In an effort to keep up with the times and serve a profitable market segment,  southern-style comfort-food restaurant chain Cracker Barrel recently added a new item to its menu.

“Experience the out of this world flavor of Impossible [TM] Sausage,” the “Old Country Store” announced in an August 1 Facebook post, accompanied by a photo of two of the plant-based patties.

Responses across thousands of comments vary from gratitude to “meh, I’ll stick with the real thing” to … well, here’s a somewhat representative sample from commenter “Barry Deaton”:

“I just want to know why all these companies feel that they have to follow the leader on all of this crap. Cracker Barrel is a great company and they got great Without Woke Meat. Get the message most people don’t want this crap. You are only appealing to a small percentage of people. I still love Cracker Barrel but please stick to your roots.”

Yes, there are even calls going around for a boycott.

My priors were, thankfully, not confirmed when I clicked on a link to a piece by minister Brett Younger at Baptist News Global titled “Are left-wing radicals pushing Cracker Barrel to the edge of the slippery slope?”

“They call it ‘comfort food’ for a reason, writes Younger. “It makes us feel comfortable. The latest silliness is not about sausage but fear of change. Social media magnifies our foolishness, so we need to think about which wars are worth fighting.”

Can I get an amen?

Cracker Barrel isn’t “going woke.” Cracker Barrel is noticing a market opportunity and hoping to profit from it.

Somewhere between 5% and 10% of Americans (depending on which poll you look at) consider themselves “vegetarians” or “vegans.”

More than one in five Americans say they’re eating less meat, mostly for health reasons.

That’s a lot of people buying and eating a lot of food.

If I had to guess at Cracker Barrel’s demographic focus, I’d guess it’s on the high side — lots of early Gen Xers and Boomers, many of whom have been told by their doctors to cut back on the meat (especially red meat) for heart health, to reduce cholesterol levels, etc. — and families with internally diverse dietary needs and preferences.

That’s why Cracker Barrel’s menu already includes options like chicken sausage links and egg whites.

Let me emphasize: Options!

You can still get “Grandpa’s Country Fried Breakfast”:  “Two eggs with choice of Breakfast Side plus Country Fried Steak or Fried Sunday Homestyle Chicken. Served with Biscuits n’ Gravy.”

You can still get the “Country Boy Breakfast” — three eggs, sirloin steak AND ham, and biscuits with gravy.

They’re not going to chain you to a chair and force-feed you egg whites and Impossible [TM] Sausage.

You could also drive through Burger King and order an Impossible [TM] plant-based Whopper, or the original with a beef patty.

Or you can sit at home and eat spinach, or chocolate-covered pork rinds.

Relax. Variety and choice are the spice of life. And the exact opposite of “woke.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

That today’s culture wars lack a convenient place to pigeonhole Tom Cornell, whose seven decades of activism in the Catholic Worker movement continued until his passing on August 1, shows their limitations rather than his.

In a 2002 profile, Andrew Blackman noted that Cornell “shares common beliefs with liberals and neo-conservatives, communists and cardinals, and he harshly criticizes all of them.” Cornell was the sort of radical for social justice who told liberals that radicalism didn’t mean being “liberal but more so,” since his analysis of the ills of war and poverty traced them to fundamentally “different premises.” He wasn’t any more accommodating to those who professed his anti-abortion position but who seemed to be only  “concerned about people … until they’re born.”

Cornell’s means were just as distinct from partisan politics on either side. In a 2014 interview with Commonweal, he explained: “In the Bible we read, ‘I was hungry and you fed me.’ It does not say, ‘I was hungry and you formed a committee!’ Our thing is just getting down and doing it.”

Cornell’s opposition to the wars in Vietnam and Iraq drew and built on a tradition of Catholic Worker pacifism going back to Ammon Hennacy’s noncompliance with the draft during World War I (Hennacy was the sort of labor comrade Dorothy Day could dub “a pacifist even in the class war”). Cornell was instrumental in legitimizing pacifism as an alternative to just war theology and ensuring, as Karl Hess observed at the American bicentennial, “that when for reasons of conscience, people refuse to kill, they are often exempted from active military duty.”

If, as Hess added, “there are no exemptions for people who, for reasons of conscience, refuse to financially support the bureaucracy that actually does the killing” (since “the state takes money more seriously than life”), that was not for Cornell’s lack of trying. A 1967 petition cosigned by Cornell vouched that living below the minimum income tax threshold was morally preferable to funding the “poisoning of food crops, blasting of villages, napalming and killing of thousands upon thousands of people.”

Raising that income tax threshold would allow more workers of all belief systems to follow Cornell’s example. Meanwhile, the sort of voluntary community organizing pioneered by Cornell and other Catholic Workers to deal directly with social problems could make up for any ensuing budget shortfalls for the functions of the state that aren’t deadly.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “A Pacifist Even in the Tax War” by Joel Schlosberg, Antiwar.com, August 8, 2022
2. “A Pacifist Even in the Tax War” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, August 10, 2022

On August 2, voters in Kansas rejected an amendment to the state constitution which would have increased the legislature’s power to regulate (or ban) abortion.

Pro-choice groups hailed the outcome as evidence that abortion rights are a “winning issue” this year; partisan Democrats have reason to look more hopefully toward their chances of holding on to majorities in the US Senate, and maybe even the House of Representatives, this November.

More interesting, I think, is what the result tells us about where the “moderate center” is in American politics. Letting people vote on one specific issue often produces very different outcomes from letting people vote on “representatives” based on the candidates’ baskets of multiple issues.

In order to understand where Kansas is going after the referendum, it’s useful to consider where it started prior to the referendum and what passage would have changed.

Per existing Kansas law, abortion is already banned after 22 weeks. Parental consent is required for minors seeking the procedure. There’s a 24-hour waiting period for the procedure.  Government funding for abortion is only available if the pregnancy threatens the mother’s life.

In other words, Kansas without the amendment was neither paradise for the “ban it from conception” crowd nor Utopia for the “it’s an absolute right up to the moment of birth” crowd.

Had the amendment passed, the constitution would have explicitly stated that abortion is not a “right” and that the state legislature could impose additional restrictions on it.

By defeating the amendment, Kansans chose to keep things just as they already were.

Had this been a legislative election, the voters would have likely faced a binary choice between Republicans who wanted more government regulation of abortion, and Democrats who wanted less government restriction of abortion.

The voters comprising the big “center” — those who may or may not be comfortable with abortion, but resemble neither of the polar “ban it” or “don’t touch it” ends of the issue — wouldn’t have had an option there. They’d likely have gone with one of the two parties based not on (or at least not JUST on) abortion, but on a whole raft of issues and personalized identity affiliations.

In a close election, the “extremist” voters on either side might  provide the margin of victory to one side or the other, and would certainly claim that victory as indicating support for their positions, but that claim would ring hollow.

In this single-issue referendum, “extremist” voters were swamped by “moderate” voters who might or might not support the existing restrictions, but see no reason to expand those restrictions — or at least no reason to trust legislators with that power.

As someone who doesn’t always trust the collective judgments of “the people,” but who trusts the judgments of politicians even less, I find that result quite pleasing.

Unfortunately, this outcome highlights why a “centrist” party can’t win in “representative” elections. Our system is designed to divvy up the “center” into large, roughly equal partisan blocs so that “extremists” control the balance of power.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY