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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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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.

It goes back to the Moral foundations theory and the red / blue split.

Red tribe expresses purity through sexual restrictions. Blue tribe expresses purity through dietary restrictions.

So if you're holding an event with a very blue tribe group like climate change policy you are going to have to deal with a massive matrix of dietary restrictions.

Conservatives doing exotic eating plans is definitely a thing these days, but they generally view it as a pure health issue and don't feel that anyone else should have to accommodate them. So they tend to pack their own lunches if it's an issue.

Conservatives doing exotic eating plans is definitely a thing these days, but they generally view it as a pure health issue and don't feel that anyone else should have to accommodate them. So they tend to pack their own lunches if it's an issue.

Anecdotally, quite a few of these people are still evangelists for their diets. I can barely believe how many people who are obviously less fit than me still want to give me advice on how those carbohydrates totally make people fat and sluggish.

There's something to carbs making people sluggish. I had a bad habit of substituting cookies for cooking, and I'd eat like 8 ounces and then feel sleepy, as if I'd drunk a beer. Stopped buying that kind of snack, my self control is not good.

Overeating makes people sluggish. Just it's easiest to overeat when done with carbs. After a good 3 pound steak I am satiated up to the next evening.

Haha, I feel like this replicates every one of those conversations I've had. Eating a half pound of cookies is absolutely wild to me. Just don't do that! It's obviously bad for you! Just eat one cookie, or maybe two! I realize that in practice people have very different impulses around these sorts of things, so this is a completely useless suggestion, but it seems like the heart of every anti-carb conversation winds up being people going absolutely bonkers on things that I just eat a little bit of and then walk away from. Admittedly, impulse control is a hell of a lot easier with steak and eggs than with a giant pile of fried rice.

Haha, I feel like this replicates every one of those conversations I've had. Eating a half pound of cookies is absolutely wild to me. Just don't do that! It's obviously bad for you! Just eat one cookie, or maybe two!

Cookies are like that. I love cookies, but they completely ignore my satiety centers and hit only the pleasure ones. I used to have some cookies and a piece of candy after a meal, and when I tried to cut down on superfluous carbs, I realized I would feel hungry for something sweet after wolfing down a few cookies, but not after skipping cookies and eating a single chocolate candy.

My wife and I work around this by completely banning having a cookie by yourself in the house. If you want one, you have to get one for the other, too. This means you have both the impulse control of each person as well as making it relatively rare for both people to be craving cookies at the same time, so it's very rare for us to have more than one or two each. I can't think of the last time we've done anything even close to having a whole box in one sitting.

It also helps we don't keep particularly delectable cookies like flavored Oreos in the house at all, anymore.

I just switched to protein bars. I've found a brand that makes organoleptically great bars (with "chocolate" glazing and "caramel" and a blend of non-caloric sweeteners that works for me) and eating one triggers that "had dessert" switch in me.

You want me to spend 25 minutes fixing dinner when I can just down a liter of milk and half a pound of cookies and get back to whatever unnaturally rewarding thing* I was doing with the Skinner box on my desk ?

Ha!

*I feel the meme is correct, if you play a game where, if you do very well you see the message 'target destroyed' flash on the screen, you'll probably enjoy watching videos with that message rather a lot.

Milk is great though! If you insist on literally prep replace the cookies with bread or something, perhaps rye, which is great with milk, and plenty of fruit/veg are edible without cooking. Fixing dinner doesn't need to take time though, throwing some potatoes and meat in an oven and browsing the web for 30min is a lot easier than 30min spent on making a 'real meal'

But still not as easy as lying on the couch, cramming cookies into your mouth until you can't close your lips, and then pouring milk and baileys into your mouth so that the cookies all disintegrate inside your mouth! And then doing that again and again until you pass out.

Admittedly, impulse control is a hell of a lot easier with steak and eggs than with a giant pile of fried rice.

Not necessarily. Someone who might consider an entire American sized large (14" dia) pizza as something for two proper meals but probably consumed as one long meal might be equally undeterred from treating a 40oz porterhouse in the same way.

very fatty 2lb+ pieces of meat are very filling and become actively unappetizing once you've eaten 'enough' in my experience

I'm exactly that sort of pizza eater. On keto, a 14oz steak with some veggies on a mostly empty stomach is plenty. It genuinely feels like a totally different experience with hunger. Like the conversion from hunger to mere appetite just doesn’t happen.

In my experience the easiest way to deal with the various dietary restrictions is to just offer vegan food. It's not foodproof but it's usually suitable for most.

The replies to this one are interesting. I should probably clarify that this is just my personal choice - I'm not suggesting others do it. Even then, I never said that it's anything beyond my personal choice, and I don't see it as some sort of a huge burden or something where I need to bend over backwards to satisfy unreasonable demands - I know several places where I can get excellent vegan food and can also cook it myself (and frequently do). Not to mention that usually this means I just offer a vegan alternative among ones containing animal products. When we baptized our second child I got only cakes and cookies for the guests after the ceremony and these were vegan, but I didn't hear anyone complaining about the vegan cakes.

Perhaps I should also clarify that my social circles just plain happen to not only include many vegans and vegetarians, but also committed Orthodox people who devoutly observe the fasting calender - which means they spend a lot of the year not eating meat or animal products beyond fish. My family also has people with real and serious food allergies which happen to be of the sort that vegan food is suitable for them.

Not that I'm every likely to deal with it, but I'd offer roast game meat and declare vegan opposition as null and void on account of prey animal control being a necessity in any ecology lacking large apex non-human predators and would they have preferred the meat to rot in a land fill?

I have done this before. Strangely, does not seem to make vegetarians think better of eating meat.

Well, I'm lucky to note that I don't have any vegetarian friends. Well, there's this one girl who liked talking to me in high school and is, but we aren't in contact.

Interested in whether it'd work, I think it should, she's fairly intellectully honest and a catholic, vegetarianism isn't her primary religion.

Yeah but that only helps people with ideological dietary restrictions. It actually is bad for allergy sufferers because legumes are one of the more common allergies. Peanuts and soy being the obvious culprits, but legumes in general being fairly common.

That reminds me of when my old school friend and her hubby were getting caught up in the Trump doomerism back in 2017. But there's a simple solution I told them - Make America Great Again. Then there's nothing to worry about! Naturally they were very grateful.

I have no idea how this comparison is even supposed to work.

It’s that most of the meat eaters find veganism completely toxic the way a trump derangement syndrome person would find becoming pro trump completely toxic.

I don't think the analogy is perfect, but I'll try. In both cases, it goes something like this.

Problem: I am annoyed by people making unreasonable demands.

Solution: Simply satisfy their unreasonable demands, then they won't have any more demands, and you won't be annoyed anymore!

I think the comparison is that vegan food is not a solution that is very suitable or easy to do for most people (also it has to be vegan without bread and pasta a lot of the time). In the same vein that solving the Trump problem by deporting all the illegals and building a 30 foot beautiful wall with gargoyles on it isn't palatable for trump doomers.

I think this is wrong especially if food is a bribe to get people to come. Would be a huge turn off to me. Can work for a brief event with a snack but if I’m expecting a meal I would be starving. Vegan doesn’t make me feel satiate.

Shirtless bodybuilder looks up from his small publishing extra-based translation of Carl Schmitt: "Excuse me, was this steak cooked with seed oils?! I demand to speak to the manager!"

There are some guys like that around here, but I think most understand it's a dose-dependent thing, not ritual pollution.