How I got over my meta-outrage about James Corden's Gastro-xenophobia

Meta-outrage is outrage at other peoples outrage. This is the main product promoted by Fox News commentators and conservative radio hosts who attack cancel culture. It is also the basis for Argumentative Penguin’s Whack-a-woke series. It often inspires meta-meta-outrage in liberal bloggers.

Gastro-xenophobia is a fear or hatred of food from other cultures. This fear is the basis of James Corden’s food-based “truth or dare” with celebrities, called “Spill Your Guts or Fill Your Guts.”, in which participants choose to either answer personal questions or eat food deemed too disgusting to eat. Many of those foods come from Asian cultures, and Corden recently received a petition with 46,000 signatures asking him to either end the bit or stop including Asian foods.

My first reaction was meta-outrage. “Come on!”, I thought. “Corden included lots of non-Asian foods, including haggis from his native British Isles. This is cancel culture at its silliest." On reflection, however, I decided I had no real reason to be outraged by this.

First of all, Corden was in no danger of being canceled by this. It's not just that, like JK Rowling, he was in no danger because of his established fame. Kim Saira, the person who prepared the petition, never asked for him to be fired, or tried to stop someone else from hiring him. She simply explained why many Asians felt the way they did, and asked him very nicely to stop hurting their feelings. She understood that…