Food and veganism
Food is great! Everyone loves it, even though we all have preferences, and often they clash (like with pineapple on pizza!). I'm no vegan (hate me for it later), but with an odd set of circumstances I've been thinking about the topic quite a bit today: my friend made some negative comments about America's food, I was picking lettuce out of the sink, and my 5 year old brother was watching some Minecraft animation where a zombie was violently eating animals¹. There is a noticeable overlap between the solarpunk and vegan communities, and today I'm daring to address it.
Welcome back to Futurism, apparently the only gemlog out there that posts solarpunk-adjacent anything. This gemlog is completely dedicated to solarpunk and solarpunk-adjacent things like anarchism, in fact. Let's work together to bring about a brighter future.
Let's talk about me
I'm in an odd spot. Logically, autistically, I know I should be eating pretty much nothing but fruits and vegetables and drinking nothing but purified water. But that's boring, it doesn't remotely taste good, and ironically, I can't get myself to eat pretty much any of that (or, maybe, not more than one bite).
Even though I used to like good old peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, I Can't Even with the taste or texture of bread (although I think I'm cool with Wonder bread and maybe Sunbeam but we never get that because it's either too expensive or not at the store we go to). It's the same with Spaghetti-O's and mayonnaise.
I have been able to get myself to try a few things, although the uproar this sometimes causes with my family makes it more difficult. Even if I actually do like it. Like recently I finally had some honeydew melon for the first time. It's kinda nice, definitely has a familiar melony flavor, but it is a little thick, kinda slimy (I hate that), and I can't get more than a couple bites before I just can't eat it anymore. Watermelon's a bit like that too but I can eat more of it (it's really thin, but it tastes great).
So, my diet mostly consists of pepperoni pizza, mac-n-cheese, mashed potatoes (unfortunately this is the flaky instant kind), chicken (nuggets/tendies and patties), and a strict few variants of each. And most of my hydration comes from sodas -- I should cut this out entirely but for now, 2 cans a day is fine (I usually have more on busier days; days I have work, travel days, events, suchlike).
I have a lot of "shoulds" that I will be working on, way slower than I "should," for the next... forever, probably.
Once I can move out, I'd like to make my home an "ingredients household": one in which most or all of the things in the pantry are ingredients, rather than pre-made anything. I'm probably not going to get a lot of "raw" ingredients, I'll probably get value-added things like pre-cut pepperoni, tortillas, or tomato sauce/paste, in addition to like fruits and veggies. And I'll definitely have a few pre-made things on hand, mostly "just in case."
- Maybe I'll have a snack-making day, when I make crackers or chips or something to snack on during the week.
- I wonder if I can remake that AMAZING butter-biscuit dough... I've been itching to make a full-size pizza out of it. We don't have an oven though (it broke³).
- You'll never separate me from cheese. I'll get a stockpile of cheese wheels if I have to.
- Maybe I'll write about what I want my home to look like in the future, more completely, in a future Futurism article. Maybe that's best kept to myself, though.
The overlap group
Visions of a better future, for a lot of people, typically involve the removal of meat (and iirc poultry and dairy, too) from our collective diets. Their reasons for specifying this are valid, too: the climate crisis², something else I forgot, personal preferences, and ethics concerns.
Aside: There's also a group, I'm not sure if it overlaps, that emphasizes "organic" products over non-organic. Even though I work in the produce department, I don't really know the difference but I think it's in how it's grown, meaning the only real difference at the end is you pay more for the same exact product. I don't really understand how you can grow plants unethically, so this seems like a waste to me.
I've also seen some other non-vegan environmentally-conscious people suggesting "eat less meat" is enough. If the concerns are about production, "less" isn't really going to do anything, while we're still operating under capitalism; what needs to be "less" is production, by a lot.
On the front of some Nasoya tofu containers, there's this illustration of a solarpunk-looking world, everyone's apparently eating tofu or something and everything's branded Nasoya and people are riding bikes. It's greenwashed, absolutely, because it's capitalism. But, apart from Nasoya-branded everything, this seems to be an ideal of a few people. It actually scares me and I'm not sure why.
(Strangely, even though there are wind turbines in the Nasoya illustration, there's not a single solar panel in sight. They even have birds flying over near the windmills. Definitely greenwashing, and I'm getting PETA vibes from this.)
Trouble and compromise
You're going to have a lot of trouble convincing suburban dads, and a lot of men actually, to not eat meat. It's practically in their blood, they're vicious, violent, carnivorous beasts. You're also going to have a lot of trouble convincing autistic "picky eaters" like me to do that too.
I think we need to do a few things -- and yes, this is stopping short of what "really" needs to happen, which again, is not feasible.
- Emphasize fruit/veggie meals that actually taste good. I think this is going to be hard but there's definitely stuff out there that even the picky eaters can get into (watermelon! apples! corn!).
