What is it about food that turns people into horrible assholes? Like, you’re hanging out, drinking beers, playing Jenga and one person in your group is like “Hey! I’m hungry! Who wants to get some food?” And then the discussion begins about where everyone wants to go. And then one person pipes up, “I don’t care I just want to make sure there’s something there for me to eat.” Then everyone looks at that person annoyed because yeah, obviously there will be something for them to eat. It’s a damn restaurant, FFS. And then the person qualifies that by saying they have some kind of self or medically imposed dietary restriction. AND WITH THAT THEY RUINED EVERYTHING. The conversation moves from “Yeah, we all would like pizza!” to “Hey, you’re a huge asshole and you don’t even know how to eat and let me tell you everything that is wrong with your diet and why you merely speaking up that you want an option is oppressing me. AND WHAT ABOUT BACON? DID YOU EVER THINK ABOUT BACON?” And the food-restricted friend is like “Um, what the hell is wrong with you? I’m allergic to tree nuts what does that have anything to do with bacon?” Melee ensues. Everyone starts throwing beer bottles at each other. A few people get stabbed. The police show up. A few people get life in prison. The rest block each other on Twitter. Guaranteed. Every fucking time.
First, let me propose a rule that anyone who invokes bacon during any food argument is automatically banned from contributing anything else to the conversation… or really any conversation at all for the rest of the day. Or week. Or maybe ever.
What is it about other people’s diets that makes people insane? People are emotional about food. I get that. But I don’t understand the hostile defense of our diets.
For example, people REALLY hate vegans. Like, you have that one friend who you’ve known for 20 years then one day they happen to mention in a conversation that they are vegan and suddenly everyone in the room is screaming at the vegan telling them to get off their pretentious soap box and FUCK YOU BACON BACON BACON I LOVE EATING ANIMALS STOP ATTACKING MY WAY OF LIFE. Actually, just utter the word “vegan” and everyone assumes you just said “Please tell me how much you hate vegans.”
Then there’s the “I’m better than you because my diet is better than yours” folk who are always countered by the people who think they’re better than the healthy food eaters because they eat nothing but deep-fried lard balls covered in hollandaise and alfredo sauce. One likes to give you unsolicited advice on what is wrong with your diet. Whenever possible. They sit on social media and wait for you to mention that you’re eating yogurt and they’re like MONSANTO IS KILLING YOU WITH GMO YOGURT FRUITS! THAT’S LIKE THE WORST THING YOU CAN EAT! TRY KALE! MAKE YOUR OWN YOGURT! OUT OF KALE! The other makes YouTube videos to evangelize how you don’t even need lube to masturbate while eating cheesy onion-ring burgers.
And people generally think they know what you SHOULD eat based on what THEY would do in your situation. We tell people who are thin to eat more junk food. We tell people who are fat to eat… well, really nothing at all except maybe just a handful of tapeworms. And we especially love to tell poor people to try harder to eat healthy.
And what’s with the horror that kids have deadly food allergies? As if not bringing in confetti guns filled with peanut butter sugar cakes to school is a violation of my basic human rights and I shouldn’t be willing to surrender that right to a bunch of kids who are like “Please don’t let me die. I just want to learn math.” It’s weird that people are more concerned about their right to hurt children in the name of food than about actually hurting children in the name of food.
Do you get food judgey? Are you a defiant mayo-sturbator? Do you eat healthy? Do you hate people who eat different foods than you? What food lectures drive you crazy? How do people think you can put ketchup on a hot dog? Who the fuck does that? That’s basically the same as drowning puppies.
It’s funny, because we just bought some bacon. I was avoiding it for so long because “SATURATED FAT WILL KILL YOU!”, but it turns out that probably isn’t true and that it was the sugar all along.
I don’t even know what to think about food anymore, so it’s hard to preach. I’m pretty confident sugar is bad for you, at least in “bottle of fruit juice” or “chocolate milk” quantities. And I’m pretty sure I lost weight over a 6 month period because I cut out bread and fruit juice.
But for the rest of you? I couldn’t say. It does seem those vegan people live longer, or whatever, so I can’t hate them too much.
On the other hand, I sliced and marinated flank steak in orange juice and soya sauce the other day and BBQ’d it in a wok with vegetables that had been seasoned with olive oil and a balsamic vinaigrette, so I don’t think I’ll be going vegan anytime soon myself. But you guys knock yourselves out.
