Thread by @originalspin

This is a Chinese hotpot, you engorged penis

It could be made with nothing but vegan ingredients and it would still be delicious and you’d still be a xenophobic tool

https://twitter.com/jonaweinhofen/status/1078512183393148928

Can we talk about white veganism for a second? The kind espoused by folks like Jona here, who begins his Twitter bio with the Sanskrit word for “nonviolence” but then craps on Asian cultural expressions in order to advance his neocolonial beliefs?

https://twitter.com/jonaweinhofen/status/1078512183393148928?s=21

Because veganism as practiced by white Western culture *is* neocolonialist. It harvests and expropriated ingredients and preparation techniques from nonwhite cultures to create expensive foodstuffs that many people in their origin cultures couldn’t hope to afford.

Tofu, tempeh and quinoa are fancy Whole Foods goods for white folk but they were subsistence proteins in Asia and Latin America first.

And while poor local farmers initially benefited from white interest in their fare, mass commercialization has subsequently crushed them.

Do you know how white people first fell in love with tofu?

Via the concentration camps where Japanese Americans were “relocated” in WE2, where displaced farmers grew soy and created makeshift tofu production plants to supplement the military-style western fare they were served.

The US government pushed Japanese Americans off their land and put them in a mass racist/xenophobic incarceration. White farmers took over billions of dollars of real estate, while Japanese Americans farmed dry patches in the desert to make cultural sustenance for their families.

The soldiers assigned to guard Japanese Americans in the camps became familiar with the fare being prepared “on the side”—it was better than the mess hall food—because of the hospitality of captives toward their captors. Tofu was “weird” but they developed a taste for it.

The rise of the counterculture led to a boom in interest in eastern spirituality and vegetarianism. By the 70s, tofu consumption spread rapidly into white communities. Though initially most tofu was made by small Asian American businesses or imported, US industry jumped onboard.

Though an almost unknown product in 1900, used only as forage for farm animals, by 2000, 70 million plus acres of American soil was planted with soybeans and the US was a net exporter of soy to Asia.

America is now the world’s soy king, to the point where Trump is making Chinese imports of a plant that originated in China a central part of his trade agenda.

More recently, white vegans and natural food lovers fell in love with the Peruvian grain quinoa, and began importing it by the ton—causing an actual quinoa shortage among poor Peruvians, who saw their staple grain being sent to feed condescending white folk instead of their kids.

Fortunately native farmers were able to step up production and there were only a few seasons of drought. Then industrial commercialization hit them like a storm of anvils. Major US producers began farming quinoa, destroying Peru’s market.
nacla.org/news/2018/03/1…

So when @jonaweinhofen mocks traditional Chinese fare to condescendingly push borrowed beliefs, he should know that he’s part of a vast exploitative program designed to repackage nonwhite staple fare and commercialize it for white bellies, crushing native cultures as it goes.

Also the delicious huoguo @jonaweinhofen mocks as “dishwater” began as a cold-weather mainstay of poor Chinese seeking to stretch scarce meat into a hot meal made mostly of plant products. If he wants to mock meat as gross, he should turn to his German roots and look at sausages.

Sourcing for history of soy in the US (and the Japanese American incarceration roots of US taste for tofu): MAGIC BEAN by University of Kansas Press

kansaspress.ku.edu/978-0-7006-263…

Should be WW2 obviously, typo