Food chain 4 February 2004, 15:21

When its size grows sufficiently, your audience can more properly be called the public. And that’s when the freaks and cranks start grinding away. You started out as one voice among the many, but now you are The Man. You’ve become something that inspires folks to complain, protest, rebel, and secede from. Things are not like that yet at the ever-modest Beetroot.

But I’ve noticed since US Thanksgiving that the vegetarians have been at Cypher’s foodlog. Chalk it up to cultural differences between veggies and carnivores.

Friends have heard me quip before: if cultural differences didn’t inspire such sharp outrage, these differences wouldn’t matter and we’d all just be one culture. Tolerance is a lovely idea, but in practice there’s nothing to fall back on but a combination of lip service to diversity with the polite hypocrisy of approving only those diversities along an unspecified, narrow continuum.

Food is by no means neutral territory, no matter how multicultural and cosmopolitan a city you live in. It isn’t simply a matter of taste. Food elicits a palpably visceral gut reaction. The idea of what is appetizing varies between cultures: very markedly between the dominant (carnivore) culture and the alternative espoused by those (veggie) revolutionaries. Let’s face it, it’s useless to proselytize for either side in this conflict between aesthetics and ideology. But I keep thinking of Salman Rushdie and his bacon sandwiches.

Cypher also happens to run Fotolog. It has a lot of Brazilian users. For this reason, voices are rising, saying that there should be a version of Fotolog in Portuguese. Popularity; population; politics.

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