Now research conducted by Portsmouth University has shown that of those people claiming to have an allergy or intolerance, only 2 per cent actually did. That means millions of people wrongly think they have a food allergy. Their condition is not an allergy itself, but the belief that they have an allergy. … The realisation that most people aren’t that special can be avoided by adopting a quasi-medical condition that sets one apart. It demands attention and consideration. It forces other people to think about them and make special arrangements for them. Only last week, a friend with recently self-diagnosed lactose intolerance came round for a cup of tea. Do you have any soya milk? she asked as the kettle boiled. I confessed I hadn’t and felt awful. It was then that I realised she was on her third chocolate biscuit. Oh, milks OK in chocolate biscuits, she said hastily. How convenient, I thought.

— Food intolerance: the new epidemic? [via]

I find this example somewhat annoying (even though I agree with the sentiment) since lactose tolerance is something that declines for the large majority of people as you become an adult. Whatev, though. I’m still really feeling the bit from savage minds of food allergies as an anti-modern idiom of distress.

But this fussiness is part of a larger yearning for control altogether, which is where the anti-modernism comes in. Food has long been not only a means of forging and asserting cultural identity but of resisting the onslaught of a homogenizing, enervating modernity that threatens to dissolve not just cultural identities but individual identities. From the health spa/retreats of the Kellogg brothers and their peers (that gave us corn flakes and granola) to the popularity of Sweet-n-Low in the ‘50s and ‘60s to the communes of the hippie era to the herbal remedies of today, food has been seen as a way to “get back” to a more “natural” way of life – as opposed to the high-stress, low-community, detached and distracted way of life that is modernity.
None of this is to suggest that there are not very real food allergies – it’s hard to argue with anaphylactic shock. Nor, more importantly, is it to say that the 98% of food allergy sufferers in the study with no medically detectable food allergies do not, in a very real way, suffer. The bodily manifestations of the most obviously social disorders can still drastically limit a person’s quality of life.
What it does suggest is that treatment of food allergies needs to go much further than antihistamines and food avoidance to encompass the cultural psychological. If control is a central issue – as it is already recognized to be in anorexia nervosa and other eating disorders, which strike bright, ambitious young women with overbearing parents hardest precisely because they are the least in control of their lives and the most aware of it – then a) developing non-food strategies for regaining control, and b) developing a realistic relationship with the demands and pressures of daily life are also important to individual adjustment.

— Food Allergies and Modern Life

Because when you say you can fix the problem by consuming the right things, by doing correct individual actions–you don’t have to think about real solutions. You don’t have to think about capitalism or the shit corporations put in our food. And you can look down on people who don’t live up to those individualist morals. You get to feel good about yourself for teaching your niece to say no to dessert, and not to waste water. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so much of the responsibility, in both cases, lands on the shoulders of women. So much of it has to do with food. Maybe it’s time for us as women to let go of guilt for not being vegan, for taking long showers, for leaving the water running, for all of it, just as we let go of guilt for what we eat. Because not only does “every little bit” not necessarily help, the attitude that it does contributes to shaming women, and elevates middle class conservation to a morality that was never allowed the poor. Consuming your way to environmental salvation: the feminism-acceptable diet talk.

— It’s not a diet, it’s lifestyle activism [via,via]

Food Not Bombs is a white supremacist movement. If you can’t see that you still have your blinders on. Fuck you is my response to white charity. All your romantic rhetoric about blurred lines between the servers and the served quickly enters the wastebin of reality with every chapter formed. For all those FNB chapters that rely on dumpstered food, I flip a finger to all you white college kids and middle-class punks hiding in drop-out culture, get your fucking privilege out of my face. Did it ever cross your mind that people of color cannot do as you do? Did it cross your mind that dumpster diving is a practice that comes with risks for people of color you know nothing about? And quit fucking up the dumpsters. Some people rely on them for survival; and boo on you that I have to point this out, but they shouldn’t be made to go to your once or twice a week “picnics” to get fed. Fuck corporations but fuck you too for controlling the underground food supply. White people, you’re still stealing.

— Open Letter to Food Not Bombs [via]

for me, the question isn’t, “Does being vegan cost more?” But, rather, “Is healthful food that is nonexploitively produced (regarding human, other animals, and the earth’s resources) accessible to everyone?”

The problem I have with the title question of this post is that I think it fails to challenge the ideology of capitalism. That is, I think these sorts of questions tend to assume that we are rational individuals in the marketplace each acting towards our own self-interest, and that if being vegan is most cost effective way to live then the market will select for it. (This is what I see when cost analysis is being discussed, whether comparing the price of vegetables to meat or health costs of a vegetarian diet to a nonvegetarian diet, either way it’s a question about what’s the most rational choice in the marketplace.)

So I think the question relies too much on class privilege, because if you’re poor then by definition you don’t have access to the marketplace. That is, you first have to have money before you can participate in marketplace, and the more money you do have the more you access and power you have to participate. So it doesn’t matter if it’s a plant-based diet or not, all food costs more than you can afford when you’re poor.

So that’s why I believe the question about access is important, because it hopefully gets beyond capitalist ideology and leads to a deeper understanding that many people don’t access to healthy, nonexploitive foods. And the next step — after we recognize that not every on can eat, let alone eat well — to asking why that is and what can we do about it. That’s the kind of discussion I would like to see taking place.

— Dani commenting on Does being vegan cost more money?