Tofu is food

A while ago, I posted a question about where to buy regeneratively grown soybeans in an ag group on Facebook and was asked:”why would you eat gross vegan processed food when you can, you know, just eat meat?” I had to laugh – because to a Chinese person who grew up eating LOTS of tofu, tofu is just…food?

This, my friends, is capitalism and the industrial food complex at work: tofu becomes fake meat; quinoa gets marketed as a gluten-free superfood; amaranth is suddenly an “ancient grain”, and crickets are the new alternative protein. 

Yet this market-led food system is failing us: quinoa farmers not being able to afford their own crops; corn making its way into absolute everything; Mexican cartels seizing the avocado market…and if “cheap food produced at industrial scale” is truly the only way we can feed the world, why are there still nearly a billion people globally going hungry – while we throw away 1/3 of the food produced around the world?

Let’s start to decomoditize the food system by treating food as what it should be: nourishment, building stones of our identity and culture, a human right, and a common good that should be shared with all.

Let’s start by calling tofu…food.