Love this topic. I used to get food judgey and now I really try not to because I think it gets a bit bullying at times. Still, who can help feeling morally superior when you’re the only one at the table who ordered a salad when everyone else has fries? “Look at me; I’m so full of willpower” Then you steal the leftovers before the plates are cleared!
You may not feel morally superior. You may just be way more hungry.
The comment section shows that most of us resemble the food gunfight described in this article. We are all emotional about our food and think our way of eating is the right way, despite how we’ll all try to say we’re better than to judge other people for their food preferences. These comments (per usual of any food discussion) are full of passive aggressive judgementalism towards people who eat differently.
That said. My diet is best diet, so don’t you criticize it, you hitler-like meanie..
I have some friends that are paleo. In the beginning I just avoided all of these conversations with them by letting them prattle on endlessly about their diet (as people who are heavily restricting their diet are prone to do.) Now they have calmed down with it a bit and we don’t have to talk about it, which is great.
However the one thing I will soapbox about with them, and anyone, is food that is pretending to be other food. It is probably because I grew up on a diet all the time, but I hate food that lies to me. Don’t call something a chocolate donuts if it doesn’t actually have any wheat or eggs in it and has not been fried. No matter how delicious that thing is you are setting it up for failure, failure at being the thing it said it was. Call it something else.
There is a chain of vegetarian (vegan?) restaurants. I was excited to check it out, thinking that I would be able to get a delicious vegetable based dish that I would enjoy, because that is hard to get in a fast casual environment. However the only thing they had were sandwiches that would have been delicious with real meat, filled with fake meat. There were guacamole and bacon burgers with fake burger and bacon!
I don’t think we’re doing tofu, or banana chocolate mush, or cake baked with applesauce any favors when we try to call it real food. The lie of it is what causes me the most rage. I’m not saying that imitation can’t be good, or even better in a different way from the real thing. Why can’t we just give fake foods their own identity?
(Also I absolutely CAN believe that it is not butter, and that it is actually worse for me than butter, thank you very much.)
Tofu is its own food. Maybe not its own American food, and certainly it is sometimes chopped up and called “fake ricotta” or grilled up with steak sauce as a fake meat. But I don’t think it was invented 2000 years ago strictly as fake meat for vegetarians. ;)
Also, not one that you mentioned, but nutritional yeast! Also its own food despite the strong association with veganism. My meat-eating parents taught me to sprinkle it on popcorn, and people who have never tried it because “it’s just for vegans” or “it’s just for health-food freaks” are missing out, because YUM.
Oooh! They had this at the movie theater in my hometown! Brewer’s yeast on popcorn is superior to fake butter flavored butter on popcorn in every conceivable way.
Oh yes! Nutritional yeast, ground up real quick with a little quality chili powder, and sprinkled over popcorn. Tastes amazing, and I’ve found most people (that I know, anyway) won’t bother you for some because, ew, vegan food.
Then don’t eat the fake food?
I have a love for soy bacon that far exceeds real bacon. Sure it’s masquerading fake food, but damn if I don’t love it.
I’m the same way with hot dogs. Soy dogs have a better texture, a better taste, a better everything really.
There’s a fine example of food judgementalism right there. Other people’s dietary choices isn’t real food. “Real Food” is only what you define it as.
Nice way to miss the whole point of the article.
Yes. Thank you.
Um, tofu is actually very healthy, and very much a “real food” in that it is minimally processed. It’s a great source of protein, and I think it’s used in a lot of veg*n cooking because it’s versatile. It’s definitely an improvement over processed gluten like boca burgers health-wise.
Really, I’d be interested in learning why you think a food that’s been eaten for thousands of years in a large chunk of our globe (to no ill results) isn’t “real food”. I’m also curious as to why you think tofu is imitation anything. It’s tofu. Most of us eat it AS TOFU, rather as an accent or a star in a dish. Just because you as a non-Asian see it as something “weird” or “other” doesn’t erase its history as food.
I’m going to eat what I want, keep walking, and hope that I somehow live long enough to make it to the Singularity, while occasionally yelling at my friends that THAT IS NOT SOY MILK BECAUSE SOY BEANS DO NOT HAVE BREASTS!!!
