Politics & Power Quote by A. J. Liebling

Liebling’s jab lands because it’s less a food joke than a satire of cultural authority. The Englishman, in mid-century American stereotype, comes packaged with inherited confidence: accent as credential, tradition as proof. Put that figure in the role of culinary instructor and Liebling flips the usual Anglo-American prestige hierarchy on its head. The American may be “one-eyed” (hardly a gastronome, still learning, still provincial in certain ways), but at least he can see something. The Englishman, by implication, is operating on pure bluff.

The line’s real engine is the biblical echo of “the blind leading the blind,” a phrase associated with moral failure and institutional hypocrisy. Liebling swaps in “one-eyed” to sharpen the insult and to make the comparison feel lived-in rather than sermon-y. It’s not that Americans are culinary saints; it’s that the supposed expert is dramatically unqualified. That asymmetry is what makes the wit sting.

Context matters: Liebling wrote as a journalist who adored French food and treated eating as a serious pleasure, not a garnish to “proper” life. In that worldview, British postwar austerity and the era’s reputation for boiled sameness become a symbol of broader cultural self-denial. The quote’s subtext is a warning about deference: don’t mistake manners for mastery. If you outsource your taste to status, you’ll end up being instructed by someone who can’t taste the difference either.