When I was twelve, I wrote a children’s book called What’s In My Lunchbox? for my sixth-grade English class, which detailed the origins of a B.L.T. sandwich, an apple juice box and a bag of potato chips. As I put together drawings of a little ant crawling his way through the genesis of my lunch, I learned that Mott’s apple juice is bottled in my home state of New York, that the potato chip factories often throw away entire truckloads of potatoes if too many are found to be blemished and that the crispy bacon in my sandwich was produced in a massive industrialized farming facility run almost entirely by an underpaid migrant workforce. My book was celebrated with many prestigious literary awards (check pluses, gold stars...). I became a vegetarian shortly afterwards.
Yesterday, I was scrolling on TikTok and came across the type of content that is normally an instant skip for me: a “street interview”-style video, this particular one set in a college library. When asked about her “hot take” by the interviewer, one woman declared that “men’s views on tofu directly reflect their views on women.” The interviewer – a man, of course – immediately shut her down, but she proceeded to explain her take, which I want to use my lunchbox children’s book experience to expand upon. She explains that tofu is at the forefront of many environmental campaigns for veganism, and that meat and the fossil-fuel capitalism that drives its production are often linked to traditional ideas of masculinity, hence why so many men ridicule me when I tell them for the eighth time that I do not eat steak (sorry to my cousins, I still love you guys). The woman closes by letting the interviewer know that most foods are political, and I could not agree more. I think that everything is political, including and maybe most of all food.
In my sophomore year Theory and Methods course for the Medicine, Science, and the Humanities major, my brilliant professor was always reiterating the idea that “everything is situated somewhere.” By that she means, a sandwich is never just a sandwich. It is bread, mayonnaise, bacon, lettuce and tomato. It is farms and factories and farms-turned-factories. It is poor working conditions and immigration policies and food waste. You cannot eat a sandwich without thinking about where it comes from — everything is situated somewhere. By these principles, we cannot think about tofu inside of a vacuum where it exists as tofu alone. Tofu is also the growing popularity of non-meat protein alternatives, the backlash to such campaigns for environmentally-conscious eating, the association of veganism with femininity and also sometimes with weakness.
To clarify, you do not have to like tofu or stop eating bacon to be considered someone who cares about their community and the environment, or to be considered a feminist. I bring up my sixth-grade picture book not to argue and divide, but as a reminder that foods (and most other things) have a history worth learning about, and that if we are made uncomfortable by someone else’s dietary choices, or by the politics of ours, we should turn inwards rather than deflect negativity onto others. I do not think that men who don’t like tofu hate women, but I do think that men who are theatrically disgusted by tofu and the women who eat it have some learning to do!
My lunchbox has gotten heavier since sixth grade. Alongside the sandwich, the chips and the juice box I now carry the heavy knowledge that every choice I make has roots and ripple effects: a history and an origin of production, a contribution to climate change and gender politics and fair labor practices and the ICE raids. I want to eat like a feminist, like an environmentalist, like a compassionate and thoughtful and well-educated human being. I want tofu to be for everyone, not as a literal soy-based protein, but as a call to remove gendered labels from food and practices of care, and to accept the politics of everything not as a source of anxiety, but as a call to education and action. If it’s true that you are what you eat, maybe we should all take a look at the stories tucked behind mom’s lunchbox note.
Hailey Finkelstein is a junior from Ardsley, N.Y. majoring in Medicine, Science and the Humanities. Her column shares miscellaneous prose on current issues, the collective Hopkins experience and growing up with a pen in hand.
