Navigating the ethics of our food choices can be complex. With every meal, we face decisions that impact the environment, animal welfare, and cultural norms. Let’s explore the moral landscape of our diets in an age of heightened awareness.

Deciding what to eat on an ethical basis is a bit of quagmire. Every time you eat, something dies, whether it be an insect on that lorry windscreen, or the harvest mouse, harvested in that field of organic wheat. A cow dies for you, but your demand for meat gave it the life you later took.

When they said you had to de-colonise your diet, this isn’t what they meant:

 

 

We are of course morally superior when we’re alert to social injustice (so I’m told) and a bacon sandwich may well be institutionally or systemically racist, and therefore to be avoided. However we do as a species like to show off a bit, and if you can attach some snobbery to your virtue signalling, you will achieve that much desired social status. Woke people won’t admit to there being such a thing as Woke Food, but just look at the two lists.  With which list do you identify?

Woke	Bloke, Not Woke
Avocado Avocado, smashed = EVEN WOKER Beans, non-baked Cheese, other Chickpeas Posh crisps Couscous Curry lentils lettuce (not iceberg) fake milk from soya, almonds etc pesto Quinoa, pronounced keen-wah Quinoa, pronounced kwin-oh-ah = WOKE but somehow less so spices suchi warps, I mean wraps Greek yoghurt	Apple Banana Beans, baked Burger Cheese, edam, mild, tasty Cheese roll Chips and chip butties Crisps ready salted, salt and vinegar jam doughnuts hot dogs lamb iceberg lettuce meat in general any natural milk pies pizza sausage sausage roll scone hams

Here is simple formula to follow:

Food from a non-English-speaking non-white culture = WOKE

Food from a non-English-speaking white culture = SUSPICIOUS

Food from an English-speaking white culture = NOT WOKE

It’s Just Plain Nuts

 

 

Although California regularly suffers from drought, it produces 82 per cent of the world’s almonds, many of which have been planted to meet the increasing global demand for almond milk. This year-round crop consumes about 8 to 10 per cent of California’s agricultural water supply. Not just nuts either:

 

 

Meat

Meat is a widely available source of protein and full of Vitamin B12 and iron. It also whacks out nosh in an easily digestible form. Your body needs protein, but if you eat lots of low protein food, you end up eating a lot of calories just to get enough protein. Most of us don’t need a lot of calories.

Forget that statistics about how much it water or food it costs to produce a pound of beef. These can be a bit misleading. The carcass of a cow weighs only about 75% of an actual whole cow. It’s skin becomes leather. The bones, fat, intestines and so on are all used. They make dog food, cat food, soap fertiliser and even pharmaceutical products. Vegans would replace all that with plastics.

 

 

The Food Police at Work

We used to take the mickey out of foreign foods. Now that’s considered racist and indigenous food culture is where it’s at. Worse still, there is the ever present danger of cultural appropriation, you know, when you adapt a dish to local tastes. It’s a form of colonialism, travelling to distant lands and pillaging their recipes. British chef Jamie Oliver even has “cultural appropriation specialists” to approve his menus, after his “punchy jerk rice” attracted criticism because he didn’t use traditional Jamaican jerk marinade ingredients. He told the Sunday Times “Your immediate reaction is to be defensive and say, ‘For the love of God, really?’And then you go, ‘Well, we don’t want to offend anyone.’ ”

 

 

Is There A Place for “Woke” Culture in the Food Allergy Community?

by Aleasa Word, FAACT’s Vice President of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Woke has its origins in the USA, so I make no apologies for naming a few American culprits:

She wrote in February 2023 that “The idea of being “woke” in our community excites me. The choice to be woke can help us feed our natural curiosity as humans to find out more about what we don’t know. If we don’t make that choice, we may doom ourselves a life that is often void of the amazing color of change that makes the world beautiful. That change includes the hues of skin attached to diversity or race, the nuances of differing cultures, the wisdom of varied generations, the abilities of those in every social-economic class, and the acceptance of those who found their “happy” identifying with a gender or orientation that suits their true self. There are some negative things that woke culture has spotlighted for us. Systemic racism exists. Systems of oppression exist. Real world issues like hatred, violence, and malice exist. While understanding the reality of all of these, I would caution all of us to NEVER LOSE HOPE!

She was of course writing about, and in the context of, food allergies

 

Here’s another unknown person,

Fabio Parasecoli. “It is impossible to ignore the topic of race and structural racism when talking about food systems and food culture. And we should not shy from those conversations, least of all in our classrooms. The worst thing that could happen is for schools and institutions of higher education to adopt the same woke#washing that we are seeing in the food business. The Black Lives Matter movement may not be as visible in public discourse as it was a few weeks ago, but its influence is still very much felt.”

