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1·5 days agoWhen you start with compromises like that, the failure is guaranteed, there is no “attempt”.
That’s like saying tapering off a drug addiction is a compromise compared to going cold turkey.
I agree that food is addictive. Habits we develop around food are some of the strongest habits we have. Which is why a lot of people make radical changes in their diet - think New Year’s resolutions - and then give them up entirely because they find their new diet too hard and go back to their old comfortable habits.
If a “revolution in your kitchen” worked for you, good for you! Congratulations!
For other people, changing their dietary habits in a way that lasts a lifetime means building better habits through slow and gradual change.
Especially for people who aren’t cooking and eating alone and have to take other people’s preferences into account - that is, making changes is necessarily a compromise with the other people in their household. And it’s much easier to get your household to agree on smaller, gradual dietary changes then a food revolution.
You know, this is a systemic issue, not a “stupid politicians being stupid” issue.
You’ve got a population of seniors, people who are getting older and losing their physical mobility, who are less able to walk or bicycle or take public transit than younger and healthier people are - many of whom live in car-dependent subdivisions or in areas with poor public transit, like, say, rural Illinois.
These are people who rely on their cars for grocery shopping and medical appointments and socializing.
These are people, often on fixed incomes, often close to the poverty line, who struggle to afford the fees for rideshares or grocery deliveries.
And you can say “if they can’t pass the test they’re not safe to be on the road” - but from the article:
According to the Illinois Department of Transportation, in 2023 the crash rate for drivers 75 years and older in Illinois was lower than any other age group of legal drivers.
This bill is not about leaving unsafe drivers on the road - it’s about not adding unwarranted scrutiny and not making it harder for an especially car-dependent group of people to continue driving.
And it adds a provision that lets a senior’s family members report them if they believe the senior is no longer safe to drive.
This bill is a response to seniors who are genuinely frightened of losing their right to drive and becoming unable to meet their basic needs - and they have a right to be frightened of that, because we’ve built a system where a lot of people can’t meet their basic needs without driving.
In other words, if you build a system that makes driving necessary, you can’t really blame people for not wanting to lose the right to drive.
Congratulations!
“The goal shouldn’t be perfection but rather a healthy and sensible dietary pattern that allows room for enjoyment,” Kuhnle said.
Right. Because attempts at perfection typically fail. Especially when it comes to diet. Quick and drastic dietary changes often lead to relapses and rebounds - yo yo dieting is a thing, after all - while gradually changing food habits is more likely to result in long-lasting dietary and health improvements.
It’s not about a “magical middle ground”. It’s about understanding how humans act.
I have another tip!
Michael Pollan has a dictum for health: eat “real food”. And by “real food” he means food containing only ingredients your great-grandmother would recognize.
(Or someone else’s great-grandmother in some other region/culture, if you’re eating food from somewhere else. Food you’d see on a farm or in a market before the rise of industrial food processing, is the point.)
A way to do that in a modern supermarket is “shop the edges” - do most of your shopping in the produce section, the bakery, for non-vegans the meat and deli sections, the fresh unprocessed food sections that are located on the edges of the building in a typical American grocery. Then duck into the middle of the store for staples like rice and beans and oil and stay far away from the frozen food section.
And when you do that - when you avoid pre-processed food, buy fresh ingredients, and make your own food - it’s easier to eat vegan because you control every ingredient that goes into your food. Your food will not have mysterious chemicals that may or may not be animal derived. Your food will just be food.
And not only will you be eating more ethically, you’ll end up a lot healthier.
Vegan meat substitutes are still fairly healthy compared to actual meat.
I agree, although that’s more a function of how unhealthy meat is than how healthy meat substitutes are.
And I think there’s a significant difference between traditional meat substitutes, like tofu and wheat gluten, and modern meat substitutes like impossible burgers, with high levels of sodium and saturated fat and chemical binders and industrial processing and so on.
Congratulations!
My two best tips are:
If you remove non-vegan ingredients from non-vegan recipes without adding anything else, or substitute vegan meat/cheese/dairy for the real thing, you’ll always think something’s off because it’s never going to be exactly the same. And meat substitutes that are highly processed to try and match the texture and flavor of meat are as bad for you as highly processed anything else.
So my recommendation is: practice cooking recipes that are naturally vegan. There are a lot of vegan dishes in Indian and Chinese cuisine, for instance. There are old recipes from before factory farming when meat was for special occasions instead of every day.
Pizza is flatbread with sauce and toppings, and there are a ton of naturally vegan flatbread recipes. Experiment. Go wild. I’m not telling you not to try vegan cheese, but also try pizza dough with (eg) pesto, shallots, and four different kinds of mushrooms, and see how that goes 🍕 🍕
My second tip is: forgive yourself if you slip.
