Like all mental illnesses, eating disorders can be illogical and difficult to tackle alone. It’s not your fault that you were drafted into this fight, but I know you have what it takes to win! You deserve to have a healthy relationship with food, and with the way you view yourself. You are incredible, you are strong, and you deserve to eat 💖
I WOULD PAY TEN TIMES AS MUCH FOR CHOCOLATE IF IT MEANT REDUCING THE AMOUNT OF SLAVES IN THE WORLD? HOW IS THIS ANY KIND OF PROBLEM.
good news, you can! the company’s called Tony’s Chocolonely and their entire purpose is to make slave-free chocolate and reform the chocolate industry.
Whole Foods carries it. If you don’t want to support an Amazon-owned company, World Market carries it. You can also buy it directly from the company.
It’s the best chocolate I’ve ever had and it’s 100% slave free. Tony’s Chocolonely works really hard to push for transparency within the chocolate industry and actually has and is following an action plan to eliminate slavery within cocoa production. They’re good people who make good chocolate.
As a certified Chocolate Snob™, I HIGHLY recommend Aldi/Trader Joe’s (they’re owned by the same company) for chocolate. It’s cheap and great quality for the price, and almost all of it is Fair Trade and/or UTZ certified. TJ’s dark chocolates are a little more expensive but also a little higher quality than Aldi’s, I’d say, but Aldi beats a lot of more expensive stuff (such as Nestle that’s for sure). And TJ’s cocoa powder is noticeably tastier than the Kroger store brand for the same (or lower) price!
I… I didn’t even know there was still slavery in the chocolate industry… and the fact that Cadbury’s isn’t on the slave-free list makes me feel kind of sick cause they’re what I usually buy…
I WOULD PAY TEN TIMES AS MUCH FOR CHOCOLATE IF IT MEANT REDUCING THE AMOUNT OF SLAVES IN THE WORLD? HOW IS THIS ANY KIND OF PROBLEM.
good news, you can! the company’s called Tony’s Chocolonely and their entire purpose is to make slave-free chocolate and reform the chocolate industry.
Whole Foods carries it. If you don’t want to support an Amazon-owned company, World Market carries it. You can also buy it directly from the company.
It’s the best chocolate I’ve ever had and it’s 100% slave free. Tony’s Chocolonely works really hard to push for transparency within the chocolate industry and actually has and is following an action plan to eliminate slavery within cocoa production. They’re good people who make good chocolate.
As a certified Chocolate Snob™, I HIGHLY recommend Aldi/Trader Joe’s (they’re owned by the same company) for chocolate. It’s cheap and great quality for the price, and almost all of it is Fair Trade and/or UTZ certified. TJ’s dark chocolates are a little more expensive but also a little higher quality than Aldi’s, I’d say, but Aldi beats a lot of more expensive stuff (such as Nestle that’s for sure). And TJ’s cocoa powder is noticeably tastier than the Kroger store brand for the same (or lower) price!
I… I didn’t even know there was still slavery in the chocolate industry… and the fact that Cadbury’s isn’t on the slave-free list makes me feel kind of sick cause they’re what I usually buy…
No ok but I actually met him. Several of my colleagues and students were hired to do some assessments for several manmade and natural ponds on his property. He wanted to maintain them with several different fish populations so that kids nearby could fish and have a good time.
While we were working he rode up in his four wheeler with a terrified look on his face. I never thought I would see a former football player on the verge of tears, but boy howdy he nearly was. Several of us stop what we were doing and go over to see what was up.
“I was running the tractor through the field and almost hit a fawn.” He says.
Now, for reference, it’s pretty common to have farmers run over and kill fawns. The defense mechanism of fawns when they are young is to lay down low and not move…which obviously isn’t great for when there’s a tractor. It happens all the time, but it can be pretty bloody. It’s not a pretty sight.
So, thinking that maybe such a gory scene unnerved him and that we may have to dispose of the body, I say “Mr. Brown, is the fawn still alive?”
He says “Yes, I took it to the barn…but I’m afraid the mom won’t take it back because it has human scent on it.”
The myth about “human scent” is a common one, but it’s just that…a myth. But still, this guy was absolutely terrified that this little deer was going to live the first few weeks of its life without a parent. He was distraught.
