Weird double standard on ultra processed foods

Someone in my family often rants about how things like Impossible meat are super processed and not very healthy, and they like bringing up this one viral image that listed all of the Impossible meat ingredients and then for steak just said “steak”. Sometimes they bring this topic up while we’re eating.

Yet they eat processed foods with hydrogenated vegetable oils and refined carbohydrates and added sugar and multiple preservatives ALL THE TIME! Almost every night they want some sort of processed dessert or snack. Chips, hot dogs, bologna, pop tarts, sugar cereal, candy bars, crumbl cookies, fried chicken…

soybean oil is the first ingredient listed on our jars of mayonnaise, but nobody but me knew this because nobody ever reads the nutritional label on anything. One time we were all eating marie calendar’s pot pies and he said that “seed and vegetable oils are the real problem, not meat” but the pot pies were made with soybean oil. One time he was eating a bowl of Skinny Pop butter flavored popcorn and when I mentioned it was non-dairy he literally stopped eating it and said “I KNEW it tasted bad! This will probably give you cancer”, but PopSecret and movie theatre popcorn are both made with oil, too, and he likes those.

Now what confuses me isn’t that he thinks fake meat isn’t healthy. I mean, compared to less processed plant foods, it most certainly is not. I think it’s a good thing to be aware what food is made of. What confuses me is that he only seems to care about processed foods when it’s vegan food. Also, it’s not like all vegans are just eating Impossible burgers and oreos. Just like vegans aren’t only eating lettuce and carrots.

I’ve also seen fruit and vegetable pills advertised on TV and these got no remarks, but for some reason tofu is weird and fake.

I think I know the reason your family member only cares about vegan super processed food…he’s a small-minded, hypocritical asshole.

It’s a means of avoiding judging their food selections. They genuinely don’t care how the food is processed, as you have made very evident. It’s merely a convenient way to avoid having to consider their food selections. It’s comparable to when people draw attention to the fact that mice and other small creatures perish while growing vegetables. They are unwilling to consider it seriously. All they want is for veganism to be incorrect so they won’t have to worry about what to eat.

The fact that you have to cope with that is awful.

Simply keep telling him about the increasing number of vegan foods he consumes. Make him sabotage everything he eats.

Bread is scary, flour is scary! Food processors, blenders? Of the devil! (But not taking a bite out of an animal!) /s

The relative is demonstrating to you the influence of the media. Raise a small question and… Don’t forget confirmation bias either.

Being ignorant is convenient.

After you move out and grow up, you don’t really recall all these stories.

By what do you mean? Steak is just steak. It is represented by the symbol ST in the periodic table of elements.

It never fails to surprise me how some carnists suddenly transform into dieticians when discussing vegan cuisine, all the while making completely terrible dietary decisions for themselves.

It’s clear that he doesn’t really care about processed foods or health; instead, he just wants to bash vegans because he gets offended when they criticize his dietary choices.

This person consumes the highly unhealthy “processed meats,” I’m going to assume? such as those that are proven to promote cancer, like bacon?

This is a rather typical occurrence. My go to response is, arsenic is natural, uranium is natural too, totally unprocessed. Go eat some uranium/arsenic now :pinched_fingers:t4:. This usually causes consumers to pause and consider the fact that natural or unprocessed food isn’t necessarily the best.