Title

Beans, beans, nothing but beans: Pintos, kidneys, garbanzos and black beans. Edamame and red mungs and cannelinis and turtles |

[apocketfullofbakedbeans]

I'm thinking back to the time a woman I know went vegetarian and she told me, unprompted, that she'd only eat meat if it's to try food from a different culture so she could have the experience of eating food from that culture, even if plant-based options are available. Paraphrasing here, but she basically said she'd go against her morals to eat one dish over another so she could have better experience with eating food from different cultures through that dish.

And at the time I didn't challenge her on that, because even though I disagreed I didn't want to argue. And at first my disagreement came from the vegan default of "harming animals isn't justifiable just because you want to try something new", but the more I'm thinking about it, there's so much more to it in that it's so disrespectful to other people's cultures to say shit like that.

Straight up saying you won't eat something because it's not a good enough experience of someone else's culture for you is incredibly xenophobic and stepping so far out your lane I can't even imagine how someone would come to that conclusion. Like, who is she to dismiss a culture's plant-based foods and label them as less important to experience than their meat based ones? How do you even rank that?

[crippled-peeper]

straws are accessibility tools that let some disabled people drink . I’m sick of ppl demonizing them

[apocketfullofbakedbeans]

Exactly, it's another case of people running their mouths while not giving disabled people a second thought. And once you bring it up, they'll be like, "Well, I wasn't thinking about them when I said it," without seeing that that is the actual issue.

And on the environmentalist end of it... I've said it before and I'll say it again. Anti-straw stances are for performative environmentalists.

It's literally the easiest thing a person who doesn't need them can do, and yet they'll still receive an unreasonable amount praise from the wider environmentalist community.

It's also the "safest" in terms of criticism and pushback. It's why you see people talk freely in environmental spaces about ditching straws to save our oceans more than fishless diets (which does far more for the ocean and marine wildlife), even when they and the people they talk to can easily cut out fish themselves.

[apocketfullofbakedbeans]

The "veganism is a privilege because plant-based foods like mock meats, plant milks, and butter/egg replacements are more expensive than the non-vegan versions" argument from non-vegans will never make sense to me.

To start, the average vegan isn't more likely to make more money than the average non-vegan. In America, Black people are 2x more likely to be vegan than any other race and women, both Black women and women of other races, make up roughly 75% of American vegans. The reason I bring this up is because women, regardless of their race, and Black people, regardless of their gender, tend to deal with wage inequality. Not to imply the average non-vegan is loaded, but the most likely scenarios are that the average vegan will either match their wage or make less than them.

And it is true that those alternatives generally cost more, I'm not going to argue that. It's also true that it's incredibly hard to find vegan alternatives in larger quantities at your average grocery store. At the store I work the average-sized pack of non-vegan nuggets is the same size as a value pack of vegan nuggets (1lb 5oz for $5.99 and $8.99 respectively). And the smaller, "average-seized" packs of vegan nuggets are about a dollar less, give or take some cents depending on the brands, than the average-sized non-vegan nuggets.

And with the above said, the majority of non-vegan don't think those alternatives are good, or at least as good as the non-vegan version, to begin with.

So, with all that said, how are we the privileged party when it comes to grocery shopping? When non-vegans choose to eat foods like burgers, nuggets, ice-cream, etc that align with their morals, they have options that are great tasting, relatively cheap, and generally widely available, meanwhile when vegans choose to eat those types of food that aligns with their morals, they're options are generally expensive and restricted, and are, allegedly, low quality in both taste and texture.

And it's especially wild to me because the majority of other vegans I've met and know don't even eat most of these foods on a regular basis. And personally, outside of soymilk, I rarely buy alternatives if they're not on sale or discounted, then I (reasonably) stock up.