From: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Newsgroups: rec.food.veg
Subject: meat cravings/soybean politics
Date: 3 Sep 92 18:40:57 GMT
Reply-To: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Organization: COMANDOS Project, Glesga Yoonie

leslie@cgrg.ohio-state.edu (Leslie Bishko) writes:
> I've been a vegetarian for one year and have lately been somewhat
> distressed by meat cravings! ...
> Folks, I'm posting here because I need support!  BBQ'd ribs are
> calling!  Relatives think I'll separate the meat from the vegetables!
> Restaurants offer limited selection and nutriciously deficient
> alternatives!

With restaurants you're probably shit out of luck.  The only restaurants
in the First World that have a clue about vegetarian cooking are specialist
vegetarian places, and if you ain't got one where you live, tough.

When cooking for yourself there's quite a lot you can do.  Go to a Chinese
supermarket and start experimenting with tangy preserved things.  There's
a lot of them and they do a very good job of making you forget about whether
there's meat in what you're eating.


> Also, no matter how long I cook 'em, I can't seem to prepare a good batch
> of soybeans.

Me either.  This is not an accomplishment I particularly need.  This thing
about soybeans and Western vegetarians is a sociological phenomenon of the
late 60s and early 70s; they were heavily marketed by some rather sinister
organizations - the Moonies (who funded some of their activities by soybean
farming) and the animal feed industry (most soybeans are grown for cattle
feed, and soy for human consumption is as much a "by-product" of the beef
and dairy industries as leather or gelatin are).

The Moonies used soy heavily as a staple food, and their converts got some
awful deficiency diseases as a result.  Also, soy contains high levels of
steroids (mostly oestrogens, I think) which have some biological activity.
Traditionally, the cultures that grow soybeans either ferment them or turn
them into curd, rather than eating them directly the way American hippies
started doing.  That's centuries of experience which shouldn't be dismissed
without good grounds - and the "health food" industry's use of the bald
isolated fact that soybeans have lots of protein is nowhere near convincing;
there's a lot more to nutrition than that.

("Health food" industry in quotes, because the companies that market most
of the major specialist veggie products are subsidiaries of transnational
corporations that produce all kinds of evil shit - there's very little
veggie produce made by independents.  One of the few such independents is,
surprise, surprise - the Moonies).

Given that boiled soybeans have a texture so much like plastic bubble
packaging when their skins come off, and that lots of better-tasting
and better-looking beans are easier to cook, why bother with them?

-- 
--  Jack Campin    room G092, Computing Science Department, Glasgow University,
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Newsgroups: rec.food.veg