Dear lemmy, someone very close to my heart is starting to fall into conspiracy theories. It’s heartbreaking. Among other things, he has now told me that soy beans are not supposed to be consumed by human beings and is convinced that despite the literal centuries of human soy bean cultivation and consumption, we shouldn’t eat it or anything derived from it for this reason (ie tofu, soy sauce, etc…evidence that soy is present in other common foods doesn’t seem to register with him).
I don’t even know where he got this information from and can’t find a single source to back it up (even disingenuously). I’ve tried explaining to him that sure, in its original state it’s not edible, but undergoes processing (LIKE MANY OTHER FOODS) to become edible. And that this has gone on since at least the 11th century, so it’s not like Big Soy is trying to poison the little people.
He’s normally a very reasonable and intelligent person, and I don’t know how to reach him. I thought it might be helpful to show him where these myths have come from with hard data sources to prove it. He seems open to the possibility, so I don’t think he’s a lost cause yet!
Help?
How do you mean? I eat soy products and I’ve never had anyone mention race as a reason for avoiding soy products.
People from east and southeast Asia have been cultivating and eating soy beans as a staple food since before Babylon. I mean that literally; there is evidence of soy bean cultivation in what is now China from like 7000 BC.
It’s tough to take a phrase like, “Soy makes men weak,” as anything other than racism when it puts down a quarter of the population of the planet. At best, it’s ignorance, but in my experience the people who hold this opinion don’t change their mind when you explain this to them.
Some people are clever enough to try and say that they don’t hate Asian people, but they’ll stigmatize everything about being Asian. Soy products are associated with Asian people, so as a workaround, they can walk right up to the racism line, without jumping completely over it. It’s subtle racism.