[ZPrimed]

I don't disagree with much of what the author wrote here, except for the part about "I'm starving, but I'm vegan so I won't eat SPAM and I won't eat the peanut butter because it is 'processed' and has 'chemicals.'"

Humans are omnivores, veganism is a choice. You don't get to complain about how rough it is when you yourself have chosen to play with hard mode turned on. Obviously if there are health issues that require an altered diet that's a different story, but if that was mentioned I missed it somehow.

Everything else about the story has merit though, the rich are too rich and the US's "safety nets" are awful. Nobody should go bankrupt due to health problems they can't control.

[stego-tech]

Christ.

Just...that attitude right there, that is part of the problem. That humans who struggle but stand on principle somehow are less deserving than those who willfully throw away their morals or values for comfort.

In that moment, he chose to stand by what was important to him knowing the risks involved. That's one of the things I believe makes us human: the ability to sacrifice our personal benefit for greater causes than ourselves. To suggest he should throw that aside so as not to prolong hunger, instead of critique the system that demands he sell his principles for unhealthy foodstuffs "they" deem appropriate?

Just...fuck, man.

Fuck.

[pseudohadamard]

That was my reaction too. Muslims and Jews, neither of them especially pick-and-choose religions, are allowed to eat haram/non-kosher food if there's no other alternative and yet this guy rejected food he was given due to a lifestyle choice. So instead they stole food that was meant for other hungry people, and felt euphoric about it.

I kinda stopped reading about then.

[armchairhacker]

I mean, if it’s eat meat or die you eat meat or die…but being vegan is a basic privilege. Especially because AFAIK vegan foods require less resources per calorie to produce, so would be cheaper except for logistics.

Avoiding hyper-processed food may be smart if it would lead to health problems later. One jar or peanut butter probably isn’t an issue. But at the macro level, countries spend much more on ER treatment than they could on preventative care, like free or subsidized healthy food.

[tim333]

I looked peanut butter and it's mushed roasted peanuts, sometime with vegetable oil added. Not much hyper processing or weird ingredients there.

[ndsipa_pomu]

Depends on the brand, but a lot of peanut butter uses palm oil which has a bad reputation due to deforestation (often illegal) to produce it.

Cheap brands often include xylitol which is toxic for dogs.

[IAmBroom]

You're shifting the goalposts. The complaint was about ultra-processed food, not the ecological implications of farming.

[ndsipa_pomu]

I was replying to a post mentioning "weird ingredients there" and to my mind, anything apart from peanuts, salt is a "weird ingredient".

[aziaziazi]

Not sure if you’re straw manning intentionally so I’ll imagine the best: a misreporting of his words. Here they are:

> One winter when my roommate and I both were navigating our latest setbacks, we couldn’t make ends meet and we literally went hungry. There just was no money for food. We would go to the catholic food box donation center and they gave me a box, but I was vegan and the box was full of garbage Spam and Frank and Beans type stuff that I ended up just settting out on the curb. I would rather go hungry than develop health problems from filling up on ultraprocessed hydrogenated oil government peanut butter.

Being hungry isn’t starving, the way being out of breath is different from suffocating.

> Humans are omnivores, veganism is a choice

To understand his choice to not eat the box we might paraphrase him: "humans are natural whole food eater, not UPF eater".

It depends on what "human" definition is used: homo sapiens (biologie)? A poor American (context)?