Luckily my professor/boss was like “Don’t worry Mr. Brown, if you return the fawn relatively close to the spot that you found it, the mother will come back. The human scent thing is just a myth. The fawn will be alright, just be sure to keep the barn quiet so that the fawn doesn’t panic.”
Mr. Brown’s face lit up and he let out a sigh of relief. “Thank God” he said “I was so worried.”
And that’s the story of how I met the sweetest man ever: Mr. Jason Brown.
For magic improvements on thing that is already perfect:
Use one spoon white sugar, and one spoon brown if you have it.
After microwave, before noms, add vanilla ice cream.
o/
salt is a flavour enhancer, add just a tiny dash, not enough to make it salty.
Because I love you all.
reblogging cause i need to save this
A note for those who have trouble measuring butter with a spoon as I do: one cup I am sixteen tablespoons. Butter/margarine bricks are usually a half a cup, so just cut one eighth of that amount
These are really good! And yes, for the love of god, if you have it use white sugar and brown sugar, add just a pinch of salt, and as many chocolate chips as you darn well please. Great with icecream, whipped cream on top, or a tall glass of milk (keep in mind you gotta eat it with a spoon, you can’t dip it in milk)
My eyes just rolled back so far into my head I can see my brain.
[Image: a white non-binary person with short dark hair wearing a tank top with butterflies on it, in a black and white portrait. They’re turning their head toward their upturned hand, on which is an engraved wide wedding band. They are looking past the camera. Above their hand are the purple words ‘not everything is about you’ with brightly colored cartoony framing.]
Msg for your, uh, friend.
I’d also like to point out that OP’s story also provides an example of a vegan who is not just Entitled as a person (thinking they need to redirect attention to themselves when talking about something unrelated to them, as already pointed out here), but who is clearly ignorant about their own diet and its actual ethical and practical considerations, meaning they probably did zero actual research into it before using it for smugness brownie points to shame other people for things that shouldn’t by all logic even violate the ethical reasoning behind their diet anyway.
‘Cause here’s the thing: I sometimes see (especially, the young) vegans assuming honey is ~unethical and exploitative~ because literally all they know about its origins is “it comes from honeybees”, meaning all they think is “it’s an animal product” – and I sometimes even see them claiming that humans taking honey is “stealing the animals’ labor!!” – and therefore ethically 100% wrongity wrongity badwrong.
But…it’s not.
See, in order to think that honey is 100% ~unethical exploitation of bees~, one would have to have no idea how large-scale food production actually works – particularly in regards to fruits and vegetables, but especially in regards to honey itself, and the actual practices of beekeeping.
Here’s the truth that a disturbing number of people aren’t aware of before they decide Honey is Badwrong:
1.) Honeybees are a NECESSARY part of the pollination process of many, many of our crops. Cucumbers? Oranges? List almost anything that isn’t being carefully hyper-closely monitored to avoid cross-pollination with neighboring varieties, and that Crop? Is likely – particularly in cases of large monocrops – being pollinated almost entirely by honeybees, because other pollinators in the wild, just wouldn’t add up enough to cover the whole of all those fields.
And a large portion of our fruits and veggies REQUIRE fertilization before they can even begin to produce the edible portion.
Squash, peppers, tomatoes, citrus like lemons and limes and oranges? All of those and quite a few besides, are bodies produced AFTER the flowering stage, and originally evolved to carry seeds. And with some species – such as all the types of tree nut; grains like wheat, barley and rice; various types of beans like peas, kidney beans, or soy; coffee cherries; spices like cocoa, vanilla, or poppy seed, I could go on and on really – in those species, the edible part we’re familiar with? Literally ARE the seed.
So needless to say, it’s really, really important for them to get pollinated!
Which means that if you eat any “non-animal” products OTHER than mushrooms (which are a fungus and…kind of an exception to this), then you are almost certainly already benefiting from bees’ labor to begin with. You simply cannot avoid “benefiting from the labor of bees” if you’re on a plant-heavy diet! That’s just…not how farming works in the modern era or even the ancient ones.
