[ao98]

If your first thought was “what is The Sad Bastard Cookbook”, here’s an except (and yes, totally worth fighting for :)

“Life is hard. Some days are at the absolute limit of what we can manage. Some days are worse than that. Eating—picking a meal, making it, putting it into your facehole—can feel like an insurmountable challenge. We wrote this cookbook to share our coping strategies. It has recipes to make when you’ve worked a 16-hour day, when you can’t stop crying and you don’t know why, when you accidentally woke up an Eldritch abomination at the bottom of the ocean. But most of all, this cookbook exists to help Sad Bastards like us feel a little less alone at mealtimes.

The Sad Bastard Cookbook is funny, realistic, and kind. It’s vegetarian/vegan. It’s a community-built project. And the e-book is free. It’s hard to survive late capitalism and we want to help.”

[dotancohen]

Interesting correlation, by the time I got to "when you can’t stop crying and you don’t know why" I thought to myself the cookbook had better be vegetarian. Is there a known correlation between emotional distress and vegetarianism or veganism?

[JumpCrisscross]

> Is there a known correlation between emotional distress and vegetarianism or veganism?

Apparently yes [1][2].

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36045075/

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-63910-y

[dotancohen]

That is amazing, I thought that I should not be able to predict that. Thank you.

[ao98]

That’s a good question (and I don’t know the answer). As a practical matter, if you’re strapped for time, having fresh meats on the ready isn’t practical. And canned/frozen aren’t great options.

The opposite holds true for many veggies because they are seasonal - for big portions of the year, canned or frozen are the best you can get. Beans/lentils, dried or canned, etc.

[semi-extrinsic]

> As a practical matter, if you’re strapped for time, having fresh meats on the ready isn’t practical. And canned/frozen aren’t great options.

At least where I live, you can get excellent quality canned soup with meat, like goulash or chicken noodle soup.

Also, cured meats like salami or prosciutto have long shelf life in the fridge and are excellent for throwing together quick pasta recipes. Cook pasta, slice a little salami, fry salami in the pan with some oil, maybe add some chili flakes or garlic or fennel seeds, put the al dente pasta and a splash of pasta water in the frying pan, cook for two minutes more, done.

Also raw eggs last more than a month in the fridge. Hard cheese lasts indefinitely if packaged well. Dry cured slab bacon is good for at least a month. And so on.

[dotancohen]

  > As a practical matter, if you’re strapped for time, having fresh meats on the ready isn’t practical

I usually have some form of pastrami in a well sealed container in the refrigerator, this is one of my ingredients for a need-a-quick-to-prepare-meal. They last for weeks if properly sealed.

But my point wasn't really about the fitness of the specific ingredients, rather, why would I associate those with emotional distress with vegetarians? My wife and daughter are vegetarians and I have no negative associations with that lifestyle. But looking back, many emotionally distressed people that I've met have been vegetarians I think, thought I do not imply that the association also goes the other way.

I wonder if there have been studies on correlations - I should not have been able to predict that.