"Is the name kaffir lime racist?"

We buy a lot of limes, because Meade makes limeade just about every day. If you've read this blog for a long time and also have a long memory, you may remember when Meade was only a commenter here, and his screen name included his first initial, so that it was l.meade, and that looked like "limeade" with the bottom two thirds of the "i" dropped out.

We tend to food-shop at Whole Foods, where there can be a choice of different limes — the limes that look like green lemons, the darker rounder sort of lime, key limes. I don't really keep track, because without a sense of smell, the basic tastes are exposed in raw form, and sourness is the worst. Imagine what a lime would be like if you couldn't smell it. I'll tell you, in a word: bad. To me, limeade is a way to take a glass of water and cause it to need a whole lot of sweetener to make it drinkable. And then Meade's sweetener of choice is stevia. What the hell! "Here's What The Stevia Sweetener Really Is — And Why Some People Think It Tastes Bad." I'm one of those people. So Meade's drink of choice is a horror to me.

Yesterday, at Whole Foods, we saw a type of lime we'd never noticed before. It was small and warty and twice as expensive as those other limes. What are "kaffir limes"? There must be some reason people want to pay double for something uglier, though perhaps it's a trick to make nitwit shoppers assume it must be great, because it's twice the price and weird-looking. That might be one dimension of the Whole Foods scheme to manipulate consumer psychology — along with friendly staff, happy butchers, vast variety in chosen places (notably, cheese), godforsaken aisles of questionable curatives, magazines at the checkout point that signal lightweight spirituality and moderate athleticism, and puzzling racks of canvas slip-on shoes and flimsy, cottony shirts and leggings.

We were told kaffir limes might have something to do with Thai cooking, and we declined the produce person's offer to slice one of those things in half right now and give us a sample, which seemed frightening both because of the small machete she brandished and because of the sourness of lime in unadulterated form. I said we'd look it up on the internet.

So, I'm looking it up and the first thing I find is a Slate article: "Is the Name Kaffir Lime Racist?" The short answer is that although the word is a racist slur in South Africa, the use as the name of those limes seems to have arrived in English by a different route:

As the Oxford English Dictionary points out, Scottish botanist H.F. Macmillan used the term in his 1910 Handbook of Tropical Gardening and Planting to refer to a lime found in Sri Lanka, the home of the ethnic group that refer to themselves proudly as the Kaffirs. Macmillan lived there for 30 years, and it was there that he wrote his botanical handbook. It is difficult to say how he, and the other people he heard using the term kaffir lime, understood the connotation of the word, but it seems at least possible that the name began innocuously....

University of California researcher David Karp has alerted me to an even earlier published instance of the name kaffir lime than H.F. Macmillan’s: In The Cultivated Oranges, Lemons Etc. of India and Ceylon, published in 1888, author Emanuel Bonavia briefly mentions the fruit, noting, “Europeans call it Caffre-lime.”...

Karp and his colleague Cara De Silva have posited a different explanation for the name, speculating in 1998 in the food journal Petits Propos Culinaires, “Indian Muslims most likely encountered the fruit as an import from lands such as Thailand and Sri Lanka, where Buddhists and other non-Muslims predominated. ... From this Indian usage, intended to convey otherness and exotic provenance, the term passed into English.” This theory suggests that the name’s roots lie closer to the original Arabic meaning of kafir than to the 20th-century racial slur, although of course the term’s potentially benign origins don’t invalidate modern-day concerns about the word’s offensiveness.

It seems to me that if you have a product with a name that some people will experience as offensive, you might want to change the name, even though there's a pleasant-enough explanation. (See: Pee Cola and Barf dishwashing detergent.)

But in the case of kaffir limes, the explanation is not all that pleasant. It's old-fashioned othering. I thought we were eschewing that too. And by we, I mean, we, the kind of people who shop at Whole Foods.