Are there any names of food that are associated with political correctness other than Fried chicken?

Solution 1:

The remark Garcia made was criticized specifically as being racist, because Tiger Woods is a black man and fried chicken is stereotypically associated with blacks/African Americans. There's tons of potentially offensive food/racial combinations like this, and it really depends on what race you're talking about. These may be specific to the US.

• African Americans: Fried chicken, watermelon, fruit-flavored sodas/beverages like Kool-aid or orange soda
• Hispanics/Latinos: Beans, Tex-Mex food like tacos/nachos/burritos
• Asians (of any nationality): Chop Suey, Dog/cat meat
• Native Americans: Alcohol, particularly whiskey.

There's lots more stereotypical foods that you could list, depending on nationality. It's just that the ethnic groups being stereotyped aren't subject to as much racism as the first few I listed so they aren't considered to be as offensive, although they are still kind of rude. A few more examples:

• French: Frog Legs, Cheese
• Irish: Potatoes, Alcohol
• Canadians: Various northern animals like Moose or Beaver
• Germans: Sausage, Sauerkraut

Solution 2:

It is not the name of a food that necessarily causes problems, but the association of some characteristic or activity with some group in a way that marginalizes them.

In some cases, affinity for certain foods is part of a negative stereotype. In 2008, Fuzzy Zoeller made rather ill-received comments about Tiger Woods choosing fried chicken and collard greens for the Masters Champion Dinner; these foods, along with watermelon, corn bread, and others were long used in racist iconography, owing to a supposed predilection for them among African-Americans. The derogatory term beaner similarly refers to the presence of pinto beans in the Mexican diet, and the old-fashioned slur mackerel snapper refers to the old Catholic practice of eating fish on Fridays.

But one needn't refer to a comprehensively developed stereotype to offend. To reduce any group of people to a single trait is inherently problematic. If you call the French team beret-wearers, you are clearly trying to stir up animosity against them— even though not only is there nothing wrong with wearing berets, but there's no evidence that the French wear them any more often than people of any other nationality. It's simply a cheap association because the word beret is French in origin and pronunciation.

Solution 3:

In the UK, we sometimes, politically-incorrectly, refer to French people as "Frogs", because they eat frogs' legs. (They in turn refer to us as "les rosbifs", or "Roast Beefs").

The US refer to us as "Limeys" because our sailors used to eat limes (the idiom "limey bastard" is still very much in use).

There are also a lot of jokes about Latvians and potatoes.

Other than that, there are a lot of words which are used to describe people, bodily parts, acts, etc. with sexual connotations, including crumpet, cherry, pork, nuts.

Also be careful of mentioning any kind of sausage, including bologna, salami, hotdogs and particularly wieners.

Solution 4:

As Marcus_33 points out, the most problematic instances in which someone refers to a particular food to disparage someone else involve foods associated with particular racial ethnic groups. Four U.S. epithets that specifically equate groups of people with a particular food are Beaner (Mexican/Latino), Frog (French), Kraut (German), and Limey (British). All are objectionable and well worth avoiding. Weirdly enough, the term Ricer arose in the United States about 10 or 15 years ago to refer to people who modify and customize automobiles from Asian countries to make them especially fast and powerful. I wouldn't use that term either.

In addition, foods sometimes come up in the service of political criticism. According to Robert Jewett, in Captain America and the Crusade Against Evil (2003),

A Republican media consultant suggested that, in the 1984 election, "it's the perfect gentleman versus the cowboy. ... Reagan is a healthy dose of macho, and Mondale is part of the Brie-and-chablis crowd."

This food-centric criticism caught on as a cultural critique, and for some years afterward, "brie and chablis" became a shorthand for the tastes of affluent (and depending on your political biases, effete) U.S. liberals, in contradistinction to an appetite for meat and potatoes (and perhaps Budweiser beer) that presumably marks one as a heartland American.