Who's Afraid of Plant-Based Ice Cream?

When every little petty grievance and misunderstanding opens a new front in the culture wars, we're in big trouble.

Excuse me, I think there’s something wrong with my ice cream? Source: Karolina Kołodziejczak on Unsplash.

At the risk of taking the bait, I’m going to write about the right’s latest culture war outrages: woke lids and plant-based ice cream. I’m exaggerating a bit. In recent days, the former caught a lot of heat online and, presumably, some offline, including from a Conservative member of Parliament. The latter was set off by another Conservative MP who was triggered by carton of Häagen-Dazs he seems to have misread or misunderstood. But each instance is a case study in just how far down the rabbit hole we are right now. And as absurd as things have gotten, I don’t think we’ve hit rock bottom yet.

There’s no sense in running down the details of each case too thoroughly. The Tim Horton’s lids are a case of the decidedly-mid coffee giant replacing some of its plastic lids with paper lids in a pilot project at some stores. Tim’s says the switch at certain locations is a test as they look to reduce plastic waste. So, the company is collecting data, trying things out, and working on addressing a shared problem that pollutes the planet.

Fibre-based lids are annoying, like their counterpart straws, but plastic pollution is a serious problem, and we need to figure it out. Really, that’s the story. It’s a problem we need to solve. The lids need to get better. In the long run they will, and we’ll switch. In and of itself, it’s a story worthy of paragraph or two at best and nothing worthy of the histrionics we’ve seen.

The ice cream thing is even sillier. A Conservative MP claimed plant-based ice cream “isn’t ice cream) and that marketing/packaging it as ice cream “should be illegal.” At least that’s my reading of his post — not that the product itself should be illegal, but the way it’s packaged and marketed should be tightly controlled by, one assumes, BIG GOVERNMENT. He goes on to call for a “Truth in labelling law” so that people know they’re getting the “real,” thing, whatever that is.

The ice cream in question is clearly marked as plant-based — which you can see here — and pretty much every plant-based or alternative milk or cheese or ice cream product I’ve ever come across is also clearly marked. That’s obviously beside the point. Perhaps there’s some politics here, as always, since politicians across the political spectrum love to pander to the dairy cartel in Canada, but there’s plenty of right-wing virtue signalling and rabble-rousing going on here and in the Tim Horton’s lid case.

When the right blows up these non-stories, they’re signalling at once that the government (somehow, it’s always the government, not the companies in a free market making business decisions based on long-term trends and goals) is too big, too powerful, and too dangerous. They want to change everything, and fast; they want to control every bit of your life. It’s Soviet totalitarianism by way of oats! Because one you go down that road, it’s a short hop, skip, and a jump to eating bugs. Bugs! Just like Orwell warned.

We could have productive conversations in these cases about trade-offs: we could talk about the quality of fibre-based alternatives to plastic, about how that affects the population (for instance, folks with disabilities who can’t use paper straws), or whether labels are clear and simple. There are discussions to be had there. But the right-wing frame always jumps to Big Government, “woke” politics, and the culture war. And as soon as it goes that way, we cut off chances to talk, understand the issues at hand, discuss options and trade-offs, and solve problems.

One of the biggest problems with treating every issue as a chance to open a new front in the culture wars — rather like seeing every problem as a nail when the only tool you have is a hammer — is that you can apply this approach to almost any issue without solving any problems. Woke lids, Stalinist ice cream, commie bike lanes, hippie defence policy, whatever. There’s no end to it because culture war politics is so amorphous, ever-expanding like the size of the universe, and the warring itself is the point.

Politicians therefore can, and do, bring issues both silly and substantive into the culture war frame, which leaves us all worse off, except those who cynically use this approach to whip up cheap outrage, maybe raise a few fundraising bucks, and solidify their base. But what then?

The left does this, too. I don’t think the two are equivalent. I think the right is worse and more dangerous. While left-wing culture warification can be absurd, obscure or override important class politics discussions and priorities, the initial stance tends towards inclusion and is rooted in a concern for justice, however, misguided that can become. There’s more to explore there, but that’s for another post.

At any rate, I took the bait here because I think it’s important to point out that the predominantly right-wing trend of turning every issue into a melodramatic, partisan, zero sum, culture war struggle forestalls chances at discussion, deliberation, and debate that are essential for solving big and small problems. It’s also polarizing, which isn’t inherently bad since we disagree about things and there are better and worse approaches to sorting the world, but it’s a form of toxic polarization that is corrosive to public trust while providing no useful solutions. It’s truly the paper lid of politics and we’d be far better without it.