WHEN, last week, William Sitwell, editor of Waitrose Food magazine, suggested to a journalist, who had pitched an idea about “plant-based” recipes, that it might be good to run a series about “killing vegans, one by one”, he was throwing himself right into the hot heart of the cauldron of current identity politics. Of course, he didn’t realise he was doing this, because he wasn’t aware that the email that he fired off in private to journalist Selene Nelson would then be posted on social media and the viral outrage would begin.

For, in these days, what you eat, which used to be attached to the place and culture in which you grew up, but also, often, your religion, is rapidly becoming one of the more sensitive aspects of personal identity. Like everything, in this globalised world, it seems to be becoming more tribal, not less.

There’s little more personal that you can do than comment on someone else’s diet. There’s good reason for this. Although it is possible to change what one eats, and many have already done that, it is nevertheless intimately tied up not just with the family culture we come from, and all the accompanying emotions, but, increasingly, with our politics.

On some levels this isn’t new. Food is what has brought cultures and tribes together, but also what distinguished them. Throughout history our slurs and nicknames for other nations have revolved around what they eat. Some of the most intensely felt divisions between religions revolve around food. Yet, even those divisions seem to be paling into significance in comparison with the food identities that dominate the current culture wars.

Sitwell resigned following the reaction to his comment. Perhaps an apology should have been enough – except that the magazine he worked for was not an independent publication but one issued by Waitrose which sells to a growing vegan market, and this is about the market and consumer relations. No doubt the company wouldn’t tolerate such comments from staff on the shop floor.

There’s also no denying that the words “kill” anything are misjudged. Exchange the word vegan for a whole host of other identities and he’d probably have fewer defenders. Bear in mind this is the same week in which Twitter has had to apologise for the fact that the words “kill all Jews” became a trending topic on the social media platform, after the words were used in hate graffiti at a New York synagogue.

In fact, what surprised me most was how many people were keen to defend him. This is probably because, among certain circles, vegans are considered one of those groups that it’s okay to insult. It’s not hard, on social media or even in real life, to find people saying such things about vegans.

It’s fairly clear to most of us that this is another episode in the culture wars, in which we find that rather than looking for ways to come together, we’re hunkering down and refusing to share tables. The depressing thing about this is that, as a result, a rich global culinary heritage is being reduced down into a kind of binary politics.

On one side are the vegans, stereotyped as social justice warriors and snowflakes. On the other are the carnivores, roughly stereotyped as conservatives. Of course, people who eat meat and those who consume plants transcend those categories, but in his world those subtleties are forgotten.

What’s sad about this is that food should be about coming together, a shared experience, through which we commune not just with our own tribe, but the others we invite into our lives – but we’re losing touch with that.

I’m not denying that food is political. There is much to resolve about how we feed everyone in a climate-change imperilled world and make that healthy and affordable. But when diet morphs into identity politics then we lose our intuitive relationship with food. Dazzled by our rich food landscape, paralysed by choice, food becomes no longer a way to fuel ourselves and commune, but another aspect of our identity and narcissism.

LAND VALUES

Anders Holch Povlsen, the man who has just, with his snapping up of the 1,100 acre Kinrara Estate near Aviemore, become the individual to own the most land in Scotland – he’s a decent guy, isn’t he? The billionaire seems like a good enough fellow, what with his laudable intentions to protect the natural assets of Scotland for the next 200 years.

He’s a rewilder who has embarked on Scotland’s biggest reforestation project. And, apparently, for all the Dane is a billionaire, back home in Denmark he still drives a battered VW Golf and sends his kids to state school.

But still, decent as Povlsen is, he’s just one individual, in control of 220,000 acres of Scottish land, and that’s proof of how much more there is to do on land reform. We can’t just be sitting around thinking how lucky we are that a landowner happens to have decent values. What about those who don’t?