Thread for Hostile Visitors to Endlessly Rehash the Issues They Have With Feminist Research or Whatever

You’re welcome. 🙂

I should point out that the $80/week isn’t just for food. It also covers toiletries, cleaning products and paper products, so the weekly amount we spend on food is less than that. I should also point out that while we buy local and organic whenever we can, those concerns take a back-seat to price. Finally, we also stockpiled canned goods and bottled water for emergency-preparedness.

@bahumbugi

I do agree, however, that easy access to a variety of food options is representative of privilege, whether you’re a vegan or not.

Among its findings are that food miles are not an accurate way to measure a food’s ecological footprint, because transportation of food accounts for only about 15 percent of its ecological footprint; production, storage, whether a food is animal or plant, non-carbon greenhouse gas emissions, scale, and other factors account for about 83 percent of a food’s carbon footpritnt;

Another part of the food miles thing is that even though big semis transporting food to supermarkets travel a long way, they also carry a massive amount of food at once. Compare that to how little a farmer carries in his pickup to a local farmers market, and the amount of gas used might be pretty close if you’re looking at gas used per pound of food transported.

Here is from the Telegraph (btw, the link had an ad with sound, so if you click it at work, you might want to turn down volume first)

They found that if consumers had to make a round trip by car of more than four miles to visit their local farm shop, the carbon emissions produced were greater than the mass produced vegetables that had been kept in cold storage and transported by heavy goods vehicle.

The researchers compared all carbon emissions from the fuel and energy used in each supply chain. As both methods used organic farming the farming practices were deemed to be the same.

Are we debating if food desserts exist? Because story time!

When I was in Pittsburgh proper, I was nearly next door to two family stores — Mediterranean (mostly Greek really) and Indian. The later was almost all vegetarian, the former had plenty of veggies. Down the road, within walking distance if you can carry grocies 1~2 miles, was a huge Giant Eagle, and just a bit further to Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. basically, fucking ideal.

Then I moved just outside the city (Milvale, for the Pittsburgh savy folks) and there is nothing — one shitty grocery store by irregularly scheduled bus, a dollar store, gas station, and subway. Only one that sold any sort of fruit was the gas stations bananas and apples, no body had veggies, subway was actually the healthiest food that wasn’t a nightmare to purchase (that bus route really was unreasonable, at the best of times, and the veggies barely edible anyways). None of it meshing with a clinically depressed poor person’s ability to eat. Beans last, sure, half mushy cucumbers do not.

Dollar store did have Quaker oatmeal though, for cheaper than Giant Eagle.

So yeah, having moved from the city proper, with impossibly easy access to nuke and eat vegetarian food, to fuckvile with dollar store, gas station and subway…I ate a lot of subway, when I had cash. When it was food stamps…the dollar store and what they had, all of it stuff from a box.

In other words, when you don’t drive, and have shitty public transit, and have to shop on food stamps, your options don’t really end up healthy, even if they are vegetarian.

And I’ve never even been a big meat eater, vegetarian for a decade, having subway charge the same (more or less) for a salad or a spicy Italian, and cured meats being my guilty pleasure…yeah. Doesn’t bode well for vegetarians, fuck vegans (oatmeal only will turn into “fuck my diet is gruel” in no time).

I mean, congrats that your food dessert is miscalculated by putting too much weight on their being fast food and not enough weight in their being real grocery stores, but food desserts totally exist. (And my fist act upon moving back to Pittsburgh proper was to stock up on what I’ve taken to calling Indian MREs, because nuke and enjoy your chickpeas = lovely)

That got long, sorry.

Oh and I maintain that family dairy farms must continue to exist because the best pie I’ve ever had is made by the female head of one (I refuse to call her “the farmers wife” as she does so much around there…including being an unofficial no kill shelter, people literally down cats at her doorstep, she vaccinates them, let’s them roam the barns and pasture, and her kids are usually “you want a cat? We have cats!”…my aunt’s adopted two officially, a third hangs out in her garage when it feels like it)

@Argenti — I don’t deny the existence of food deserts. I’m certain that there are many places where access to affordable healthy food is a serious problem. But, I am skeptical that such places are so common in urban areas (which is where the definition of the term is usually applied) as to make it simply unthinkable that people living in them have no choice but to eat crappy food.

The other thing that bugs me about the concept is that it’s often used by privileged foodies as an excuse to not examine their own habits and food ethics critically. Even if food deserts are a thing, that doesn’t give people who aren’t trapped in them immunity.

And anyway, I approach the issue primarily from an animal rights perspective; personal health, though important to me, isn’t what convinced me to go vegan (though done right, it’s one of the healthiest ways of eating there is). You don’t have to eat vegan or vegetarian to be healthy.

Okay, here’s something that’s slightly weirding me out. I get like, wanting to be able to get good foods, or vegan foods, in a food desert.

What I don’t get is saying some people are only using privilege as an excuse. Like, even if it’s technically possible to track down the sources for vegan food, some people have different priorities and don’t have time to track it down.

I … really can’t tell whether people are trying to say that those people are bad or not. This thread got confusing for me

Well, I think it is an excuse when it’s used by people who don’t live in them.

In other words, if I have different priorities, or no meaningful ethical objections to meat-eating, or whatever, and I don’t live in a food desert myself, then pointing at people who do live in food deserts as an excuse for why I shouldn’t change, or be asked to think critically about my own food choices, is… well, it’s just a bullshit excuse. And frankly, kind of insulting and paternalistic towards people in food deserts.

RE: Argenti

I’m doing okay, actually–I had about a month of actively fighting a relapse, which sucked, but I didn’t succumb! Proof my food plan totally works! *thumbs up* And now I’m feeling better, which helps. Extreme moods–down OR up–are what spur the ED, so right now, I’m in the comfortable middle ground. Sneak made me a wee naan pizza for lunch with cheese and sundried tomatoes and spinach; it was great.

Also, today is Mac’s six-year-anniversary of moving in here! So we’re going to grab some delicious frozen yogurt with mochi, which is one of the few foods everyone in the system can agree is awesome.

Regarding buying food in bulk: God, I wish I could. It’d make shit SO MUCH EASIER. But I’m sharing a small kitchen with five other bodies, a bunch of whom also have food issues, so it means there is NO SPACE to put food. (Even if I COULD get out to one of those shops and lug a ten pound bag of stuff back home.)

What I’m really missing right now is fucking EasiYo. GodDAMN, do I miss EasiYo…

Bob: you were doing so well until the mansplaining and utter condescension. This is why militant vegans piss me the fuck off.

I think people who have choices do need good reasons to eat foods that are harmful to other sentient beings, other people, and the environment.

The smug self-righteousness is coming off my monitor in cartoon stink lines.

The other thing that bugs me about the concept is that it’s often used by privileged foodies as an excuse to not examine their own habits and food ethics critically. Even if food deserts are a thing, that doesn’t give people who aren’t trapped in them immunity.

Is this a thing that happens? Pardon me if I’m misinterpreting, but it sounds like you’re saying that people who, like, eat foie gras at gourmet restaurants are using the existence of different people who live in food deserts as an excuse to keep eating foie gras.

I can’t imagine this ever actually happening, because it boils down to food enthusiasts excusing their food choices because of lack of options, and foodies never want to admit that limited options might govern the way they eat at all.