https://www.washingtonpost.com/clim...ood-label-diet/

The article is behind a paywall, but the idea that people are going for the healthy and sustainable label makes me think we should be labeling beef, chicken, pork, cheese, eggs, and cream as healthy and sustainable.

.................

To me, the premise of this study is just silly.

They applied these terms to gift baskets. How many people buy gift baskets for themselves? Gift baskets are so expensive relative to the amount of food in them that most people who buy them will buy them with a gift recipient in mind.

Unless I completely missed something in the article, I don't recall anything even hinting that the gift baskets were meant to be a gift for the person choosing them (such as how a business will sometimes provide employees with a brochure of choices for an end of year gift, implying that the person who chooses the gift basket will be the one consuming the food in it), so my guess is that the first assumption is the right one - that the ones choosing the baskets were NOT the ones who would ultimately be receiving them.

So when buying a gift basket, if you're basing your choice on the description, you purchase it based on what you think the recipient would appreciate about it. You might buy a gift basket labeled vegan or plant based for someone you know for sure is vegan. You might buy a gift basket labeled healthy for someone you know for sure is on a diet (or for someone you wish ate a healthier diet). For the sustainable label - you choose that for someone who you think would appreciate that about their gift basket, even if it's not right there on the label.

Gift giving is almost always a game of making your "best guess" as to what the recipient would like.


The percentage of people in the US who declare themselves vegan is only 3%, with 5% vegetarians, so I'm quite surprised that they managed to get 20% and 27% choosing the vegan and plant based basket descriptions. Healthy and sustainable are more vague descriptions - even then, the number only rose to 40%... Which means that 60% were still choosing the baskets with animal products.


But that brings up other questions - The meat in gift baskets is often summer sausages or dried deli meats, and not all meat eaters actually like those. The cheese in gift baskets is often smoked or hard cheeses - not everyone likes those either, so would often choose a fruit, nut, or cracker basket instead.

They've said nothing about the pricing on these baskets and the size of the vegan, plant based/"healthy" and "sustainable" baskets as opposed to the ones containing even a single animal product. If you're buying a gift basket, are you going to go for the small basket that has 3 different types of meat and 4 different types of cheese, but is 1/4 the size of the basket that costs the same price, but contains 3 different types of crackers and 4 different fruits? Some would, but most wouldn't. An impressively large size gift for the price is often the primary influence in choosing a gift basket.

Like the "diabetic" meals on airlines that often have more sugar and starch than some of the "regular" meal choices.

People may think a "vegan" basket contains plain fruits & vegetables and be surprised to see half of it is ultra-processed crap.

Exactly.

Also, there's a lot of vegans who live off of processed junk.

I remember about 3 decades ago shopping at a furniture store one time and got to chatting with the salesperson, who felt the need to inform me that she was a vegetarian who didn't use any animal products at all. (Back then either the word vegan was rarely used or not used at all to designate the difference between vegetarians who ate dairy and eggs, and vegetarians who only ate plant matter.)

Anyhow, she also said that she didn't eat any vegetables - she was living on crackers, donuts, cookies, candy, and whatever other junk food she could find that didn't have any animal products at all in them. For instance she would order fries at a fast food restaurant, or eat a bag of chips for lunch because they were being cooked in some kind of vegetable oil.

I often wondered just how long she was able to survive on that kind of diet - at least eating some vegetables, she would have gotten a few nutrients, but eating nothing but junk, little to none of that is even fortified.

But my point is that apparently there's a sub-sect of vegans who subsist on absolute junk, so they might have no problem at all with a vegan/plant based gift basket that consisted of nothing but ultra-processed junk.

There's a giant subset of people currently mistaking marketing for information. Millions of dollars spent on "plant-based" has imbued it with a healthy aura when it is processed junk. Their lies are the only thing that makes these extensive monocultures seem attractive, when it is environment destruction on top of everything else.

Heedless agricultural practices are destroying the top soil that took millenia to build. That's never in the marketing, but that is the facts.

I am glad the term "vegan" is... developing a bad taste in people's mouths!

(ta boom tish!)

It may seem strange, but many Youtube videos about the current processed food crisis (I recommend Evil Food Supply) has given me a look at the convenience-food lifestyle. And how seductive it must be for younger people who don't know the meals they eat three times a day are substantially not food.

