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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 definitely think some people's dietary restrictions have the form you describe, as being some kind of personal belief about the rightness or wrongness of eating certain things (vegetarianism and veganism seem like the obvious example). On the other hand some things (like allergies) don't really have this character. If my friend has a peanut allergy so severe that eating them will cause anaphylactic shock and possibly death, that seems qualitatively different to something like veganism. When I am accommodating someone's allergies like this it's because I don't want to maybe kill them! Which seems like a very reasonable thing to do, and their request seems quite different in character to anything that could be called a "holy act", nor does their motivation for the request seem comparable to religious requests.
Agree on peanuts.
Some vegans seem to fall into the group of girls who want to be skinny (somewhat red tribe). But predominantly blue tribe. The meat only thing I guess is red tribe as it’s macho anti environmentalism thing. Meat only Im going to assume are heavy maga. Gluten’s and all those things are probably primarily the things I’m thinking about.
Further on Peterson the right is less religious than they once were so getting a subset inventing new diets like meat only would be a form of right religion too. Personally when I’ve looked at the science I’m open to ketone supplements having benefits but my understanding of human biology is it can handle anything but the system works best when it doesn’t need to turn protein into carbs or carbs into proteins.
The big categorical difference I think is as state expecting others to follow.
Does seem to have the same divides as elsewhere of the blue tribe being more feminine.
To perhaps bring this back to more familiar Culture War ground I think the desire to accommodate dietary restrictions springs from the same place as the desire to use preferred pronouns: the perception that it's the courteous thing to do, that it would be rude to do otherwise. Underlying this is a belief that society ought to change in certain ways to accommodate individuals living their lives the way they would prefer to, and that we as individuals have some responsibility to create that space for others. Exactly what we should accommodate in what circumstances is a question on which underlying theories differ but I think this is the general motivating principle.
ETA:
After reading some other replies I'm wondering how much of a left/right divide on social issues is about who, when, and how has an obligation to accommodate others. It seems to me right-coded non-libertarian positions tend towards the individual having an obligation to alter their behaviors to conform with wider society while more left-coded positions tend towards society (really other people) altering so as to accommodate individuals.
I think this is an astute way to generalize it and I'm glad someone put it in a less boo outgroup framing. It fits nicely with the often smug "Just be a good person" frustration I hear from progressives when there is pushback against what for lack of a better term I'd call pathological inclusiveness. For the most part it's fairly harmless - 99% of the time the people hosting dinner parties that have to accommodate every currently conceived allergy are progressives themselves and they get a kind of pleasure out of being accommodating. It plays into their self image as a good person to readily take on these tasks for others and I've long since learned never to tell a woman who wants to do something for me that they shouldn't bother.
This also fits into a thing I often have trouble articulating about why it's sometimes difficult to argue against this class of progressive values. On the abstract level I think my position is correct but when you're in a room full of progressives and the topic of trans people come up everyone else is affirming and validating how much of a good person everyone else there is for supporting trans people it's very difficult to speak up and say "Hey actually I don't think this whole trans thing is such a good idea, have you considered the epistemic problems with differentiating between the qualia of correctly or incorrectly believing you are a different gender" people do not say "hey that's an interesting point I haven't thought of before, let me think about it and we can have an open discussion". They say "hey man, why are you being an asshole? You made Astra cry and feel unsupported. People kill themselves because of people like you".
It's nearly impossible to penetrate this kind of love bombing with unpleasant truths. And on the meta level it incentivizes the exact grievance porn that I so often perceive of the left. Progressive type people see themselves as helping the downtrodden and it's deep in their self conception that they're the type of person that helps the downtrodden, but they've also formed an immune system against even questioning claims of being downtrodden. From my perspective they're doing the equivalent of giving a kid as much sugar as they ask for, each extra spoon full is the kindest path in the moment but it's a road to diabetes paved with good intentions.
Anyways I've rambled a bit but thank you again for putting this the way you have, it's allowed some things to click for me.
Think of all the emissions that they won't emit. It will help fight with climate change. And open space for immigrants and will alleviate a bit the housing crisis and unaffordability of the homes.
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