I’m a foodie, which could cause people to put me into the pretentious category, but the sort of food geekery that I enjoy expands the sorts of things I appreciate rather than narrowing it. For example, if faced with a Vegan, rather than bemoaning all that the Vegan is losing out on by not eating butter, I think of all the awesome and delicious Indian (ghee-less) and Ethiopian food I’ve had, and start thinking about how to change veggie dishes I like that they fit. It’s like an engineering puzzle, but the result is delicious food!
The thing that does annoy me, however, are when people start talking about Organic and GMO in religious-like terms. It quickly gets very mother-earthy and or paranoid. On one hand, I’m all for more sustainable farming, and if Organic is the only way that can be done, fine. But if it can be done other ways, great! Practically, I still have to wash my produce when I get home. if not to wash away pesticide residue, then to wash off all the bug-poop.
GMO is a pet-peeve. I’ve yet to hear an argument against GMO foods that isn’t some paranoid luddite argument from ignorance (I’m looking at you Tom Colicchio), along the lines of ‘we don’t know what the consequences will be!’ To which, in my head, I think, this is the environmentalist foodie version of Pascal’s Wager.
Ugh. Yeah, so there’s that.
I agree that a lot of the GMO talk is silly and pretty anti-science. But there is a real argument against it, and it’s this: GMO in theory is perfectly fine and possibly VERY beneficial. It’s not used that way. Most GMO crops are designed to be able to withstand a ton of pesticides and herbicides, which translates to a lot more harmful chemicals entering our environment and messing up all sorts of ecological processes then traditional crops. The other problem is that it allows companies to trademark seed, which is a new thing, and Monsanto et al. use that to exploit farmers, here in the US and especially abroad.
Ooh, someone actually interested in the non-woo reasons to oppose GMOs. Okay, here goes (I’m going to talk almost exclusively about plants – animal farming has its own host of unique issues that complicate matters further; much of what I’m saying can be applied to animals as well, but to consider exactly how, we’d have to delve in to the other issues around animal farming, and this is already going to be a long post). The overreaching problem is one of the necessary agricultural approach. With traditional farming practices (including selective breeding), what one has is a whole lot of smaller farms that are selecting, generation after generation, the best seeds to re-plant next year in that specific context, on that specific farm. The result is that we wind up with a wide diversity of crops that are ideally suited to the specific place that they are being grown – they have been adapted to the local environments through a process of human selection. With GMO seeds, we (almost always) have a single genotype that has been developed for a hypothetical, abstracted ideal growing environment, one which does not exist outside of a lab. In order to get the ideal hypothesized behavior and crop yield from the seeds, it’s necessary to alter the environment, sometimes radically, to match the hypothetical ideal as closely as possible. This is a terrible practice from the standpoints of efficiency, sustainability, and even profitability (in the case of small, locally-owned farms – for factory farms, the model is profitable due to the major differences in structure).
While we’ve always modified our environments to be more hospitable to a certain degree, what we tend to do is adapt our own behavior to best suit our environments, to the extent that we even eventually alter our population’s genetic make-up. One big reason is greater efficiency – it takes less energy, typically, to adapt one organism – and many of them if we’re talking populations genetics – to be suited to an environment than to alter an environment to suit the organism. We don’t try to, for example, drain segments of the ocean where we want to drill for oil so we can use the same kinds of oil derricks we use on land, we adapt our method of mining to the new environment, and we use scuba suits and submarines and robots to construct the wells. We don’t try to control the temperature of an entire city or country, we carve out smaller pockets we can maintain at comfortable temperatures, like our clothed bodies, houses, or cars. Terraforming is generally far more costly (in time, energy, money) than adapting to the extant environment, but it’s necessary for GMO crops designed for a single idealized environment. Also, because the local environment tends to be the result of pressures from the surrounding environments and local meteorological conditions, it will tend to shift back to the state it was in before human intervention. This basically means that the necessary terraforming is not a one-off expense (in terms of time, energy, money), but an ongoing process.
This also ties into the sustainability issues. The ongoing need to curate the environment is wasteful versus farming crops that might have lower yield per plant but require no (or little) irrigation, are already adapted to resist local pests (thanks to centuries of selective breeding for such resistances), are already adapted to the particular seasonal cycle of the area, etc. The kind of ongoing curation that is necessary typically becomes more intensive over time as well, since the crop is not adapted to local conditions and may deplete particular soil nutrients faster than they are replaced, out-compete instead of coexist with local flora that might be useful for things like housing bacterial responsible for nitrogen fixation or combating erosion, encourage a population explosion among local pests, etc. which will require additional interventions to keep the environment at the near-ideal required for the GMO crop to be productive.
