Great list! It all comes back to what Michael Pollan said, “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.“ Also, it is super fun to make homemade Yogurt, fermented cabbage or pickles for example and to grow fresh micro-greens(sprouts) for your sandwiches or salads. -AK
My great-grandmother would sooner recognize soy milk than pasture-grass-fed milk - granted, in Dhaka she would be used to the milkman coming over with fresh (presumably unpasteurized but definitely not pasture-grass-fed) milk every morning, a tradition that extends even now, but I don’t see what’s so wrong with soy/rice/oat milk? Especially if you have lactose issues?
And good luck finding raw dairy products, fermented produce, or unrefined sea salt in many countries without blowing your budget or heading to Super-Urban-Central.
Someone on my Facebook friends list keeps claiming that veganism would be the answer to world hunger. I really can’t see that happening - not when in places like Dhaka it’s a lot easier to have cows and goats roaming around in the dusty city than trying to grow anything beyond rice, and not when one significant Muslim holy day involves the sacrifice of livestock and the donation of meat to the needy - there are LONG LINES in every house during that time. You reckon they’ll be friendly to a house that says “oh, to fix YOUR hunger, WE went vegan, so NO MEAT FOR YOU! It’s good for YOU anyway”? It’s hard enough just being vegetarian, you’d miss out on half the food because there’s milk or eggs or fish or ghee in it somewhere.
Sometimes I feel like the people who argue for one particular diet for world-changing reasons assume that everyone does farming the same way. Not all cattle farmers chop down rainforests to grow grain and not all chicken farmers use battery farming, for goodness sake. In some places “organic farming” is (or until very recently) was the norm.
Though this food chart does remind me of my Denver host family, who had food substitutes for everything. Fake egg, fake milk, fake who-knows-what, all with the promise of being “low on fat” or “low cholesterol”. I can’t see how fake food could possibly be better than just normal eggs and normal milk! Never mind that they all taste like something out of a chem lab!
Lists like this really shit me. My mum and sister are lactose intolerant so they drink rice milk, I can’t eat meat let alone “fresh pasture grass fed meats”, and SO WHAT if I use tinned legumes? The “eat” list relies on a lot of intensive preparation and/ or proximity to fresh food, for many of us we just can’t do that. Regardless of why, there’s always going to be some food snob handy to judge us. Tell me how THAT’S healthy?