Dear lemmy, someone very close to my heart is starting to fall into conspiracy theories. It’s heartbreaking. Among other things, he has now told me that soy beans are not supposed to be consumed by human beings and is convinced that despite the literal centuries of human soy bean cultivation and consumption, we shouldn’t eat it or anything derived from it for this reason (ie tofu, soy sauce, etc…evidence that soy is present in other common foods doesn’t seem to register with him).
I don’t even know where he got this information from and can’t find a single source to back it up (even disingenuously). I’ve tried explaining to him that sure, in its original state it’s not edible, but undergoes processing (LIKE MANY OTHER FOODS) to become edible. And that this has gone on since at least the 11th century, so it’s not like Big Soy is trying to poison the little people.
He’s normally a very reasonable and intelligent person, and I don’t know how to reach him. I thought it might be helpful to show him where these myths have come from with hard data sources to prove it. He seems open to the possibility, so I don’t think he’s a lost cause yet!
Help?
Yup, it’s a conservative talking point. It was originally a rebellion against vegetarianism/veganism/etc and all of the meat alternatives. Lots of “they’re trying to take away our meat because they hate America and nothing is more American than eating steak and burgers” type of rhetoric. The soy-based alternatives were an easy target for conservatives to rile up their readers, because the vast majority of vegans are progressives.
Then conspiracy theorists took that and ran with it. There is a strong correlation between conspiracy theorists and conservatives. It’s not an “every conspiracy theorist is conservative” situation, but the correlation is very strong. So conspiracy theorists will tend to mirror conservative talking points, then take it a step further by injecting the conspiracy theorist side of things into it. The “they’re trying to take away our beef because they hate god” talking points quickly morphed into “they’re trying to force soy on us to make us more liberal.”
And in the conservative’s mind, when they think of liberals, they think of blue hair, crying about pronouns, and effeminate men. So naturally, that’s where the conspiracy theorists ran with it. The “they’re using soy to turn us liberal” suddenly turned into “they’re using soy to turn us effeminate.”
I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest the commonality been conservatives and conspiracy theorists is poor critical thinking skills.