Also because of this ongoing and perhaps escalating process of terraforming and environmental curation, as well as patent concerns and the lack of ability to preserve seeds for the next planting in the case of terminators, GMO crops are often less profitable, especially for small farmers who cannot leverage the kinds of economies of scale and subsidies (be they cross-industry, state-based, or consumer-based) that large factory farms can. Ultimately, GMOs are one further extension of the factory model of production, with the intent being to generate large numbers of identical, interchangeable products in a controlled, managed environment, and they really only come close to their potential under such conditions. While industrial production techniques can certainly increase production and quality, they also have a tendency to rapidly deplete resources and impact environments in ways that are detrimental to the flora and fauna that adapted to live there, including people.
Finally, being (usually) clone seeds, GMO crops seriously threaten food security. Traditionally-selected crops maintain a certain degree of variability, and a pest that attacks such a crop is going to be less likely to kill off all of it as a result (same is true for drought, unexpected temperature shifts, etc.). The diversity lowers the odds of total crop failure, as the cost of ideal, near-identical production from every individual plant. The single genotype of the GMO clone seeds creates universal susceptibility to environmental changes, such that crop failure will tend toward all or nothing. While the problems laid out in the preceding paragraphs aren’t unique to GMOs (factory farming of traditionally-selected seeds can result in some of the same problems, especially when farming seeds in environments very different from those in which they were selected, though GMOs necessarily suffer such problems), this one is.
So, yeah, a lot of the rhetoric opposing direct genetic modification and promoting organics is complete woo-based bullshit. However, there are a number of very serious concerns with our current primary approach to food production, and GMOs necessitate using these problematic methods. Even ignoring the intellectual property concerns, which could be easily remedied if our national leaders could agree that patenting genetic sequences is absurd and not allowed, there are some big concerns about GMOs that are based entirely in reality.
I forgot to mention that while organic farming can be accomplished entirely without petroleum (and greatly increased human and non-human animal labor), both the production and growing of GMO seeds requires it at present, which will potentially make the stated problems increasingly severe as we burn through our oil supplies.
Err… A few issues with this:
1. A lot of them are engineered to produce their own pesticides, which, of course, freaks out a lot of people who don’t know the biochem involved. Then again, the same people will freak over someone adding 2% more of a complicated sounding name, to a food, when the substance in question was originally found (and is, in many cases, probably made via some genetic process, not a test tube, in all cases), which was originally found in a plant. This is one of my irritations with “restricted diet” people – many of them restrict them out of delusions, ignorance, and paranoia. The ones that don’t… I just wish would stop telling me that I would be better off on their diet too.
2. The “hypothetical” environments are not hypothetical. Most of the GM going on are for “drought resistance”. They are being produced with the intent to grow them in places where its either not possible to bring in vast amounts of extra water, or because we would need to drastically alter the environment to bring such in, possibly using say.. oil to run trucks to deliver it, or other expensive resources, many of them not available to the people that they are expecting to help with it. The real issue is a bit like the thing with show CSI last week, where two people get killed by an altie-medicine quack, do to an obsession with a woman who has a very rare genetic disorder, so rare that her husband (one of the victims) stole the formula for a drug, which the company refused to produce, because it was “not profitable, given the tiny number of people who needed it.”
The point being, companies that produce this stuff plan to make a profit. Many of them are probably too damned stupid to do the math, and realize that the cost of buying their seed is, in the long run, probably worse that “drastically altering the environment” to grow something that won’t in the location its needed, in the first place.
Plants – don’t need to be resistant to pesticides. Resistant to “local conditions”, where they are a poor fit, and where, unfortunately, so is ever other possible plant you might want to farm, definitely. In which case, you have two choices – drastically alter the environment, so something will grow, or drastically alter the plant, so it can grow there. Both options are expensive, probably prohibitive, for the people that need them. But.. the former, ironically, isn’t going to result in a big GMO company suing them over “saving seed”.
As for using “natural” method to simply breed something for the environment.. Depending on what plant it is, whether there are even already varieties better adapted, and a whole host of other issues, including, “Does any version of it even contain a gene for X vitamin, or other thing we want to add?”, you are talking about decades, or generations, or even *never*, to come up with a version that can do what is needed.
