Letters to the Editor
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Binarism: Vegetarian vs. Carnivores
It really amazes me how we try to reduce humans to this binary division: vegetarians and carnivores. We are neither. We are omnivores. We have choices. Our cultures had seasonal and cultural attachements to what we ate. We have now succumb to corporatism and fanaticism for our food notions. We have abandoned our roots to food. We have demonized it and we have commodified it.
Like alc earlier, my family is Greek. Older Greek people basically had a vegan diet for 80 days in the year, 40 days before Christmas and 40 before easter. Then there were all the other days with no meat for special saints. I walk around and young American kids think they invented veganism. Gooooo on....!!!! They invent imitation food to sustain themselves and have lost the ways that people for generations survived periods of no meat and no dairy. Religion reasons were given for not eating meat or things that came from animals with blood, but it was really scarcity and need. Gee, it resulted in really good health. Now the Greeks have succumbed to the meat based diet because they are prospering and guess what? They have become really unhealthy. The old women that made the wild greens salads, that new all the edible greens are dying off, what a tragedy.
Even the Germans who you all think are carnivores had set days a week that were grain days. How do you feed families in the cold winter days in Germany? You invent all kinds of ways to cook with grains. Another question I have is about all those gluten allergies. Gee folks, if you are European American there is no way your genetic type would have made it this far if you had gluten allergies. I am no geneticist, if you were really gluten allergic you would have died off somewhere in Russia, Poland or Germany, I don't think that gene would have made it this far.
So, please stop demonizing food. Start enjoying it for what it is and what it gives us: life. Make choices but don't judge others for their choices, they cannot help it, they are omnivores. Oh, by the way, can you all go back to being carbophobics? My local bakery in Berkeley keeps running out of my favorite baguette.