BBC presenter and Times columnist Giles Coren has been accused of “blatant racism” in his latest review of an East London restaurant.
In his Times Magazine review, of a new Popeyes branch in Stratford, East London, Coren said “exploiters” of fried chicken recipes in chain restaurants had brought ” obesity, sloth, waste, [and] high street degradation” to white communities.
However, readers accused Coren, 52, of associating Black people with these negative effects and blasted the review as “blatant racism”, with one commenter saying it was “disturbing to see” the piece in a national newspaper.
In a comment to MyLondon, Coren denied this association and said he was “sad and baffled ” by the criticism.
“I abhor and despise racism and racists, which is why I wanted to acknowledge and criticise the complex history of fried chicken as it is represented today on our high streets,” he said.
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In the review, the Amazing Hotels presenter described visiting the chain at the end of the Christmas holidays with his two young children, where he ate a chicken sandwich.
He described fried chicken chains and the product as ” the appropriation of an essentially black dish by white cooks and recipe writers”, and said their popularity had relied on “the century-long racist mockery of African-Americans as primitive hungerers after a single foodstuff”.
Coren added: “But I tend to think, yes, sure, white exploiters stole fried chicken from the Black people they disenfranchised and impoverished, but look at what the theft has brought to white communities in terms of obesity, sloth, waste, high street degradation, dismal culinary monoculture, low pay, animal welfare atrocities…
“Isn’t fried chicken, in a weird way, a form of race revenge? The thrusting young economies of West Africa now must surely look at a KFC bargain bucket and high-five themselves that their ancestors had the forethought, all those years ago, to provide the means by which white culture would one day poison itself to death.”
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Outraged readers posted their criticisms of the review on Twitter, with one writing: “This review by Giles Coren in The Times is easily one of the most overtly racist things I’ve read published in a major newspaper in the 21st Century.”
Another said: “Yes Giles Coren is a d***head but how many editors did this pass through before it was published?”
A third added: “Giles Coren thinking that the people of West Africa, a few generations ago, planned to ‘poison white culture’ using fried chicken is, quite frankly, f***ing mental.”
The Independent’s Race Correspondent, Nadine White, tweeted: “A review of the new London Popeyes restaurant in The Times. Fried chicken = Black people = sloth, waste, degradation.”
Giles Coren told MyLondon: “I am so sad and baffled that a piece I wrote about the historical racist appropriation of black food culture by profiteering white-owned corporations has been interpreted in this way.
“I abhor and despise racism and racists, which is why I wanted to acknowledge and criticise the complex history of fried chicken as it is represented today on our high streets.
“There is no ‘association of black culture with sloth, waste and degradation’ in the article, only of the way in which those things have been visited upon the world by the massive corporate fast food boom that industrialised existing food traditions.
“In the work I have done around child obesity and food poverty with the charity Bite Back 2030 I have listened to young people from all parts of London describing the “food desert” some of them live in because fast food outlets selling burgers, fried chicken, cheap pizza and the like have driven all other options from our high streets, and how that corporate exploitation must be challenged. And that is what I tried to do in my review of Popeyes.”
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