Food is an addiction. And I mean this quite literally. Fat is psychologically addictive, sugar is psychologically addictive, meat is psychologically addictive. Millions of people in the West don’t feel a meal is complete without a meat dish - by which I mean they literally don’t feel full unless they know they ate meat. I was one of them. It took months before I could finish a vegan meal and not still feel hungry after.
Doing the right thing is hard when the world wants you to do the wrong thing and your body agrees with it.
So if you have cravings you can’t beat and go buy a pizza - forgive yourself and promise yourself to do better tomorrow.
Of course it’s satire. I’m kind of shocked how many people don’t recognize it as satire.
24·1 month agoI see your argument being brought up all the time - it was especially common a year or two back when the 15 minute city had a moment among conservative conspiracy theorists. “But what about people who like to live in suburbs?” “How dare you force people into filthy crowded crime ridden projects?” “Do you want to live like a poor?”
And my response is, people who don’t want to live in those dense walkable urban communities don’t have to live there.
Even in an idealized sustainable civilization where neighborhoods like the one in the video become the model, there will be other types of communities.
Here’s the thing. Life is a series of tradeoffs.
People want the big home, lots of space, and no neighbors, and also want all the benefits of dense urban centers - jobs, stores, services, community, etc.
And that’s what gave us suburbs, and urban sprawl, and car culture, and unsustainable mass consumption to fuel all those individual daily commutes from the urban center to the suburbs.
Because what we traded for the current American civic model, which lets wealthy people have both big houses and lots of land and all the benefits of densely populated urban centers, was using enormous amounts of land, and energy, and resources of all kinds, to build and maintain unreasonably large sprawling megacities, and the transportation infrastructure for daily commutes, and the fossil fuel infrastructure to fuel all those commutes, and so on and so forth.
But that’s not sustainable. It’d take the resources of four additional Earths for everybody to live like a suburban American. And the more climate change (and the attendant economic upheaval) impacts our resource acquisition and supply chains and so on, the harder it’s going to be to funnel those resources to the cities. The suburban/urban sprawl model is on its way out.
So how does one live in a city and get all the benefits of living in a city while consuming a sustainable amount of resources?
The tradeoff for a sustainable urban community is losing the suburban “bedroom communities” with the big houses and the daily commute and the unsustainable consumption. If you want the benefits of city life you have to actually live in the city.
If you want to live with a ton of space and live sustainably, on the other hand, there are rural communal models that allow that.
But the American car-centric urban sprawl lifestyle has an expiration date. If we don’t give it up willingly, geopolitical realities will put an end to it sooner or later. And accepting we can’t maintain the privileged lifestyle we’re used to is something we’re all going to have to do sooner or later.
But look on the bright side, I bet some politically connected contractors in Oakland made a whole lot of money off building it. That’s called investing in the local economy 😆
I’m not a huge fan of Porter. But between her and Kamala fucking Harris, whose big takeaway from the 2024 election seems to be “we didn’t run far enough to the right…”
I don’t know if I used the right term by saying “surcharge”. They built an extraordinarily expensive trolley line from BART to the airport about ten years back and are charging high fees to cover expenses.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakland_Airport_Connector
The San Francisco Airport, on the other hand, has an actual surcharge - the main BART line goes direct to SFO but they charge like $5 extra. But SFO also has the same surcharge on taxis and rideshares :/
In case anyone is wondering, a one way trip from Oakland International Airport to the Civic Center station in San Francisco (the stop next to City Hall and the city’s largest open air fent market) is exactly $12.65.
The trip from Oakland to Civic Center is “just” $5.20, but like OP said, there’s a fuckass stupid airport surcharge for the last half mile or so.
I imagine dead trees were flammable, even back then. And oxygen levels were 15% higher. Can you imagine the forest fires?
Hey now, banana pancakes are awesome.
Funny how so many old punks do it, then 😆
How much would you pay to join a community with that level of protection for user rights? Like the old subscription based forums, some of which are still floating around the internet?
Because “multiple independent steps of verifying” is, frankly, going to be a lot of frustrating, thankless, and redundant work for moderators. I mean, we know how to safeguard people’s rights through legalistic processes. Courts do it all the time. It’s called due process. And due process is frequently a slow, complicated, and expensive pain in the ass for everyone involved. And I think very few people would want to do that work for free.
(Conveniently, this would also serve as a good test for joining such a community - people are more likely to follow the rules and act like decent human beings if a subscription they paid for is riding on it, and it would price out AI and spambots in the process.)