Tuesday, August 13, 2019

Great take-down of food snobs

The Fake Backlash to Fake Meat
Food activists angry about the processed nature of new plant-based meats are missing the point

The entire thing is worth a read; the conclusion:

"But when we find fault with a clearly beneficial innovation slotting neatly into modern food systems, perhaps the problem isn’t with the system, but with our own idealized vision for what an equitable, healthy, appealing food system should look like. Surely there are excesses and failures with the status quo, in the arenas of nutrition, corporate governance, worker rights, treatment of animals, and more. But while we work to actively address those issues, we might consider whether the systems we have designed over generations to feed billions of humans aren’t doing a relatively good job at that task already. After all, global hunger and undernourishment have been trending downward for decades, an achievement we should surely take into account.

"In the meantime, I would ask that we at least reclaim the concept of food processing as a feature, not a bug, of modern food systems. Doing so would prevent pointless squabbles over vague, value-laden categories and allow for honest, outcome-based efforts to produce healthy, affordable food that leaves behind as small an environmental footprint as possible. In a free society it is fine if some people still wish to differentiate themselves by eschewing these efforts. But the rest of us don’t have to take their tastes seriously."

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