Foreign Food For Thought

April 17, 2012 by Anastasia Kyriacou in Some Thoughts with 0 Comments

Britain needs immigrants just as much as it needs their foreign food.

Of course imports and immigrants are not the same, but they perform the same task – that is they leave their country to enter another. Think of England’s signature domestic dishes; fish and chips, spag bowl, apple pie; after watching Jamie Oliver’s Jamie’s Great Britain, it dawned on me how every single one of these “British” meals were in every way not British. Even cider isn’t English, considering apples’ origins are Chinese. So unless the BNP ‘grow their own’, how absurd is it that they preach against foreigners all day and then come home to eat imported produce! (And probably continue preaching prejudice).

Jamaican poet and activist Louise Bennett wrote a poem called Colonization in Reverse, which mocks how in the late 1940s and 1950s the British were calling for Jamaicans to come to England to be exploited as cheap labour, and now the British complain how foreigners ‘take our jobs’. Most significant are her final two lines ‘but me wonderin how dem gwine stan, Colonizin in reverse’, for they truly state what racist nationalists must realise – Britain would unquestionably suffer if immigrants were to be “sent back to where they came from”. Generations of immigrants have unarguably contributed vastly to make this country what it is today, and therefore it is a fair statement to make that Britain needs immigrants just as much as it needs their foreign food.

So tell me, what is it to be British, when British history revolves around either their conquest or enslavement of other races? Perhaps members of the BNP should try ancestry.co.uk’s fourteen day free trial and see where their roots really lie, maybe then they won’t feel bad for that Saturday night cheeky chicken korma. So before you think about being racist, try to remember what you had for tea last night. (Tea originates in India by the way).