

Or even better - let a corn dolly write the damn thing; it would do a better job.