I see them crying about their uncontrollable appetite and how it is starting to scare them and how depressed they are. Yet, transitioning to real food seems so daunting, because I can see how it looks that way. I've learned zero junk food because the consequences of me giving in are so immediate and distressing. I had to hang in there for the good feedback, which turned into a more compelling motivator the longer I listen.

Which is why I can say that the cravings do go away, and we feel so much better. But people need more help than they are getting.

I send people to DietDoctor, which is easy to find and access. But to make such a change, people need to believe it will work. In this sea of outright lies which is what people find when they "search," that's still difficult.

(Sorry for the long drawn out story ahead...)

After my mother passed away a few years ago, I became part owner (along with my siblings) in the family farm. It's by no means a small farm, but also not a factory farm since it's family owned. There's more acreage than my father was ever able to operate all by himself, and more than my brother can operate on his own, so we do have a sharecropper who farms a portion of the acreage. My dad grew up on a farm that grew a little of everything, but when he acquired the current farm, it was already declared by the USDA as a grain farm, and as the new owner, Dad was then listed as purely a grain farmer, a designation that my siblings and I also have. It's not that you can't grow vegetables, fruit, or livestock, but you can only grow enough for your own use - if you SELL any of the unlisted products, then you're subject to penalties that will be far higher than anything you'd earn by selling your unlisted products illegally.

Our sharecropper has significantly improved the land that he's farming. My dad (and also my brother) had tried growing wheat a couple times a few decades ago, and because of poor production decided that the land just wasn't good for growing wheat, and went back to just growing corn and soybeans. Our sharecropper on the other hand has planted carefully chosen cover crops that have improved the soil immensely - he planted wheat on a couple of our fields for the first time this year, and the crop was so good that he was able to sell the harvest for seed, as opposed to just selling it as grain. As one of his cover crops this year, he planted a field of radishes. They will not be harvested - It seems that they draw nutrients from the soil, but die off over the winter, rot in the ground, and that process provides more nutrients and much improvement to the soil.

Another tactic that helps improve the soil is not plowing the harvest stubble under immediately after harvest. If you wait until spring the remaining root structure has helped hold the soil in place through the winter months and spring rains, and then if you disc up the top few inches (rather than use a plow which digs deeper into the soil), it loosens the soil for planting.

Our corn and soybean crops are sold to local grain elevators that own chicken farms. (and if our sharecropper hadn't been able to sell the wheat to a seed company, that would have also been sold to one of the chicken companies) One of those companies is a nationally advertised chicken brand, another has a chicken contract with Aldi (many times when I've been at Aldi and they're refilling the fresh chicken display, I see the name of that company on the crates they're unloading) The third is a smaller, local chicken producer.

They're not organically fed chickens (because our crops are not organic - that's another story in and of itself), but I feel good knowing that the corn and soybeans we produce are ultimately going to feed chicken that is sold as fresh meat, rather than being funneled into any part of the ultra-processed food industry.





So many kids in younger generations were brought up on convenience foods, and it wasn't just the kind that you could make the exact same thing at home (for instance frozen lasagne), or stopping at McD's for burgers and fries. After working 8 hours (plus overtime) and a long commute to and from work, plus chauffeuring the kids to various outside activities, there just weren't enough hours left in the day for a lot of moms to go home and cook a meal from scratch, and often not enough time left to put together a minimal effort meal (such as: brown a pound of ground beef, add jar of spaghetti sauce, while pasta boils in a pot of water)

So a tremendous number of these kids honestly don't know how to cook at all. To them, food comes frozen in a box or bag, ready to nuke and eat. If it comes in a can, it needs to have a pop-top tab on it, because they often don't know what a can opener looks like or how to use it. Cooking is as foreign to them as a teen trying to figure out how to use an old rotary phone that's attached to the wall. No wonder it's so daunting to them - they have no basis in their lives to even know how to begin, much less pull together an entire meal.

The youngest ones may grow up not even knowing what food looks like, since they're so often being handed a squeeze tube to suck on that contains mostly fruit puree with a little vegetable puree added.

Will they even be able to figure out what fresh meat and vegetables are? Or will they just look like indecipherable things that the grocery store displays around the edges?