Vegan Food Review: Your Choices Aren't Mine (A Vegan Friendship Manifesto)

[eredien]

Hey there, friend who is trying to convince me that soy is bad for you! I appreciate that you have been kind of on a personal health kick lately, but I already know that soy is not a miracle food. I know it has some problematic estrogens, and have been slowly cutting back on it because I don't think that's good for me. I know that it's generally

Comments

[fiddledragon]

Well said. I'm looking forward to seeing more reviews :-)

[eredien]

Thanks!

[thoughtsdriftby]

Well as long as you don't eat 25 times the adult dose of estrogen like soy compounds a day while you're a baby, you should be fine. There's a bigger problem with estrogen mimicking pesticides used in agriculture that leach into city water supplies but they don't want people looking there.

A good Miso soup is enough reason to throw caution to the wind and live dangerously.

[eredien]

Well, honestly, there's so much junk in any water supply I think it's one of the biggest public health problems of the 21st c.

[eredien]

There's...well, a lot of food shaming. Mostly around women, but around men too. I've seen it happen mostly with older men on low-something diets--they get really grumpy that they can't just eat what they want anymore without thinking about it first, and sometimes women aren't very sympathetic to that for the reason that they can't really imagine *not* thinking most of the time about their food choices. the only men I've seen being shamed for eating fries are on a low-sodium diet, or something; women pre-emptively shame themselves while in the process of ordering their own illicit fries at the McDonald's drive through window, before they're even eating.

I think this set of Applebee's commercials says a lot about gendered food-shaming in our culture.

These two commercials came out just after New Year's this year. They both feature groups of friends ordering off the same menu, which offers meals 550 calories and under.

This one is called "Cutbacks." The women say things like, "gotta cut back--I love cutting back!" and gasp in

[copperwolf]

Why do you start spelling the word "veg*n" partway through this post?

[eredien]

Ah, that's shorthand--for covering both "vegan" and "vegetarian," so I don't have to type both of them out each time but still try and make it understood that both are being covered.

It's a thing in veg*n circles and also the * is the old multiple wildcard operator for computers--so typing "veg*n" in Windows should get you "anything with the letters "veg" and then some other letters and then "n." "

Thanks!

[seishonagon]

Just have to say three things:

1. This post is great. Really, really, really great. Thank you for posting it.

2. I really want to talk to you about eating when we talk this week, if you're up to it - I know you're not always in a good headspace to talk about eating, because of the way your issues with food intersect (or don't intersect) with mine. But if you are up to it, I have a few specific things I'd like to talk about: primarily, self-inflicted food-shaming, and I am starting a brand-new (for me) diet this week and would love to know some of your thoughts on specific aspects of it as you are one of the people I know whose food-related views I admire and respect the most, because of your thoughtfulness, thoroughness, and conscience (not to mention perserverance) when it comes to your diet.

3. Please let me know if you ever see/her me engaging in any form of food-shaming. I feel that people who have inflicted it on themselves are likely to inflict it on others without noticing, and I desperately want to not be someone who does