One of the more peculiar sets of correlations we discovered on Parlia, where we polled people’s views, was between politics and food preferences. Liberals, for example, seem to be the biggest tea-drinkers. Hard-left and hard-right prefer wine, where centrists much prefer beer. Centrists, unlike anyone else, will also often bite ice cream. Conservatives prefer a hamburger, whereas liberals prefer a curry. Conservatives are less likely than liberals to like spicy foods. Strangest of all: people on the right are measurably more likely than people on the left to prefer their peanut butter smooth.

Some of those differences can surely be explained by class or generation or some other factor. We measured a left-wing skew for tea over coffee - perhaps because tea, in the UK at least, is traditionally a working-class drink. But what do we do with the peanut butter? If you’re feeling poetic - and many polling analyses do feel more poetic than scientific - you might imagine it has something to do with the conservative concern with purity, so smooth and unblemished is preferable to lumpy and differentiated. Or perhaps it’s about tradition. You might argue crunchy peanut butter is a degenerate spin-off from the original product. But honestly...?

It turns out that the politics/food preference correlation has been widely studied. Pollsters have long noticed there was a connection, and deeply unpleasant organisations like Cambridge Analytica had used elements of it in their political targeting during Trump’s election victory over Clinton in 2016. If someone had been to an Indian or Mexican restaurant in the last month, it was a pretty good predictor they were a Democrat.

Why don’t Republicans go to Indian or Mexican restaurants? Is it racism? Is it distrust of novelty? Is it because Indian and Mexican chefs don’t set up shop in Republican districts?

Possibly all of the above. Could it also be because, for some reason, people who tend to vote Republican also actually tend not to like that kind of food?

In 2020, a paper came out of Cornell University that asked whether ‘gustatory sensitivity’, how sensitive your taste buds are, might predict your politics. Sure enough, they found that high ‘fungiform papilla density’, or high taste bud density on the tongue, predicts conservatism.

Some Republicans might well be racist, and distrust new experiences, and suffer from an absence of exotic cuisine in their neighbourhoods, but as our Parlia poll had already hinted at, they might also just be more physically reactive to spicy flavours.

Read more in Chapter 4 - The Body Politic: pretty privilege, the conservative brain complex, and what peanut butter can teach you about politics

There is a surprising similarity between historic English territories in France and the voting map of the last French presidential elections.

On the surface it seems absurd that the English occupation of medieval France might have even the faintest resonance a thousand years later at the ballot box. But Anglo- Angevin culture (Henry II of England was the son of Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou) was strikingly different from that of its neighbour over the Channel, and the English maintained a physical presence there for over 300 years. Medieval Britain was a more egalitarian society than medieval France – we can tell from the difference in life expectancy of the rich and poor, which was much more accentuated in France. By the thirteenth century, England was edging very slowly towards a constitutional monarchy, especially after the signing of Magna Carta in 1215 when the English barons forced King John to confirm the Charter of Liberties that limited his powers; France, on the other hand, would drift in the opposite direction, towards an absolute monarchy. Women in England had more rights and social opportunities – particularly in marriage law. Historians trace the differences in attitudes between the more liberal, more egalitarian, more republican west of France and its more conservative, hierarchical and Catholic east to the influence of repeated British invasion and occupation throughout the Middle Ages, and the ideas and culture they spread there.

Similar observations have been made about Brittany – that strip of land jutting out from the French mainland in the north- west. Brittany has always been considered a little different. As late as the nineteenth century, social commentators noted how its women were socially, financially and sexually more independent, and society more egalitarian.

This peculiar Breton exceptionalism has its roots in the very distant past. Brittany was an important base for the comparatively egalitarian Vikings, who settled in France from the eighth century onwards. Viking women, for example, were able to divorce their husbands – inconceivable for medieval French-women of the interior. But the roots may go back further still.

Brittany was never properly conquered by the Romans. Roman culture was deeply patriarchal – far more so than the culture of the Gauls whom Julius Caesar subjugated – and Brittany was spared its influence. The region’s peculiar egalitarianism, noted even in the nineteenth century, may be a distant echo of their two- millennia- old resistance to the military campaigns of Julius Caesar.

Read more in Chapter 3 - Cultural Misunderstandings: Why we’re blind to our beliefs and why we’re still having arguments started by our ancestors