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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.
I have to go off on this. The trend (and it very much is a trend) to have a personal, unique set of food “sensitivities” is very annoying to me, and makes hosting guests near impossible
I recently invited an acquaintance and his wife over for a homecooked dinner and was informed he had a gluten “sensitivity”. Not celiac or a deathly allergy mind you, just a vaguely termed sensitivity. It occurred to me how selfish this is, in a way. Because if more than one person has such non-overlapping sensitivities you pretty rapidly reach a point where the intersection of acceptable foods is empty. If one person is gluten free, another vegan, another paleo, another won’t eat seed oils, what exactly are you supposed to cook?
Any meal can only really support one such person before a home cook has to just throw up their hands and say that there won’t be a meal and everyone should just eat on their own. So by making such a claim you are claiming that one spot for yourself and more or less destroying the meal should anyone else dare to do the same
It especially annoys me because these claimed sensitivities usually just cause the person to “feel lethargic” or some such vague nonsense. Can you not suck it up for the sake of a social gathering once in a while? There was a maybe 6 year period where I was vegetarian, but I would eat meat if at someone’s house for Thanksgiving or some such, it just would have been rude to stick to my diet
What's rubs me the wrong way is how entitled people feel to having any and all preferences/restrictions accommodated. Did you parents not teach you manners ? If you can't eat most things in a random buffet dinner, then bring your own meal. Actually, bring enough for a few people so the host can have some warm potluck vibes.
Now ofc, if a special guest is visiting after a long time, then I will cook to their preferences. But, if it is routine guest with a 100s of landmines or one person in a group of many, then I'd expect them to be reasonable about how much they can be accommodated.
I wonder if I'm shouting at a strawman though. Every vegan, nut-allergic, celiac person I know is polite, and brings their own food.
To be fair, if you are the type to follow fashions blindly, then you probably aren't attending the house party of a bunch of late blooming ex-nerds.
I can chime in a little bit here. I don't think you realize how viscerally disgusting eating non-veg food is to some people (certain Indians).
I remember the day I started eating beef, and my parents were in tears. My mom grew up on a farm and cows were the equivalent of dogs to her. Can you imagine being invited to a thanksgiving diner, and an upside down whole-roasted-dog is served to you on a platter ?
So now my family follows a dont-ask-dont-tell policy on my food eating habits.
It is easy for Americans to swap in and out of veganism, because their disgust response was not tuned to hate meat as a young child. Veganism is an ethnical choice, a moral boundary. It is the difference between refusing to ogle hot women as a committed man vs the disgusted head-turn away from a smelly obese homeless lady. I have a disgust response to bananas, and I get close to violently vomiting every-time I see them mashed up. This stuff is hard to change in adulthood.
At the same time, such a person should not feel entitled to be accommodated towards a rigid center-piece of a culture. (Roast turkey). You don't have to eat it, why do you think we make Green-bean-casserole & Cabbage salad ? (IMO, the sides are tastier anyway.)
As an aside, I find this incredibly surprising. I also grew up on a farm (a dairy farm specifically). For me, and for literally every other farm kid I ever have known, they have a very pragmatic approach to life and death as a result. Cows die, we eat them, it's just part of the circle of life. When you grow up around this reality of life every day, it desensitizes you rather than makes you more attached. I've definitely never heard of a farm kid thinking of cows as pets before, or being upset if someone eats meat.
Have you talked to an Indian dairy farmer before? I know a small-scale dairy farmer here in Ireland that would be loth to eat his own cattle, even though there's no taboo on beef here.
For OP it's like growing up on a stud farm and then eating horse.
What did they do with bull calves?
My grandparents owned a work horse, treated it like a tool, and when it got too old, they sold it for meat (which was apparently exported, because nobody ate horse meat in the old country, but they had no trouble with others doing so).
Horse meat is pretty good and similar to beef and when I've seen it sold it's usually far cheaper. We used to eat horse regularly when I grew up because a butcher near my father's work sold it for next to nothing.
There are about as many horses as there are dairy cows in Sweden so presumably there is a lot of horse meat out there but it doesn't really seem to get to market, maybe it goes to export somewhere.
In Finland, horsemeat is sometimes put into this sausage, which is pretty popular as a breakfast sausage.
Now that you mention it there is a reasonably popular horsemeat sandwich meat branded as "hamburger meat" lol.
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The worked on fields. Nothing was mechanized.
Cows had actual value. So a bull ox would juts get sold to some neighbor who needed one on his farm asap.
So they used the cattle to pull the plow and stuff?
Yep, this was before electricity was available in these villages & when tractors were too expensive.
Socialist India was not a great place to grow up.
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