I have no doubt there is a lot of bad GMO. I also have no doubt that painting the whole thing with a wide brush, which includes claiming that X, Y and Z issues is true of all of them, is going to neither solve the bad ones, or accomplish what is needed.
In any case, just the idea that one would engineer a plant for non-existent conditions, and that *that* is what requires drastic changes to the places they grow it… is ignoring the fact that some places “no” version of the plant are, or can be, adapted for, and just planting them things in fields, at all, is “drastically” altering the local environment. If the species you are planting not only isn’t, but can’t be, or they actually haven’t even bothered to, adapt it to that climate/soil/etc. well.. what do you think growing it there is likely to require, GMO, or “naturally breed”? The reality is, almost *everything* won’t grow in certain places, and some places, almost nothing we can eat *will* grow. That is the whole point of trying to adapt it. But, someone trying to produce higher crop yield isn’t “necessarily” also bothering to make sure the crop in question will grow someplace where the crop can’t grow in the first place.
In any case, you seem to be under the impression that they can’t/don’t, if planning to grow something in, say, an area bordering a desert, recreate the soil composition, humidity, and other “known” factors of the place they expect it to be planted. But that, instead… they grow the stuff like it was on some other planet, or something, then get all surprised when it won’t grow on earth any more. That just doesn’t make any sense at all, frankly.
Oh, and:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/10/18/163034053/top-five-myths-of-genetically-modified-seeds-busted
You might note, especially, #4, and $5.
John H., I’m really interested in what you have said. Do you have any resources you could recommend to learning more about this? I’ve been pretty uneducated and on the fence about GMO foods because I’ve had a hard time finding anti-GMO arguments that aren’t woo based but I’ve also had a hard time finding pro-GMO resources that aren’t tied to Monsanto.
Tell me about it. As an atheist and a vegan, I am possibly the most hated woman on the planet. Ah, well.
I see your atheist vegan and raise you atheist proponent of HAES and permissive eating. Nobody likes hearing that fat folk aren’t inherently unhealthy and thinness does not make one a superior person.
A superior person? No. Every size healthy? No way. http://www.bettycjung.net/BG2013/ObesityDiabetesMap.jpg
Habits seem to be more important than weight:
http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2012/12/31/evidence-that-fat-people-can-be-as-healthy-as-thin-people/
I think “health at every size” is a different sentiment than “every size healthy.”
Growing up with significant, but not life threatening, food allergies, I’ve always had to deal with being the one who has to make sure there’s nothing in my food I can’t have. I was, however very fortunate that none of my allergies made it super difficult to eat out, and if something did slip by me, there were consequences, but they were never dire. I think the biggest problem is there’s just soooooooo much information out there constantly telling you that what you’re eating is wrong. Every body and their mother thinks they have some key to a healthy diet, and there’s no end to what those can be. It’s all ridiculous, though. Eat what you like. If you’re unhappy with the results of your diet, maybe try a change, get some help, whatever you need, but don’t push it on other people.
I have both a tree nut allergy and a stomach condition that means there are a few foods I can’t eat, namely meat (minus seafood), and grapes. I also shouldn’t have a lot of milk, but I do anyway, but this does mean I eat vegan. I love food, and I love food I can eat without getting sick. Those are my criteria. I have had to hear an absurd amount of nonsense about food. Like people telling me what my beliefs/ideas about food are before I’ve even said a word, having to hear all the anti-vegan vitriol, to be honest I have heard more mean and ranty stuff from the meat-eaters than the vegans. Their chief complaint is usually that vegans are always jumping down their throats about not eating meat. So far my score is about 10-1 meat vs vegans jumping down my throat. Also lately some of my bf’s family are on a gluten-free thing thinking it’s healthy or something and I’m like NO WAY am I making my diet more restricted and expensive. I wonder if people without allergies understand how scary and annoying having allergies can be. I know what kind of food is good for me, I don’t presume to tell other people what’s right for them. The best food advice I have ever heard was “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.”
I went through a dietetics program but never got my RD, but even I don’t attack people for what they eat! If people ask for advice, I’m glad to give it, but everyone is free to make their own decisions about what goes in their body. It’s ridiculous that anyone feels they have the right to say anything to someone else about what they eat. Also, people really need to realize that kids with allergies are in REAL danger and so what if your kid can’t have a PB&J because someone in their class has peanut allergies – not that big a deal when you consider it’s a kid’s LIFE!
I’m just done with this bacon trend. I don’t understand it. How did a food item become such a pop culture icon?