How woke is my dinner? I'm relieved to see there was no avocado in it. I think I'm pretty safe - white bread, canned corn, sliced tomato, grated carrot, beetroot and iceberg lettuce are all long term New Zealand staples. There is some uncertain territory – tuna in salad is somewhat odd and olives are bought from delicatessens. However, surely beer can't be woke – New Zealanders have been drinking it for generations.

Goldsmith added there is a lot of food waste from the lunches because children are being fed mung bean and ground eggplant sandwiches. "When I was a kid,” he said, “it was a marmite and chip [sandwich], that was what you wanted, sometimes peanut butter and jelly - you want the basics. I think that's a fair point." 

Marmite and chips? I have never liked marmite and the mix definitely doesn't appeal to me.

The Spinoff has handily published a list of woke and non-woke foods so government officials who will take over ordering of school lunches can know what to put in them. Parents can also pay learn how to provide non-woke food for school lunches because that's what children want.

Included in the list of woke foods is avocado. I must tell Spaniards that avocado is woke so they really shouldn’t be eating it unless they are happy to experience the disapproval of an anti-woke right wing. That avocados are grown all over Spain is irrelevant, just like it’s irrelevant that avocado orchards cover large tracts of land in the northern half of New Zealand's North Island. New Zealand would be much better off earning export dollars selling woke fruit to Asians who haven’t yet learned to despise wokeness. It’s crazy to feed avocado, with its wide-ranging complement of necessary daily nutrition (with the exception of iron), to our children for lunch.

Avocado first came into my life when I was a teenager. Mum bought avocadoes as a novelty (and expensive) food item and we ate them cut in half with vinaigrette dressing. I thought avocado was alright but a bit squishy. The bland flavour was much improved by the vinaigrette. In contrast, Chris can’t remember when he didn’t have avocadoes because they dropped off the trees in the gardens where he lived in Chile and Mexico as a child.

However, I’m not being fair to David Seymour because he didn’t specifically refer to avocado as 'woke', but to sushi. I’m not a fan of sushi in my lunch because I find the white rice rapidly turns into sugar in my bloodstream and I quickly feel hungry again. For the same reason, I will pass on white bread sandwiches which are in the ‘not woke’ category.

Which leads me to wonder how we got to describing food as ‘woke’ ? The internet, as always, provides answers. Although I now worry about those answers, in the age of AI and the disappearance of truth. The similarity of all answers disturbs me – is there a single story of how the word ‘woke’ has developed over time? Or have multiple story lines been combined into a generic story, losing meaning along the way? But I digress – here's the generic answer.

Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), originally meaning alertness to racial prejudice and discrimination and commonly used from the early 2010s. However, 'woke' is not that new – social activist and philosopher Marcus Garvey used wokeness as a concept for black political consciousness when he wrote in 1923, "Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa.”

Black American folk singer-songwriter Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly, used the phrase "stay woke" as part of a spoken afterword to a 1938 recording of his song ‘Scottsboro Boys’, which tells the story of nine black teenagers and young men falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931.

Usage of ‘woke’ as awareness of racial prejudice was popularised by soul singer Erykah Badu's 2008 song ‘Master Teacher’ – the chorus includes, "I stay woke". ‘Woke’ became commonly used on BlackTwitter with part of its appeal being the small number of characters in the word, given the limited characters allowed in a tweet. As the term woke and the #staywoke hashtag began to spread online, ‘woke’ quickly came to signify a progressive outlook on a breadth of issues beyond race. It was used in connection with the Free Pussy Riot campaign in Russia (the Russian feminist rock group whose members were imprisoned in 2012).

 ‘Woke’ was increasingly associated with millennials and Gen Z. It and was voted the slang word of the year in 2017 by the American Dialect Society (the year in which it was also included in the Oxford English dictionary).

However, by 2019, ‘woke’ was being used by opponents of progressive social movements to mock ‘overighteous liberalism’. The process of a word going from positive to negative in this way is called ‘perjoration’:

• In the US, Republicans use ‘woke’ to criticise Democrats, while more right-leaning Democrats use it to criticise left-leaning Democrats. In 2021, Donald Trump said the Biden camp was “..destroying the country with woke.” Black activitists were also leaving woke behind, as they criticised the performatively woke for being more concerned with internet point-scoring than systemic change.
• In France, ‘le wokeisme’ is seen as an American import, incompatible with French values. It has been used variously to label individuals associated with anti-racist, feminist, LBGT and environmental movements.
• In a recent British survey by YouGov, 73% of Britons who used the term said they did so in a disapproving way and 11% in an approving way.
• In the 2022 Australian federal election, Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese both insisted they were not ‘woke’.
• At home, Winston Peters referred to Jacinda Ardern’s government and the Labour Party as a ‘woke guilt industry’ and Judith Collins referred to Ardern as woke.

It’s suggested the progression of the use of ‘woke’ has paralleled that of ‘politically correct’ – a term originally used self-descriptively by the left, then used as an insult by the right, and one that now has relatively little weight. It’s looking like time woke trots off into the has-been list of terms, where it will have little meaning other than labelling the person using it as a relict of a bygone era.

However, what I would really like to happen right now, is for David Seymour and Paul Goldsmith to bare the contents of their lunch boxes to the media so we can see how woke their lunches are. Pictures would be great. Except, silly me, MPs won’t be needing to economise by making their own lunches, will they? They can claim for meals when away from Welllington under the Basic Expense Allowance and get subsidised meals at Parliament. I really hope there are no woke items at Parliament to sully their palates and their allowances are only spent on unwoke food; marmite and chip white bread sandwiches, anyone?

I can't believe we went all the way to artic Norway, land of auroras, then there was the best ever aurora at home while we were overseas...might be a message in that.