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‘Taking care of your family is racist. Gotcha’: Leftist professor’s hit piece on neat pantries met with scorn

March 18, 2023 | | Print Article

The “everything is racist” crowd has a new axe to grind, marching double-time toward the downfall of society as associate professor Karen, Ph.D. endeavored to coin a new term in the fight against the white-dominated, heteronormative patriarchy: “pantry porn.”

Yes, after decades of admiration for Martha Stewart-types and funneling billions into the home and garden industry, white guilt has come to Bed, Bath & Beyond, like all crackpot ideas, through pseudo-intellectual busybodies. The latest was handed down from Loyola University of Chicago associate professor of marketing Dr. Jenna Drenten as she wrote for “The Conversation” about the supposedly COVID-born offspring of food porn.

“Storing spices in coordinated glass jars and color-coordinating dozens of sprinkles containers may seem trivial. But tidiness is tangled up with status, and messiness is loaded with assumptions about personal responsibility and respectability,” she wrote for the site that markets itself as “News by experts.”

Describing a social media trend where influencers promote how they’ve decluttered their spaces, especially food storage which was a paramount concern at the height of supply chain disruption, Drenten continued, “Cleanliness has historically been used as a cultural gatekeeping mechanism to reinforce status distinctions based on a vague understanding of ‘niceness’: nice people, with nice yards, in nice houses, make for nice neighborhoods.”

“What lies beneath the surface of this anti-messiness, pro-niceness stance,” she asserted, “is a history of classist, racist and sexist social structures.”

The marketing professor’s denigration of organization that leaned heavily into globalist ideals of minimalism, you know, “you’ll own nothing and be happy,” landed as well as could be expected as commenters summed up the takeaway.

“So this professor thinks black and brown people are slobs? Who is the racist?” one asked as another determined, “Taking care of your family is racist. Gotcha. Writer thinks POC only have packaged, processed food.”

https://twitter.com/VERBAL_CHANCLA/status/1636701384182726658

Were Drenten to take her research beyond the predetermined outcomes she sought to find, she might actually see how these trends are more of a return, albeit by tooth and nail, to the way many households were run when a single income was sufficient. Instead, she piled on stereotypes and contended the “pantry porn” phenomenon would create a burden on women.

“But the social pressure to curate a perfect pantry might make some women work overtime,” she argued. “They can’t just shove store-bought boxes of snacks into a cupboard; they must neatly place the grab-and-go snacks into a fully stocked pantry that rivals a boutique corner store.”

“Pantry porn, as a status symbol, relies on the promise of making daily domestic work easier. But if women are largely responsible for the work required to maintain the perfectly organized pantry, it’s critical to ask: easier for whom?” Drenten concluded.

Some believe she had scraped the bottom of the barrel, but a new outrage will surely follow.

Kevin Haggerty
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