I recently ran across an interesting article in a food blog I regularly scan for source material, and it turned out to be something other than I was expecting. So I decided to write the story I had been expecting, which I thought would be a darned sight more interesting…
A detailed guide to intro-through-advanced Pie Throwing – part
of the Monty Python sketch, ‘History of the Joke’…
Here’s what happened…
I was scrolling through the usual suspects looking for something a little looney to start off another week of renewed COVID-19 lock down drudgery with a little colour and an off-beat flavour when I saw the headline: ‘Pig Guts Literally Flew As Taiwan Politicians Brawled Over American Pork’.
I figured that Pork Taiwan pork producers were getting a little help from their parliamentary opposition parties over a trade dispute that threatened their livelihoods. This kind of thing often happens when local farmers get undersold by imports. But it wasn’t that, exactly. Taiwanese pork growers and others were protesting the import of U.S. meat raised with the help of a growth aid called ractopamine, a substance similar to adrenaline or epinephrine.
The use of ractopamine had been banned in Taiwan until this past September, hen the government ruled it legal in a move help increase Pork availability. Opposition politicians echoed the outrage of picky Chinese consumers who opposed the move, saying the chemical could have serious side effects on humans. The protesting lawmakers brought baskets of Pig intestines and other ‘Pork byproducts’ into their legislature to throw at government members of the Chinese parliament, the Kuomintang.
But I wanted to find out about food-throwing
I quickly Googled up a few thousand pages of online posts on the subject that chronicled a plethora of examples and origin stories involving the throwing of food as a protest. Even I – who thought I’d seen and/or heard it all – was especially fascinated, particularly by some of the more obscure examples…
Cream Pies ‘weaponized’ early on
One such post looked at the history of Pie Throwing as a serious protest. It seems that the practice of Pie Throwing, or ‘Placing’ as an entertainment device, has been in vogue since silent film maker Mack Sennett first portrayed it in one of his productions in the early 20th Century. In a completely separate evolutionary line, Pie-throwing appears to go back at least as far as the 1600s, when a mob of Spanish bakery owners snuck into a state dinner for visiting members of the Hapsburg Monarchy, protesting heavy taxation and military conscription.
More recently, members of the public whose names have mostly been lost to the official record have managed to throw Pies into the faces of such historic figures as Watergate perpetrator G. Gordon Liddy in 1977, hydrogen bomb inventor Edward Teller in 1980 and Monsanto’s CEO Robert Shapiro in 1998. World Trade Organization head Renato Ruggiero was also hit in 1998, followed by Microsoft’s Bill Gates in 1999, haute couture designer Calvin Klein in 2001, the Green Party’s Ralph Nader in 2003, and conservative socio-political icon Ann Coulter in 2004.
Nothing more need be said about the immortal Cream Pie than that one of the most hilarious treatments of the topic came in, when the Monty Python guys presented a detailed, ‘learned’ seminar on the phenomenon (see video, above), preserved on the 1982 album/video of Live at the Hollowood Bowl…
Vegetables in general
According to an article at Bon Appétit.com, “Perhaps the first recorded food protest took place in 63 A.D., when Vespasian—then the governor of Africa, later emperor—was pelted with turnips by the people of Hadrumetum, who may have been angry about food shortages.
In a much more modern related incident, a delegation of American Broccoli Growers dumped truckloads of their produce onto the White House lawn after then President George H.W. Bush revealed in a 1990 interview that he hated the highly nutritious Dark Green Vegetable – one of more than 70 recorded mentions of the Veggie during his term.
Throughout recorded history, protestors have thrown discarded or rotten Veggies at their political targets to protest policies of all kinds.
Undisputed Veggie icons
But the most storied and prized of Food projectiles remain the Egg and the Tomato.
Asked why, Columbia University political science professor Andrew Gelman explained: “My guess is that people throw food because it is cheap, visible, and easily accessible. Tomatoes are inexpensive, easy to throw, and make a satisfying splat. Eggs are easy to throw and leave a big mess. Food throwing is also basically nonviolent. You throw rocks and the police might shoot back at you. But the cops would look pretty foolish shooting you for throwing food. So I’m thinking practicality rather than symbolic value here.”
My take
Seriously… I don’t in any way copndone the waste of any good, wholesome, healthy food. But if it’s already been sacrificed to the Gods of Perfection, recycled into the dumpster or onto the compost heap, I’ll concede it’s become fair game protestors by that point. It’s heart warming to admit that common produce can still do some social or political good, even in superannuated condition.
But it doesn’t explain why folks don’t throw surplus Zucchini in the summer and early fall, when those Veggies are at least as plentiful as rotting Tomatoes. As scientists and scholars always say in situations like this: “Further research is clearly needed in this area of investigation.”
My sincere thanks…
… To Fast Company.com, Bon Appétit.com, Wikipedia.com, and many another online sources for material appearing in this unabashedly derivative post.
Have fun, and good luck
So, have fun whiling away another pandemic lock down Monday, clicking link after link on this truly entrancing topic!
~ Maggie J.