On fake meat and hexane

If you read Food Babies, you probably also read other food-related things, or the news. And boy oh boy has the whole "veggie burgers are filled with toxic chemicals" story been all over the news in the last couple of days. It's great ammo for meat eaters to tell vegetarians to get off their health-conscious high horses. But I don't think everyone should be so quick to panic, and I especially don't think it should be reason to call it quits with soy all together. Yes, fake meat isn't the best for you food in the world (it is after all still a processed food with lots of preservatives, and processed foods are a little removed from being real food even when they aren’t pretending to be a “beef” burger or a “pork” hot dog.

First, the soy that’s in these veggie burgers is isolated soy, which processed in a different way than the soy that’s in soy milk or tofu which is whole soy. Whole soy, btw can actually be very good for you. Also, it’s unclear if hexane cooks off, or if the amounts in the products are large enough to be harmful or not.

I think there needs to be a whole mess of change and regulations in how our food (of the meat and non-meat variety) is produced. But I don’t know that raising the flag of panic around fake meat is necessarily a good way to go. For a lot of people just starting out with vegetarianism, or life-long meat eaters who need to cut their cholesterol after a heart attack or other life-threatening illness (like many in my family), fake meat can be an easy and tasty alternative. Not that we should tolerate anything hazardous in our food, but I’ll still take trace amounts of hexane over life-threatening amounts of e coli any day.

Mother Jones on the topic

Gothamist on the topic

(cross posted on Food Babies)

An Egg-cellent way to make money?

As a Lacto-ovo vegetarian, I’ve often said that I eat eggs because I believe in a chicken’s right to choose. (I realize that they are more chicken periods than they are chicken abortions, and that the chicken really has no choice in the whole matter anyway, but still.)

Being adamantly pro-choice however doesn’t mean that there isn’t still a lot of grey area for me on the subject of eggs and unborn babies. A recent post on Jezebel about person stories of egg donation got me re-thinking about the subject. One woman who wrote in called it “another side of being pro choice,” the thinking being I guess that if you support a woman’s right to choose to not have a baby you must support a woman’s right to choose to pay to have another woman’s eggs make her baby and the right of the other woman to choose to sell her eggs.

As most people know, donating eggs is much more difficult than donating sperm (the limited amount of eggs a woman has, the possible medical complications, the invasiveness, the recovery time) and thusly much more lucrative. But just like sperm donation values good looks (you can even get your sperm donor to look like a famous person), intelligence, health, etc., egg donation can be highly competitive. Many of the stories of egg donation involve prospective parents who want to design some “perfect” baby from thin, tall, blonde, high-SAT, scoring athletic, musically-talented eggs. Which is part of the reason egg donation has always turned me off.

Sure, you may similarly pick a mate that is smart and attractive, but without knowing the person you don’t know what kind of personality this Arian standardized test-wiz will have. The factors that are valued (race often chief among them) aren’t necessarily what makes a good person, and besides, should you really be designing your kid?

As a single woman, the prospect of making $5,000-$10,000 for something you throw away every month anyways can sound tempting, but invasive medical procedures and moral quandaries over having children in the world that you don’t know aside, it turns out that most women probably wouldn’t even qualify anyways.

So it’s true, being pro-choice means you must support a woman’s right to choose whatever she wants to do with her body, no matter if it’s something you feel is responsible or would choose to do yourself, whether that be aborting a baby they don’t feel they can care for, or having 19 kids like the Duggers, or paying to have bio-chemist Barbie’s eggs planted in her. But, the obsession with having your own (even partially) biological “perfect” child when there’s thousands of kids waiting to be adopted just seems like a waste.