2.)…but not just any bees. As I understand it, it’s specifically the honeybees that beekeepers actively transport to the correct fields. Not wild ones; domestically-kept ones! Again, the crops that we’re farming on the scales that we’re farming them on, literally require transporting bees close to them…
3.) …which, the bees actually are fine with and BENEFIT FROM, because it exposes them to tons more flowers and gives them tons of nectar to feed their hive with! This is actually a symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationship!
4.)
“But wait,” I can hear some hypothetical vegans asking. “Aha! They’d produce it for THEMSELVES so humans stealing the honey itself, is still wrong!!”
No.
It’s not. In fact, taking a portion of the honey not only does not hurt the bees, it actually, as weird as it sounds, helps them.
I know this sounds weird, but it’s totally true! Do you know want to why?
It’s because the particular honeybees we use in pollinating crops and in domestic honey production, are of a select handful of species which explicitly naturally already produce more honey than they could ever eat in a year. Which, I mean, of course they do, because how else would they have been domesticated for humans to use for honey production, right? But there’s more to it than that. It’s not just that they overproduce it to begin with; it’s what happens if they consistently overproduce it, such that their stockpile gets too high.
Do you want to know what happens in these species if they overproduce honey for too long?
They do something called “swarming”.
Do you know what “swarming” is when it comes to bees? It’s probably not what you’re actually thinking of, so I’ll tell you: it’s when a good portion of the hive SEPARATES, and wanders off to try and form a new, second hive.
“But what’s wrong with that?” you might ask. “Isn’t keeping them from swarming just keeping them from being truly free?”
No.
Keeping them from swarming, helps protect the bees.
This is because suddenly taking a good portion of the hive away, reduces the chances of it being able to survive and thrive against parasites and invaders! Which means they run a greater risk of dying!!
And those that left to “swarm”, are also low in number, and may not find a safe place to set up a new hive very quickly on their own, so they might die too.
Swarming is an incredibly risky thing for bees; they only do it if they’re greatly overproducing food and can “afford” to do it, but even then, it’s enormously risky and leaves both the emigrant bees and the original hive incredibly vulnerable.
Honeybees of the species humans use to pollinate our crops and produce our honey, actually thrive best, in other words, in a situation where a human beekeeper is there to remove the excess when they overproduce, so that they still have plenty to get themselves through the winter, but also not enough to trigger a swarming.
This is especially important in an era where we’ve had truly worrying levels of bee-harming pesticide use (gee thanks, Monsanto!), and the ominous specter of Colony Collapse becoming more common and literally THREATENING THE SURVIVAL OF BEES AS A SET OF SPECIES.
If we want these species to survive, honeybees simply can’t be allowed to “swarm” and try to form new hives, at a bad time or in an unsupervised and not carefully-controlled way. I’m sorry, they just can’t! They’re already at SUCH high risk, that even if we didn’t already depend on them for crops and run the risk of causing food shortages and starving humans, it would still be downright reckless for the bees, to insinuate we should just abandon them and let them run that risk unaided.
but also
5.) Beekeepers also help the bees in OTHER ways – not just by preventing Swarming and making sure they have access to the plants they need to make their food source – but also by monitoring the hives for parasites and protecting them from invaders and basically keeping track of the hive’s health and needs on a level that the bees couldn’t actually do on their own.
Beekeepers are also the people who get called in by eco-conscious people to REMOVE bees that take up in places they shouldn’t, such as people’s homes or businesses, without killing the bees.
So to recap: not only are beekeepers and their hives NECESSARY to sustain the large-scale fruit and vegetable crops that vegans REQUIRE to exist for their diet to even be possible, not only is honey NOT unethical to extract from hives but rather outright beneficial to extract the excess from in the hives of the handful of species we actually get it from, but beekeepers themselves go out of their way to benefit and help the honeybees survive, avoid death, and thrive in general!!
And guess what buying honey, beeswax, and honeycombs, does for beekeepers?
That’s right: in the crappy capitalist system we live in, it helps keep their profession economically sustainable so that they can continue to help the bees!
It also means that lovely golden honey that the bees went out of their way to make in the first place, is not being wasted, either. Because, again, it already has to be removed so that they don’t run the risk of Swarming, so what the hell else are we supposed to do with it?? Throw it away and let it go completely waste?? Considering it’s largely healthier and more ethical than sugar cane (or agave syrup, which requires KILLING cacti to get), that seems an awful shame when it could just…get eaten?
tldr: No, honey is NOT unethical when harvested by your friendly local beekeeper, and even if you personally don’t use it, its existence as a product and use by humans does NOT constitute an ~unethical exploitation~ or harm of an animal or its body; in fact, it’s a rare, indisputable case of the opposite.
