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Tofu is a curious food which I experimented with a little. I know that there are a lot of things which can be done with the stuff, but I wasn’t particularly interested in a new art form, just a new substance.

My overall impression is that Tofu is indeed a versatile food, but there’s something about the technology in it which offends some part of me. Tofu is a particularly processed food in my eyes, and for that reason I don’t believe I will use it heavily. I may have to revisit this moral issue if I more closely examine Vegetarianism.

I work with hard/firm tofu [ 1 ] . It has a firm texture resembling a soft meat.

Cubed and fried, it tastes something like a plain doughnut.

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2005-07-30 ∞

Something about the processed nature of this stuff really worries me.

I know, lots of the substances I eat are processed and packaged and abused in various ways. This is one of the qualifications for healthy food I have. It isn’t just the combination of materials, but the technology and amount of processing which my food has undergone.

I don’t just eat for nutrition — spurring the need for good ingredients — but I eat for my own personal moral satisfaction, as should be the case in all things, which demands a kind of respect for the processes and materials involved.

Think of it this way.. would you eat something which was prepared for you? Sure. Would you eat something that was killed for you? This should be unsettling.. I’d be more comfortable eating something that I killed for me.

Would you eat something that was tortured and killed for you? For you personally? Would you watch it being killed for your pleasure? Think in such extreme terms.. your moral sensibilities should be able to handle it.

I’m not particularly willing to eat food that is “processed” in such a way. To that end, I expand the notion to all my foods and not just “meat” in that I’m not comfortable with any food processed in an obvious and unnecessarily harsh way.

Plants have feelings too. Or rather, I have feelings so everything I observe is important and falls under a moral gaze. It’s an old philosophy of mine, but I try to see it applied fairly broadly in life as I grow older. It doesn’t yet apply to people on the street or strangers I haven’t or never will meet.. maybe later. Let’s not be all moral all at once.

Of course, I’m not exactly prepared to follow through with the entirety of this food preparedness philosophy, since I rely on a lot of food which I ought to be offended at the processing of.

Footnotes

1. Chinese: dòugān (木綿豆腐)
   Japanese: momendōfu (literally “cotton tofu”, sometimes called dried tofu especially since some are freeze-dried) [ ↩ ]