WHO TOUCHED YOUR FOOD?

The Woman Who Was Sick

There is a Little Britain sketch that has stayed with me for years.

Maggie eats something perfectly happily. Then she discovers that somebody from a group she dislikes has been involved with it.

Suddenly she is horrified.

Then she vomits.

The joke is grotesque because it takes prejudice and makes it physical.

The food hasn’t suddenly changed. Nothing poisonous has appeared in it. The only new information is who was connected to it.

Watching Britain now, I sometimes wonder why people who genuinely hold those prejudices aren’t doing exactly the same thing.

Stand By Your Principles

Britain undoubtedly has racists.

I don’t mean somebody asking difficult questions about immigration numbers, housing, wages, integration or public services. Those are legitimate political arguments.

I mean actual racism: believing somebody is inferior, threatening or less entitled to belong because of their race or ethnicity.

And prejudice rarely seems to live neatly inside a single box.

Research into generalised prejudice has found associations between hostility towards different out-groups.

That doesn’t mean every racist is automatically homophobic, or every homophobe automatically sexist. Human beings are more complicated than that.

But different prejudices can cluster.

Which makes the everyday practical question fascinating.

Pick up your strawberries.

Who picked them?

Pick up your chicken.

Who processed it?

Who packed it?

Who drove it?

Who unloaded it?

Who maintained the machinery?

Who wrote the warehouse software?

Who stacked it?

Who served you?

Was everybody acceptable?

More importantly: how would you ever know?

The White-British Supermarket

Imagine opening a supermarket for somebody who genuinely wants an ethnically exclusive supply chain.

Not simply a Union Jack printed on the packet.

I mean the whole thing.

Everybody involved must satisfy the test.

Now start removing things.

Tea becomes awkward.

Coffee becomes awkward.

Chocolate, bananas, rice, spices, citrus fruit and countless other ordinary products immediately reveal the international system sitting behind the British supermarket.

In 2025, Britain produced only around 58% of the food consumed here on Defra’s farm-gate measure.

And even a product labelled British doesn’t imply an exclusively British workforce.

Census analysis found that around four in ten workers in food manufacturing in England and Wales were born outside the UK. ONS Census 2021 analysis puts the figure at 40.4%.

So our fictional supermarket starts looking rather empty.

Tell Us Who Touched It

Perhaps every product needs another label.

Follow every human being who contributed to the product from the field to the checkout.

It becomes absurd almost immediately.

The man complaining about gay people needs a plumber.

Is the plumber gay?

Someone furious about Muslims has a broken car.

Is the mechanic Muslim?

Somebody who dislikes immigrants requires surgery.

Where was the surgeon born?

Suddenly principles become expensive.

Modern prejudice can become remarkably flexible the moment maintaining it becomes personally inconvenient.

What About Gay Hands?

This part interests me personally.

I’m bisexual.

Somebody is perfectly entitled to hold a religious belief about homosexuality. I don’t require every stranger on Earth to approve of my sexuality.

But if that objection is important enough to influence what rights gay or bisexual people should have, let’s take the principle into ordinary life.

Would you refuse food prepared by a gay chef?

Would you refuse medication developed by a gay scientist?

Would you change doctors?

Would you refuse to fly because a lesbian engineer had maintained the aircraft?

Would you demand heterosexual certification before somebody repaired your boiler?

Of course, there is another rather large problem.

You don’t know.

Sexuality isn’t printed on somebody’s forehead.

The sandwich has already been made.

Then You Walk Into Hospital

Food is the easy version of this argument.

Your principles become considerably more interesting when something has gone wrong with your body.

In June 2025, around 325,000 of the NHS’s 1.5 million staff in England reported a nationality other than British, according to the House of Commons Library’s analysis of NHS workforce data.

That’s roughly one in five.

Among doctors, the proportion reporting a non-British nationality was around 36%.

Among nurses, it was around 30%.

In London, around 32% of NHS staff reported a nationality other than British.

So what happens?

You’ve spent the morning complaining about foreigners.

By the afternoon you’re in A&E.

Do you ask where the doctor was born before they stop you bleeding?

Do you ask the nurse’s nationality before accepting the medication?

Or does the ideological border suddenly disappear when you’re frightened and somebody knows how to help you?

What If They Don’t Want To Serve You?

There is another side to this relationship.

What happens when the person providing the service decides they don’t want to provide it?

In June 2025, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson, was dining with a group at Hawksmoor Air Street in London.

The party had already been served starters when they were asked to leave.

In footage of the encounter, the manager said members of staff felt uncomfortable serving the group.

Hawksmoor subsequently framed its response around its duty of care towards staff.

I’m not interested here in pretending I know the personal background, politics, ethnicity or religion of individual workers involved.

I don’t.

The interesting thing is the relationship itself.

Political rhetoric often talks about groups of people as abstractions.

Then somebody has to bring the steak to the table.

Somebody has to pour the drink.

Somebody has to clean the room.

Somebody has to drive the taxi home.

Suddenly the culture war has a human face standing three feet away.

I Already Check Where My Food Comes From

There is another side to this argument, and I’m not going to pretend I’m some perfectly neutral consumer.

I already discriminate when I shop.

Just not between human beings.

Since Brexit, and particularly after everything I’ve read and watched about environmental standards, sewage, regulation and food production, I’ve increasingly found myself checking where things come from.

In some circumstances, I’ve actively started buying away from Britain.

I look at imported meat.

I think about where fish has been caught.

Seeing a Union Jack on a packet does not automatically reassure me.

But my own behaviour has to survive exactly the same test I’m applying to everybody else.

Imported does not automatically mean better.

British does not automatically mean worse.

A foreign flag isn’t a certificate of quality any more than a Union Jack is.

If the evidence shows a British producer is operating to excellent standards, dismissing that product simply because it’s British would be irrational.

The distinction is important.

When Food Really Was the Experiment

There is a reason modern countries developed food-safety regulation in the first place.

Industrial food production created extraordinary abundance.

It also created extraordinary opportunities to sell people things that could make them ill.

One of the strangest examples came from the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Government chemist Harvey Wiley recruited volunteers for experiments that became popularly known as the Poison Squad.

The volunteers consumed meals containing preservatives and additives while their effects were investigated.

The experiments belonged to a much larger struggle over adulterated food, industrial production and the need for stronger consumer protection.

That history matters because it reminds us what food scrutiny is actually supposed to do.

Ask what is in it.

Ask what happened to it.

Ask whether the system around it is safe.

Ask whether somebody is cutting corners.

Ask whether the regulator is doing its job.

Those questions can keep people alive.

Asking whether the person who packed it was Black, Indian, Muslim, Polish or gay cannot.