Remember I said your bacon sarnie might be racist? You thought I was kidding.

“Overall, food studies is a field populated by very well-meaning people who care about social justice, cultural appropriateness, and the politics of food production, distribution, acquisition, and consumption. Both faculty and students are mostly women and, despite growing diversification, the majority of those involved are still white.”

Is there something wrong with most people being white in America?

 

Wars in the Press

Naturally enough the Guardian likes woke food and the Mail does not. After the Mail said that Gen Z (whoever they are) were ditching ham and mustard sarnies for chicken, the Guardian called them all snowflakes and rattled of a pile of middle class foreign words like “Quinoa, vegan camembert and kale, artisanal sourdough with a non-binary condiment (they-onnaise)”

The Mail on Sunday has such a downer on woke foods that it found a dietician to blame them for a “surge of distressing gut problems”. She said ”A large proportion of my patients with IBS-type symptoms seem to have extremely ‘wokeʼ and restricted diets. Many colleagues report the same. Dr Rehan Haidry, gastroenterologist from The London Clinic, says this type of patient now makes up a fifth of his caseload. ‘Iʼve seen a massive surge recently,ʼ he says.‘They have diets with all sorts of unusual things that just werenʼt very common a few years back, but now are – nut milks, avocados, all sorts of grains.ʼ

And Dr Nick Trott, a gastroenterology dietician at Sheffield University, agrees, saying: ‘Patients are changing their diets according to healthy-eating advice theyʼve seen on social media, and suddenly develop IBS-type symptoms. ‘Last week I saw a young guy with terrible diarrhoea. He was having a pint of fruit juice for breakfast every day because he thought it was a healthy thing to do – there lies the root of his symptoms.ʼ

“Now, I should point out that Iʼm not against eating vegetables and fruit – far from it. But today, our salads look markedly different to how they did when I started my career in dietetics, many decades ago. Back then, youʼd have lettuce, cucumber, tomato, red or yellow pepper and perhaps a portion of protein in the form of cheese, tuna or chicken. Now, staples seem to be colourful beetroot, roasted sweet potato, edamame beans, chickpeas and lentils or other pulses, served on a bed of fancy grains such as bulgar wheat. These so-called superfood salads are tasty, yes. But scores of people will find them much harder to digest……The same goes for cashews and almonds – abundant in the form of trendy plant#based milks and healthy snack bars.

Many of my ‘wokeʼ diet patients also tell me: ‘I canʼt eat bread.ʼ More specifically, they tell me that theyʼre ‘intolerantʼ to gluten, the protein that gives bread, pasta and other carbohydrates their chewiness. Studies show that one Briton in ten now avoids gluten – and bread – wrongly believing that itʼs bad for their health. Instead, they seek free-from replacements or stick to low-carbohydrate diets. But they are – unknowingly – adding to their problems. First, people on low-carb or gluten-free diets often donʼt get enough fibre, leading to constipation. And it often surprises people to learn that gluten probably isnʼt the reason bread makes them bloated anyway.

 

 

Junk Food

Woke food is not about eating well or necessarily eating highly nutritious food. On the other hand woke food isn’t junk food either:

“The UK government is banning daytime TV adverts for sugary foods like granola and muffins in its battle against child obesity, branding such popular items as junk food. Ads showing “less healthy” food and drinks will only be allowed to be aired after 9 p.m. from October next year.

According to the National Health Service, obesity is rising among British kids with one in 10 four-year-olds now considered to be obese. And one in five five-year-olds suffers from tooth decay from eating too much sugar. Also included on the government’s list – which uses a scoring system based on each item’s sugar, fat and salt content – are pre-packaged popular sugary breakfast foods such as croissants, pancakes and waffles.

“Breakfast cereals including ready-to-eat cereals, granola, muesli, porridge oats and other oat-based cereals” are included, the government said. Also on the banned list are products such as chickpea or lentil-based crisps, seaweed-based snacks and Bombay mix as well as energy drinks, hamburgers and chicken nuggets.

But the new restrictions will not apply to healthier options such as natural porridge oats and unsweetened yoghurt. The government hopes the new measures could help prevent some

20,000 cases of childhood obesity a year. “Obesity robs our kids of the best possible start in life, sets them up for a lifetime of health problems, and costs the NHS billions,” Health Secretary Wes Streeting said.”This government is taking action now to end the targeting of junk food ads at kids, across both TV and online.”

© 2024 AFP