We should all be free to call each other ‘coconut’

I asked my local greengrocer for a couple of blood oranges last weekend. They were to go with an orange cake I’d baked for some left-wing friends who were coming over — a nice left-wing cake, I thought. No flour or butter in it (both right-wing ingredients, historically), just ground almonds, eggs, sugar and oranges. A cake eaten in parts of Spain which were implacably opposed to the Falangists, and also enjoyed in Morocco which is, de facto, a left-wing place because it’s in Africa. Or that’s what I thought at first. Then I noticed a line in the recipe that said I had to examine the cracked eggs with a magnifying glass to make sure there were none of those tiny red bits of embryonic chicks which you sometimes get with eggs. That’s a bit scrupulous, I thought, but didn’t get why it was so scrupulous.

Turns out it was a Sephardic Jewish recipe for Passover and my left-wing friends wouldn’t touch it — this cake was directly implicated in the oppression of Palestinians, occupying their lands, building large walls across the country, machine-gunning Turkish peace flotillas etc, shouldn’t be consumed and shouldn’t be given tenure in British universities.