About White Knight

Hi, I'm Samuel, I'm the founder of Long Table. Let's talk about the name White Knight.

Hate groups have recently seen, sickeningly, a sharply raised profile. Some of them use a variation on the name White Knights. I didn't know this until recently, and I will be changing the name.  

Why are the pancakes called White Knight?

When I first started making pancakes five days a week, I was trying to impress an acrobat. We were in a circus adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland & Through the Lookingglass. She was Alice, and I was playing the White Knight - an animated chess piece. This is us.  

This White Knight is a loving goofball and an inventor of charmingly ill-conceived things - like a waterproof upside-down box, shark-bite guards for his horses' ankles, and a pudding made of blotting paper and gunpowder.

When I perfected popcorn flour, it felt like exactly the sort of whimsically improbable thing that the White Knight would try. So I named the pancakes that used it after him.

Renaming the Pancakes

I didn't know about the racist use of the term until recently. On the one hand, I deeply regret not having known it sooner. On the other hand, I deeply regret that anyone has to know it at all. 

I want to take a moment to say, in the clearest possible terms:

fuck white supremacy. 

So it's time to change the  name of the product. While I will continue to sell through my remaining stock of White Knight pancakes, I will produce no new popcorn pancakes under that name. I will try to find a different name that honors the story of how my wife and I fell in love over popcorn pancakes.

In the meantime

In keeping with Long Table's desire to take the long view, fostering a food system that we can feel good about handing down the table to the next generations, a portion of every sale involving White Knight pancakes will go to Grow Greater Englewood.

Grow Greater Englewood is a social enterprise based in the majority black Englewood neighborhood of Long Table's home city, Chicago, working to build "an equitable and resilient local food system that fosters protections of vacant land in divested communities and focuses on connecting those residents with community wealth building opportunities."

Further Reading

on the long history of racial injustice in food systems, and some people working to hand something better down the table: