Sauce Wars: Racism or not racism?

[cartesiandaemon]

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/news/scotlands-sauce-wars-charge-for-ketchup-in-edinburgh-leaves-customer-from-glasgow-with ( Read more... )

Comments

[atreic]

Is it clear that the sauce wasn't more expensive? I didn't read round the story a lot, but I got the vague idea that he was giving away free sauce from big squidgy bottles, but selling sauce-you-paid-for in little posh individual sachets.

[ewx]

The remarks from the chippy owner make it perfectly clear that it really is about policing his customers' tastes in condiments: "If it was up to me I wouldn’t give anyone ketchup because it ruins the whole thing. Salt and sauce goes with fish and chips, anything extra should be paid for."
I don't know whether that necessarily clears him of originism (IYSWIM), since I don't know how much people in Glasgow and Edinburgh (excepting him and the aggrieved customer) really (i) have differing condiment tastes and (ii) care that much about it.
Of course it is up to him: TTBOMK no law requires him to offer ketchup at any price. If he just didn't sell it at all, I doubt anyone would be complaining. [edited for what I originally meant]
Geographic origin within a country doesn't seem to be a protected characteristic (Equality Act 2010), though it probably ought to be.

[cartesiandaemon]

Ah! I thought that at the time -- if asking for ketchup is sufficiently rare, maybe it's impossible to keep a bottle of ketchup fresh and it really does cost more. But I didn't hear anything concrete, and the guy certainly sounded like he wanted to do it deliberately.

[cartesiandaemon]

Oh, thank you for details!

So I think Glaswegians probably aren't included as a group

That makes sense. It would make sense that area of origin was included, but I guess there's not been much need for it, so we've not.

Is 'sauce' brown sauce?

I'm not sure -- it seems to be something similar, but possible regionally specific.

[beckyc]

The general consensus reached when I posted about this a month or so ago was that no this was not racial persecution. Really not remotely

[vyvyan]

I think it would have been wrong if he'd been charged for something simply because he was Glaswegian! But presumably he could have had free sauce like anyone else if he'd wanted it. It's not as though his city of origin somehow required him to eat ketchup with his chips.

[cartesiandaemon]

I agree that in this case it didn't matter, but if it _did_ matter isn't it still a blatantly indirect discrimination to say "well, I don't ban X, I just ban [thing almost all X do], they don't HAVE to do that?"

[vyvyan]

But do almost all Glaswegians prefer ketchup? Is there some intrinsic or deep-seated cultural association between a city and its inhabitants' preferred condiments? I agree it would be indirect discrimination to refuse to offer B&B rooms to same-sex couples, for instance, because freedom to form relationships with a person of your preferred sex is widely regarded as closely related to sexual orientation! But if I, as a gay person, complained that not being given free ketchup at a chip shop was indirect discrimination against my orientation (because I and many other gay people prefer ketchup to sauce!) I don't think that would be reasonable.

[anonymous]

"Against a normally non-marginalised group" may not make a legal difference, but I think it's massively important in terms of real-world significance. It's the difference between something that people laugh off as a harmless joshing and something that adds to a load of other instances of discrimination to reinforce the feeling of being systematically persecuted.

[cartesiandaemon]

Preventing discrimination against a marginalised group is certainly the really important for all the reasons you say, but I've assumed it's better to prevent discriminating on the grounds of race, sex, etc generally, which is why I was surprised to see there were such prominent examples.