Reinterpreting Prophecy

Dryden wrote in one of his satires about the ambitious Swede. These words seem strange to us today when we know Sweden as a neutral and peace loving country. The only relevance they would have to the modern reader is in relation to vegetables. The snark in Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the Snark is characterised by ambition amongst other things. As the snark does not even exist it is not unreasonable to imagine that the swede which does exist could be similarly ambitious.

It is not immediately obvious what a swede would be ambitious to become. A more popular vegetable possibly. The swede is rather old fashioned as vegetables go. Surely inside every common or garden plate fodder there is a Georgian aubergine trying to get out?

Other vegetables have more obvious ambitions. The potato for example. It is used in so many ways it has developed its own hierarchy based on its ultimate usage. Jacket potatoes are kings of the crop because they need less preparation to make them into a dish. This is why they were given jackets in the first place. Tinned potatoes, boiling potatoes and potatoes used in pie manufacture are the aristocrats. Potatoes used for chips come further down the ladder as they need to be altered quite severely to get them ready to eat in that way. Bottom of the heap are crisp potatoes. These Untouchables of the potato world need to be manhandled almost out of existence to form their dish. Some years ago Smiths Crisps produced an advert in which a group of potatoes reserved for another manufacturer revolted and insisted on being Smiths Crisps instead. They were of course portrayed as cheeky little groundlings rather than well educated and sophisticated uber-potatoes. The makers of the ad had not apparently researched the potato hierarchy properly but were still wiser than they knew.

The carrot is often held to be a reflection of a human condition. It is characterised by being orange and because people with ginger hair are always abused by the rest of the population it is assumed that the carrot is anxious to be a different colour just as red haired humans are presumed to be. Those of us who actually have red hair know that it is a mark of distinction and the negative reaction of other people is actually virulent jealousy. Nevertheless some well meaning people are now seeking to improve the lot of the humble carrot by producing it in other colours. This is patronising and completely misses the point. The carrot is perfectly happy being orange. It simply wishes to grow without its skin. The skin of carrots has got thinner and thinner as the years have gone by due to the desperate efforts of the carrots to rub it off. We have all seen the rippling rolls of flesh on a carrot that a bodybuilder would train for years to obtain. Carrots simply want to display their beautiful bodies before they are scraped and chopped and carved into unrecognisable shapes. We owe a lot to the carrot. Is it asking to much to breed it well enough to grant it its wish?

There is one ambitious vegetable whose desires are entirely justified and even more deserving of fulfilment than those of the carrot. This is of course the baked bean. The U.K. is the world's leading baked bean consumer but imports all its beans. We grow them here in large quantities. But we never use British baked beans simply because they are black. They taste just as good as the pure white ones we import. But the baked bean producers insist that the public will never tolerate black baked beans. The same argument was used to keep black people out of public service jobs for many years. It is merely a cover for their own racism. There has been precious little attempt by the black community to campaign on behalf of their bean brothers and this is a scandalous state of affairs. Racism cannot be combatted by committing vegetablism. We should be demanding our native baked beans now whether they be black, white, brown or yellow. Indeed positive discrimination is called for in this area to ensure that the oppressed black beans can not only form part of the British diet but be exported for others to enjoy. It is not known how enlightened other nations are on this issue as other nations do not eat the same quantities of baked beans. Is it too far fetched to presume that racially integrated beans would prove more popular with a wider section of the community? Certainly not if you ask the black baked beans which have long desired to play their proper part in the community.

The ambitions of vegetables are many and varied. They should all be treated with sympathy. Tomatoes would love to be harder so they were less liable to injury when being moved. Cabbage wants to be either large and tasty like lettuce or small and tasty like spinach. Lettuce wants to wear bikinis as it is always in water and spinach wants to demonstrate its own strength rather than being associated with popeye. Natives of Birmingham know only too well how callous people can be towards those who feed and nourish the rest of the country. It is not surprising to us that the ambitions of vegetables are so disregarded by the elites who claim to rule. With no communication there is no state. If we really want a nation which no vegetable would ever set foot in we are going the right way about it. But surely the Land Fit For Heroes To Live In that we were promised in 1945 is by definition a land for the vegetable too?