- Better recognize that tastes can be different. For example, I absolutely cannot stand bananas, they smell awful and so are absolutely repulsive to me. I'm considered the weird one because everyone loves bananas. Collectively and individually, we need to respect things like this. Also that better smelling does mean better tasting -- that's how flavor works!
- Put hard regulations on meat; and increase taxes on meat, dairy, and poultry, and use those funds to subsidize fruit and vegetable farming.
- Similarly, disincentivize the import and production of products made with slave labor: so, pretty much all electronics, most chocolate... I think what'll be hard is determining what actually is, because they work so hard to make it impossible to tell and legally dubious.
- Recognize that farming with animals IS sustainable. And we need to do that sustainably and minimally.
- Maybe: invest more in lab-grown meats, leather, and such, as they are (or should be?) more ethical than the alternative. Maybe I'm just uneducated swine about this one and how could I not know, yada yada yada.
Fast food
Even though I love me some Chick-Fil-A and Bojangles and Burger King, fast food is really one of the worst mistakes the United States (and the world) has made. It's all pre-processed, then processed again. It also ties pretty tightly into the US's culture around work. It's all fast, fast, fast, fast, go, go, go, go, rush, rush, rush.
We should take it slower, bring back the diner, enjoy life, and let your food be made from ingredients instead of from pre-packaged or microwaved freezer meals. Take the waiting time to chat with friends, play a few hands of Uno. Have a life!
Plus, homemade (when made by someone experienced enough) is always better.
Kudzu
In the American South, kudzu is a dreaded invasive species. Turns out though that it's edible and useful and we should be using it more, to help get rid of it and/or keep it in check. Most invasive species had some predator from wherever they came from that kept them in check; for kudzu, it's humans, and here, we're doing a terrible job at countering kudzu.
Aside: I looked and looked for the Tumblr thread that inspired this thought. I found screenshots of the first part, but not of the later part that explained all the different ways kudzu can be used and eaten. I unfortunately don't remember enough of that part of the thread to find it but if you have a local copy of Tumblr somewhere you can search (because regular Tumblr search and web search only led me to partial reposts on Reddit), "kudzu starch" is not a bad place to start.
Closing thoughts
- Dishwashers are amazing pieces of technology. It definitely took having to wash all the dishes of a family of 6 for years to fully appreciate the year or two it worked³ ⁴, when that was the easiest chore we had to do. Just water alone, when well-directed, does miracles. (See also: water cutting.) So now a dishwasher is one of my criteria for any place I live.
- I think we don't eat, say, dogs here because we see dogs as friends and have emotional bonds with them. In other places they're pests so it's more like eating a rat. Or a deer, I guess. Where we draw the line about what animals we do and don't eat is probably almost entirely based on their emotional value (and, of course, whether or not they're tasty).
The food industries have a long, long way to go. Probably a long way to go off of a nearby ledge. Nothing beats homemade, but pre-packaged is cheaper (than buying someone else's homemade, like from a mom-and-pop diner), faster (see the fast food section), and easier.
Food under capitalism is a tragedy.
Futurism Meta: Contact links
My contact links are about to change! Soon I'll be using ejabberd's included Matrix support. I don't have it set up yet; I'm not sure of the performance or server resource impacts it has, either. But once it's up, and I think it probably will be, I'll include the Matrix ID you can contact me with as a proper link instead of multiple IDs in the preformatted block they're in now.
I'll be removing the note about it, but if you want to find a bridged address between Bluesky and the Fediverse, or XMPP and Matrix, make sure you have a JavaScript-enabled Web browser ready and navigate to the link below. It's a "wizard" that should be fairly straightforward to use: choose your network, choose the network you want to connect with, put in the foreign ID, and get back an ID on your network. Appropriate warnings and usage notes are included, including warnings about defederation and notes about major missing features.
The Bridge Wizard! (https://blakes.dev/bridges)
Footnotes
¹ They didn't show the actual "eating" of it but they did show an "eaten" cow with a huge hole in its side. Keep in mind that this video is clearly aimed at children, and probably made by a child too, judging by the looks of it.
² Cow farming creates a surprisingly large amount of carbon emissions. I'm having trouble believing it's really "cow farts" that are causing this. It's got to be machinery or something, it doesn't make sense.
³ Our house has a lot of broken things in it. It's getting old, and we can't afford the repairs. We're looking into getting a new house (bigger, to fit all of us better) but with approximately no money, that's going to be difficult.
⁴ iirc the part we need for this is a tiny plastic part we could just 3-D print. but my dad insists that washing the dishes by hand uses less water than the dishwasher, so we've been forced to do that for a few years. It does still run, I think, but I don't know how well it works. Either that or we've been duped, in which case fuck you, dad.
Email me: me@blakes.dev (or DeltaChat). Subject pre-filled on this link.
Chat with me: me@blakes.dev (XMPP)
or on my backup: blake@federation.quest (XMPP)