And now Eskimo Pies

 In fact, you won't even begin to get them for awhile.

(RTTNews) - Eskimo Pie ice cream bar has changed its name after more than three months since its parent Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream acknowledged that the name is derogatory. The popular ice cream will now be known as Edy's Pie as a tribute to one of the company's founders, Joseph Edy.

Dreyer's, whose parent Froneri is partly owned by Swiss food major Nestlé, announced that the chocolate-covered vanilla ice cream bar with new name and image will come in early 2021. The company has paused the production of the Eskimo Pie until the introduction of the new brand.

Eskimo Pies have been around since 1921, nearly a century, and I'm confident that there was no racist intent whatsoever behind their name.  This places them in a different category, really, than something like Aunt Jemima which definitely had a racist tinge to it.

And therefore in some ways, this is emblematic of how hypersensitive our age has become.

The concept is pretty obvious.  Ice Cream is cold.  Eskimos live on cold places.

That's about all there is to it.

Of course, the word "Eskimo" is itself more or less controversial now, particularly if you live north of the US Canadian border where hypersensitivity to darned near everything is virtually the national creed, something that the land south of the border is rapidly approach itself.  Originally the term applied to a collection of related Circumpolar native peoples.  Like a lot of such names, nobody really now knows what it means.  Most scholars believe that it derives from a Innuaimun work being a "a person who laces a snowshoe", which likely referred to somebody else, like many North American native names do.  Some have said, however, it refers to husky dogs, but isn't meant pejoratively.  At least one Innu term referring to the Mi'kmaq sounds like Eskimo nad means "she laces a snowshoe".  There's some who think it means "people who speak a different language".  Unfortunately, in the Algonquian language a word that sounds like the means "eater of raw meat" and is offensive.  In recent years the term Inuit has gained widespread acceptance and in Canada its the norm.  In the US people tend to generally just refer to Native Alaskans, which is problematic in its own right as that covers quite an assortment of cultures, not all of whom are Circumpolar by any means.

This won't be the end of this by any means.  Renaming a product like Aunt Jemimas made a lot of sense, as the racist connection was there. Taking Mia off of Land O Lakes products was probably inevitable, but made less sense.  Mrs. Butterworth was exceedingly creepy in my view, but removing her made little sense.  Clearly, however, we're going to remove all references to any ethnicity.

Or will we?  Just recently Coca Cola started importing Topo Chico water into the United States from Mexico.  A long lasting Mexican mineral water, it's really good.  It also features an Indian woman on the label and unlike Mia, she's topless.  Somehow, however, I suspect that this will pass muster as, after all, it's sort of a native product, Coca Cola ownership notwithstanding.