Having age-appropriate menus is smart, but will it dodge the anti-woke police?

During a recent visit to Britain, I came across an interesting item on the food menu of a country pub. Following the Children's Menu - a standard offering these days - the bill of fare listed a Seniors' Menu, something I've never come across before. But it struck me as being laudable and setting an example that other catering establishments should follow.

With maturity comes moderation - or, at any rate, it ought to. As with children's portions, smaller servings appropriate to one's years mean less food wastage, and in this case, a lower risk of dyspepsia - which is always a smarter way of saying indigestion.

Menus in Britain are obliged to enumerate the calorific value of each dish on offer, a requirement applauded by nutritionists and dietitians, but looked askance at by those who'd spell kilojoules as killjoys, and who, if they think of them at all, entertain a vague notion that calories are songs sung during the Yuletide season.

Healthwise, a Seniors' Menu makes sense. But does it pass muster with that all-pervasive and all-important PC -- the shibboleth of our age -- political correctness?

Thanks to PC our everyday discourse is surfeited with a sibilance of '-isms' and '-ists'. They're like so many hissing serpents standing sentinel over sensitised sensibilities. To the political constructs of capitalism, communism and fascism have been added the politically correct constructs of racism and sexism, discrimination on the basis of race and gender, respectively.

Sometimes '-isms' generate what might be called their sub-isms in a verbal version of the biological process called scissiparity, in which a single cell divides itself into two. Male chauvinism has produced the offshootism of mansplainism, whereby a man will, at length, explain to a woman the best way to reverse a car into a tight parking slot, oblivious to the fact that she is trying to beat the world record for mentally calculating the value of pi to the nth decimal place.

Shakespeare, great mansplainer that he was, trod on multiple politically correct toes. Othello wooed Desdemona by mansplaining his adventures in exotic realms. The entire cast of The Merchant of Venice, not excluding Shylock, would today be charged with antisemitism. Ophelia's suicidal response to Hamlet's rejection would be decried as anti-feminist. And the compliment paid to Cleopatra that 'age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety' would be put in the dock for ageism and sexism, for implying that she was the exception to the rule that the passage of time does indeed wither and stale women.

So, while a Seniors' Menu is desirable from a dietary point of view, it would be deemed suspect from the perspective of political correctitude, which might frown upon the ageist term 'Seniors'.

When does a person attain - if such a development could be described as an attainment - 'seniority'? Time, in the sense of biological duration, seems to have become elastic, with 60 being hailed with anti-ageist aplomb as the new 40; 70 the new 50, and similar reversals of unidirectional chronology.

Quantum mechanics posits tachyons, theoretical subatomic entities that travel faster than light, and by doing so, go backwards in time. Is political correctness morphing us into human tachyons, doing an about-turn against the ageist implications of being Senior? With progressive political correctness, will Gen Z become the new neonates?

It could well be on the cards. Including menu cards. Seniors' Menu? You've got to be kidding. Literally.


(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are that of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of www.economictimes.com)