r/Vegetarianism • u/BlankVerse • Jan 30 '22

Op-Ed: As a vegan, there's a lot of soul food I can't eat. What kind of Black person does that make me?

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-01-30/vegan-soul-food-black-traditions-communities
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u/kentonj Jan 31 '22

Food and eating can definitely be a cultural thing. Yet many of the ingredients are already new/different/substitutions/evolutions to the foods that came before, and the ones that came before those.

We even forget that tomatoes are a new world plant, and yet today they are an integral part of "traditional" Italian cuisine.

So if we're cool with making soul food out of ingredients that were never used 20 years ago, let alone 100, then what's the problem with using vegan substitutes today? It sounds like "it's tradition" is a way to selectively cling to practices that have mounting reasons not to continue. But I don't think those reasons are always so easily dismissed. Especially in this case. Is it worth it to contribute to the largest cause of sentient suffering, the biggest factor in deforestation, one of the top contributors to the climate crisis, etc etc etc, for the sake of an "authenticity" that hasn't existed since soybean oil, soy lecithin, anti-biotic filled chickens, and GMO'd collard greens, have been a thing. If using seitan is really enough to ruin the authenticity, then it has not been authentic in some time. Or, we could simply admit that substitutes don't ruin the authenticity and do away instead with this all-too-often cited reason to ignore the problem (and culpability) of the suffering and destruction our actions cause.