No, really! Britain's most liberal daily newspaper, the Guardian, has declared Apple Pie to be racist!
Food writer, Raj Patel, claimed all-American apple pie was born in colonialism and with slavery! He also pointed out that the actual apples first arrived in the west from central Asia some 4,000 years ago.
Patel who is a Brit of Indian descent, but now has US citizenship, wrote in the Guardian "Apples traveled to the western hemisphere with colonists in the 1500s in what used to be called the Columbian Exchange, but is now better understood as a vast and ongoing genocide of Indigenous people."
He said that British colonizers used apple trees as markers of civilization: "John Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed, took these markers of colonized property to the frontiers of US expansion where his trees stood as symbols that Indigenous communities had been extirpated."He then went after the sugar on the crust... seriously! He said sugar's arrival in America in the 1700s was linked to the French slave trade in New Orleans, and that the Big Easy 'had become a concomitant hub of the slave trade'.
Oh and the gingham cloth that apple pie is often pictured on... cultural appropriation!
"Not that the gingham on which our apple pie rests is uniquely American," he wrote.
"Columbus recorded cotton being used and worn during his first voyage by his Indigenous hosts. The gingham pattern likely originated in south-east Asia, the word deriving from the Malay genggang, a striped cloth that arrived in Europe as Europe colonized Asia."
As cancel culture came for Apple Pie (I LOVE apple pie by the way!) the reaction on social media was swift! "According to The Guardian newspaper (London), apple pie is racist too. These people are nuts," one tweeted while another went for sarcasm "Apple pie is so problematic for so many reasons. It perpetuates patriarchal and cis heteronormative oppression. And what about the people with gluten sensitivity? Apple pie is glutenist".