Why I like right-wing fruit

I recently bought some quinces in our local farmshop as part of my new policy of investing heavily in right-wing fruit, vegetables and legumes. This undertaking, born of principle, has meant a surfeit of cauliflower in our diet, the brassica having been identified by the Democratic party congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a signifier of white colonialism.

That the quince is decidedly right of centre is surely beyond dispute. It was first grown in England by Edward I, the ‘Hammer of the Scots’, a man who would have made short work of Nicola Sturgeon. In the 5th century BC the fruit cropped up in Aristophanes’s play The Acharnians, when the farmer Dicaeopolis remarks to a teenage sex-worker: ‘Oh! my gods! what bosoms! Hard as a quince! Come, my treasures, give me voluptuous kisses!’ Aristophanes was clearly not a signatory to the #MeToo movement. A couple of centuries later, Callimachus tells us how Acontius uses a quince to pull some chick in the garden of Aphrodite, thus establishing the quince as the go-to symbol for elderly men pursuing underaged women.