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Are food allergies another aspect of the culture war? I was reading Reddit and a person was feeding 100 people and someone mentioned to make sure you have all the allergies/food restrictions covered. Being honest I’ve never met anyone with a food restriction I can think of except a lot of brown friends who won’t eat sausage but also have no problem with alcohol.
Ancient religions had a lot of restrictions, now Im borrowing this from elsewhere that the rise of food restrictions is just the same thing as ancients banning certain foods as holy acts. I’ve long argued that the culture wars are less of a culture war and more of a religious war and dietary restrictions are just a modern form of Jews and Muslims banning pork/shellfish etc and Catholics not eating meat on fridays. All religions seem to have focuses on eating and sexual rituals.
I know mental illness has far higher rates amongst lefties. My guess is dietary restrictions and food allergies are much higher in lefties and if your not in that religion it’s something you never think of.
Possibly the most popular right wing thinker today, Jordan Peterson, advocates a meat only elimination diet for health reasons.
If pickiness about food hasn't been a thing amongst conservatives until lately, I'm sure lots and lots of them are thinking about it now.
I haven't paid much attention to Peterson in a few years, but is he really that popular? But more to the point, when I did used to pay attention him, he never advocated the carnivore diet for others but just talked about it as something he and his daughter found useful. His daughter had some sort of consultation service to help people get on the diet, but it was the kind of thing you had to really dig through to find, not something he publicized. Has he changed his tone from "this diet worked for me and my daughter, maybe it's something you could try out to see if it works for you too" to "you should adopt this diet" at some point?
He's certainly up there.
"Advocate the diet for others" seems like an unnecessary qualification. Vegans excepted, the dietary lefties OP complain's about don't usually do that either. The annoyance is more sparked by their expectation to be accommodated than their trying to convince you to their diet.
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Yeah the left and the right did a total reversal , with the left embracing healthy at any size, fat acceptance , etc and the right now being stridently pro-health
Is that true? More liberal people probably are less likely to embrace shaming as an avenue for encouraging healthy behavior (though far from universally - in most of the liberal social circles I occupy, fat people are still very much acceptable targets, especially if they're obviously gluttonous and idle), but health nuts lean left as well (a lot of that is woo, but we're judging on consciousness, not accuracy). Conversely, conservatives are more likely to be obese than liberals, less conscious about their diet, less likely to exercise, etc... (at least in the US).
The thing to remember is that the Blue Tribe derives from the New England Yankee/WASP elite, which in turn derives from the section of the English upper-middle class which looked up to the upper class (and was frequently descended from the younger sons of upper class families). In that class, if someone commits a sufficiently grave faux pas you are unfalteringly polite to their faces and then quietly disinvite them from your social circle. (And if enough people do this to you, you fall out of the elite). You never shame people in public - that would be making a scene. In fact, the only people you even shame in private are your children and mentees, who need to learn what not to do to avoid getting cold-shouldered.
Getting fat is not acceptable in Blue Tribe elite circles. Public fat-shaming is even less acceptable. These are not inconsistent.
Yes. It's frustrating that progressive ethics seem to tear down formal rules for what a person has to do to stay in good social standing (eg no hat at the dinner table, dress appropriately, no taking the lord's name in vain, tithe 10%, no extramarital sex) while erecting a gridwork of invisible, informal third rails that cause you to lose face if you step on them.
People on the spectrum/systems-focused people skew anti-woke. Self-flatteringly, I think, anti-wokes like me say this is because wokeness is irrational, and so people with rational minds see straight through it. But the old religious rules were also irrational. Maybe autistic/systems-focused people skew anti-woke because we're annoyed that the "new way" is so implicit and requires social saavy to navigate. For example, an autistic teen girl may start putting on weight while getting supportive feel-good messages from everyone; only when her social circle shrinks and she starts getting cold-shouldered does she realize she violated a norm no one spelled out for her. You can write the same story for a person who transitions and then never gets a boyfriend.
This leads to bitterness from the systems-focused person, who would prefer explicit rules.
Yes - I am pretty spergy (obviously, being here) and I always prefer social situations with written rules, whether that is a formal dress code, Robert’s Rules, or the rules of the board game we are playing.
Anthropologist Kate Fox in Watching the English talks about the “English social dis-ease” - a kind of national spergery - and how it causes the English to adopt formalised dress codes and form social institutions with clear rules of etiquette. I also suspect it is why we invented sports with written rules.
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As a single point of data, a far-left millennial friend of mine (who probably thinks I'm a stealth conservative based on the conversations we used to have about feminism) blew up when I said I had started a diet and begun to lose weight: "Dieting doesn't work," "I've noticed you have some toxic ideas about weight," "I've heard you making insensitive comments before," etc. They then recommended I read a Health At Any Size activist's autobiography to engage with these ideas because she's "very eloquent."
The book was mostly personal and second-hand experiences of trauma due to people pointing out morbid obesity and its negative externalities. There was a whole chapter about doctors and the medical establishment being shaming and misguided. I scanned the bibliography for any academic papers (now on my reading list), but most of the references were to articles from the likes of Huffpost. Then I gave up on the book.
As regards the issue of obesity, I do think the problem is systemic: the US population has lost its ability to cook proper healthy food at home, has lost the last remnants of a culture which despised "gluttony," and has been brainwashed by Big Ag to think that eating more and more is normal, and that it's all genetic. Meanwhile Big Ag has hired flavor scientists to engineer hyperstimulus into food, hires lobbyists to keep politicians from addressing the problem in any meaningful way, and pays useful activist idiots to write books about Health At Any Size.
However, as an individual, I don't have many options other than to tune out the propaganda, establish my own system, and live my life of moderation. If that makes me "toxic" and "insensitive," ... fuck it. I'm not sacrificing my pursuit of excellence for some moral fashion.
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Yes, there's an odd thing going on right now where "people of walmart" are still acceptable targets, but the obese people closest to rich urban liberals are statistically most likely to be professional black women (60% obesity rate, something like 50% for high income black women), who are very dangerous to appear to be mocking. What I see is the explicit sneering shifting to the other, safer low-class markers of PoWs, like mobility scooters and trashy clothing. Even if their obesity is obviously implicitly part of the sneer.
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