Organic honey is the only “animal byproduct” I can actually think of, which is explicitly VEGAN FRIENDLY precisely because it comes about only from a 100% symbiotic and mutually beneficial arrangement with the species it comes from, a species which not only universally benefits from most of its interactions with us, but where the cultivation of which btw actually actively helps support other plant crops and keeps fruit and veggie farming even remotely sustainable on the level vegans absolutely require it to be, let alone if they expect large numbers of other people to convert to the diet or anything close to it.
I’ll repeat that for those in the back
HONEY ONLY EXISTS A FOOD OPTION IN OUR SOCIETY BECAUSE WE EXIST 100% SYMBIOTICALLY WITH BEES, AND HARVESTING IT ACTUALLY HELPS THEM
tldr tldr: Organic, ethically-farmed honey is 100% vegan friendly.
And anybody who thinks it isn’t, has clearly no idea what goes into beekeeping or farming crops, and should really, REALLY do more research about all the processes that lead to the items they’re consuming as their main diet, before they decide to get on any kind of high horse.
(Or, in other words, the Snobby Vegan in OP’s story isn’t just rude and self-absorbed, they’re not even doing so from an actual informed standpoint about food production ethics to begin with. So. Yeah. Make of that what you will…)
In other words, veganism needs to be re-defined to mean eco conscious / environmentally friendly dietary habits, rather than the rigid “no animal or animal byproducts” that it is.
an edible cracker with just one side. mathematically impossible and yet here I am monching on it.
‘scuit’ comes from the french word for ‘bake’, ‘cuire’ as bastardized by adoption by the brittish and a few hundred years
‘biscuit’ meant ‘twice-baked’, originally meaning items like hardtack which were double baked to dry them as a preservative measure long before things like sugar and butter were introduced. if you see a historical doccument use the word ‘biscuit’ do not be fooled to think ‘being a pirate mustve been pretty cool, they ate nothing but cookies’ – they were made of misery to last long enough to be used in museum displays or as paving stones
‘triscuit’ is toasted after the normal biscuit process, thrice baked
thus the monoscuit is a cookie thats soft and chewy because it was only baked once, not twice
behold the monoscuit/scuit
Why is this called a biscuit:
when brittish colonists settled in the americas they no longer had to preserve biscuits for storage or sea voyages so instead baked them once and left them soft, often with buttermilk or whey to convert cheap staples/byproducts into filling items to bulk out the meal to make a small amount of greasy meat feed a whole family. considering hardtack biscuits were typically eaten by dipping them in grease or gravy untill they became soft enough to eat without breaking a tooth this was a pretty short leap of ‘just dont make them rock hard if im not baking for the army’ but didnt drop the name because its been used for centuries and people forgot its french for ‘twice baked’ back in the tudor era, biscuit was just a lump of cooked dough that wasnt leavened bread as far as they cared
thus the buttermilk biscuit and the hardtack biscuit existed at the same time. ‘cookies’ then came to america via german and dutch immigrants as tiny cakes made with butter, sugar/molasses, and eggs before ‘tea biscuits’ as england knew them due to the new availability of cheap sugar- which is why ‘biscuit’ and ‘cookie’ are separate items in america but the same item in the UK
the evolution of the biscuit has forks on its family tree
I love it when a shitpost turns into an actually interesting post.
From someone who worked at starbucks. If you have a milk/dairy allergy AT ALL. DO NOT. I repeat. DO NOT. Drink Pumpkin Spice.
It contains dairy IN the syrup that is used to make the drink. Even if you get it made with soy, you will still be getting doses of dairy in there.
Depending on the severity and intolerance it can and will cause reactions. I found that as a barista I was constantly warning people about the dairy in the product. No one ever seemed to tell them that there was dairy in the mix. More times than I can count I heard people realize that’s why they kept having reactions, or that’s why it made them sick.
People legitimately do not know that pumpkin spice no matter what you do will always contain some amount of dairy.
Queer Fiction Writer 