Browsing through the incessant flow of food pictures in my Instagram feeds at night in my apartment, I always think back to the times during the pandemic. I was in that crowded house where I’m born and raised, and my grandpa spent months trying to instill his lifelong cooking techniques into me in our little kitchen. The food my grandpa made was nothing like those “instagrammable” cuisines, fancy and radiant like the trendy avocado toast; there are, bluntly, a lot of “ugly delicious.” My favorite is pork intestine noodles – sounds suspicious, but believe me, it’s the umami that will be the salvation during stressful times like school finals. The noodle’s indescribable flavor and texture always remind me of the complexity of food itself and the many things it’s associated with – culture, family heritage, and parental love.
I won’t even say I’m close with grandpa, but he is always my role model. In my childhood memory, grandpa was young, healthy, and joyful. I liked his military posture and how he always called me “little comrade.” I admire grandpa’s story: how he studied hard to overcome his rural upbringing, and though disillusioned by the cultural revolution, he eventually joined the army and made a name. I remember he always escorted me home after school. Holding my hands, he would tell me to study hard and promise to support my college abroad – the dream he envisioned but never turned true. My hands in his, I felt the wrinkles at that time, but never imagined it would ever grow feeble. Years passed, grandpa’s military figure turns slanted, his voice husky and eyes dull. He loves me though he never expresses it, but I know because he learned how to cook just for me. From dumplings to extravagant cuisines, his skills grow adept as I grow.
I always think about if he is trying to convey something through the delicious food he made – something he has in mind but too shy to say or doesn’t know how to put. It’s hard to interpret. When I hold a bowl of pork intestines noodles that he taught me how to make, I always wonder. What’s that flavor like? Parental love? Fractured dream and unintended fame? Passage of time and encroached health? Toil to sustain a family? Great expectations on his grandson? It doesn’t taste like vegan health or political struggle though.
But I found it’s the dominant language we employ to talk about food now. As veganism spreads across the world, the topic of food has been increasingly politicized. What used to be a simple lifestyle choice of what to eat now becomes a heated debate over a belief system. The identity politics is that vegans think they are doing social good while living a healthy lifestyle, but non-vegans dismiss their attempts and cling to their old habits. This is further complicated when non-vegans point out veganism spreads like a religion, yet there is very little scientific proof in its arguments, while vegans also raise issues like the morality of slaughtering animals on a mass scale and how industrial livestock production contributes to global warming.
The problem is real, though. The industrialization of the food industry puts too much tension on the ecosystem and makes the environmental crisis an imminent subject. Veganism is one of the proposed solutions. Some even radically allege it’s the “single biggest way” to reduce human impact on the environment. A research at the University of Oxford is employed to uphold this claim: cutting meat and dairy products from diet could reduce individual carbon footprint from food by up to 73 percent. What probably makes it worse is that we are not only ruining the environment but also our own bodies. The abuse of fertilizers in agriculture and chemicals in industrial processing of foods impair nutritional values in natural foods while directly damaging our health. The proposed remedy, whole food, is found to be decisively associated with health promotion and disease prevention, according to a 2014 analysis by Yale University. Sounds great, right? Why not change the way you eat, improve yourself, and – probably – save the planet?
The downside is, despite those theoretical benefits, some practices of veganism and dietary plans are accused of being founded on poor science. An article in the Guardian made a long argument against Madeleine Shaw, the author of a clean-eating guidebook named Get the Glow. The article begins with a case of how wellness blogger Jordan Younger’s own diet results in her malnutrition and orthorexia, and points out clean eating has elements of a “post-truth cult.” That is, the movement is majorly fueled by internet celebrities, who suspect and dismiss the values of authorities and experts while developing their own recipes and diets. The article also indicates that the #Eatclean movement could be a school of veganism rendered into its most vulgar form. Under the Instagram hashtag, veganism has been circulated online as a cultural symbol, and most importantly, an instagrammable symbol.
Who’s right and who’s wrong? Here it does sound like a postmodern world where solid evidence supports conflicting arguments. It’s the antinomy Kant has warned us against a long time ago as a result of the iron cage of rationality; that is, if we just say but don’t do, equally-rational-but-contradictory results (called antinomy) are totally sensible but impractical. This contest to invent rhetorics and arguments have no actual use but dividing us up. Further, if everything about food is rendered into conflicting scientific theories, it would blind us to the multifaceted nature of the world and trap us in the cage of reasons.
I’m not saying everyone has a point, so don’t judge and disengage. We do need to change the way we eat for the sake of ourselves and the planet. But do we need something rigid and dogmatic like a distorted veganism belief? Probably no.
Like the Confucius book Zhongyong suggests, maybe we all need to find our own unwobbling pivot between the two poles. It’s not about whether to convert to a vegan or not, but about the specific changes to make to concretely improve our health. As for the aspect of global warming, being a responsible consumer can never be enough. After all, no matter how hard we try to revolutionize our diet, food composes of 26% of the total greenhouse gas emission at most, according to a report published in Science. The 76% large chunk – namely electricity, heat, transport, or industrial processes – is what we have to aim harder for.
It always takes me back to the night when my reticent grandpa and I stand by each other, cleaning the pork intestines and thinking about the delicious noodles we are going to make. Anything like a meal, maintaining a healthy lifestyle, or even tackle global warming takes a lot of work – humble, dirty work, perhaps – but it’s worth it. Is that what grandpa tries to tell? Probably I’ll never know. It’s all too awkward to iterate for an old Chinese man and his grandson.