What’s better than a slice of delicious, warm apple pie on a cold winter’s day? Truly, nothing beats it. However, one professor may have just ruined apple pie forever by linking it to slavery and “ongoing genocide of indigenous people.”

Raj Patel is an award-winning author, filmmaker and academic. He is a also a Research Professor in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin—and recently, he’s making himself known for his controversial article in the Guardian regarding his stance on America’s favorite comforting dessert.

Or IS it even American? That’s the question, isn’t it?

The article is titled “Food injustice has deep roots: let’s start with America’s apple pie. It begins by discussing where apple pie even originated from—surprise: It’s just a variation of an English pumpkin pie recipe—and why he believes the dish has its slavery connections.

What’s the main ingredient in apple pie? Apples, of course. Patel shares how apples are actually pretty un-American, coming into the western hemisphere in the 1500s in with colonists and their “ongoing genocide of Indigenous people.” Additionally, he noted that English colonizers used apple trees “as markers of civilization, which is to say property.”

He then went on to connect it all: “John Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed, took these markers of colonized property to the frontiers of US expansion where his trees stood as symbols that Indigenous communities had been extirpated.”

What else is apple pie made with? Sugar, which Patel linked to the slave trade. He goes into detail about the history of sugar cane, and how “French merchants of sugar and slavery landed in Louisiana in the late 1700s,” he wrote. “Within 50 years, the US produced a quarter of the world’s sugar cane, and New Orleans had become a concomitant hub of the slave trade.”

And that gingham cloth apple pie is typically served in? He connected that to “war capitalism” that “enslaved and committed acts of genocide against millions of Indigenous people in North America, and millions of Africans and their descendants through the transatlantic slave trade.”

“In the drama of nationalist culture, the bloody and international origins of the apple pie are subject to a collective amnesia, ”Patel concluded. “The apple pie is as American as stolen land, wealth and labor. We live its consequences today.”

So, is apple pie officially canceled? Not according to many who’ve read his article, and think it’s a bit of a stretch.

“According to The Guardian newspaper(London), apple pie is racist too. These people are nuts,” one person tweeted.

“The ‘woke’ #CancelCulture mob seeks to destroy everything that is American and/or good,” another said.

You can read the full article here!

What do you think of the point Patel made in his article?