Insular crowd

Yes, for sure.

I mean, seriously, as someone mentioned up thread, this is a food board. It’s supposed to be light and breezy, a place where you go to shoot the shit about what you’ve eaten, how you ate it, and maybe even how you made it so you could tell other people how you ate it.

We’re not discussing major socio-economic or political issues here. If one wanted to change the world by talking about food and tangentially related food issues, there are better and more appropriate fora to do so.

This is escapism at its culinary best.

Eat, and let eat.

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And don’t yuck my yum! (Although feel free to yum my yuck.)

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Can I at least yuck your yuck?

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I don’t know what part of my comment this is in reply to. Of course, tone doesn’t translate very well online between strangers, and more often than not it is due to the reception of the message, not necessarily its intent.

I don’t go out of my way online to offend others, nor to be offended :woman_shrugging:

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Please do! Do you have the same visceral aversion to mayo as I? And is this a good time to mention I don’t like filet-o-fish?

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I’ve been known to go down a rabbit hole or two, and today I found myself here! Wow.

I’m thinking context is everything. At the time, maybe “welcome to folks retreating to a world obsessed with food”.

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If there’s a place you (or anyone) knows of that allows discussions of food to veer into political territory, please post a link. I’d be pretty interested in participating. As long as it’s not Reddit. Reddit makes me nervous.

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I recall invitations to participate in education and discussions regarding access, urban gardens, and health related “food as medicine” stuff, but don’t know that they were forums.

Here? I’d actually be fine with discussing the stuff that @chienrouge is interested in. I understand that there’s an aversion to those discussions on Hungry Onion, so I was wondering if anyone knew where to find them elsewhere.

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No. Not here.

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I know you’re trying to be helpful, but you haven’t given me much to go on. You remember invitations to participate in discussions. Where? and from whom?

My apologies. I will do my best to get back to you. I was not prepared to share details here. I come here for something else. Again, my apologies for not being more helpful.

That’s okay, no harm done.

@small_h , and others; Let me start by saying I didn’t really think this post through. None of these are forums. For me, more of a " be about it" than a "talk about it ". More apologies.

I learned about this one “here”.

I’ve posted about this in the past.

These are from my personal bookmark list. Part of my research when applying to be a master gardener.

I shared this one before

Some I researched for a conference that was supposed to happen in 2020 and didn’t.

From The Table to the Gardrn Programs

BUILDING CHARACTER TO BUILD COMMUNITY

Some were closed since.

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I’m not really looking for fora to engage in a political discussion, but I’m sure they exist given the infinity of the Internet, and Reddit is certainly an easy place to start.

Regarding food, specifically, I recall past discussions here about access and so on that definitely veer on the edge of or dive right into food politics.

If a thread linked to an article about food politics, my expectation would be that the discussion would naturally be about food politics.

But when someone intentionally tries to politicize an unrelated discussion away from the topic, that’s when the drift has been shut down at least in my experience. Even then, it usually used to go for a while until it got too heated and the mods had to be flagged.

There always seemed to be a pattern, though – the same posters, the same topics brought up across different and unrelated threads, seemingly to incite an argument and usually completely off the main topic.

But even when that happens, as a community member, my preference would be that comments be left up as long as they are not directly insulting, offensive, or bullying, so the thread memory isn’t erased, as happened with the thread that prompted this latest discussion.

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Thanks! I’m familiar with some of those, but others are new to me. But! As I’m sure you’ve figured out, my question was “if I can’t discuss it here, then where can I discuss it?”

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Yes, I’m certainly anti-baiting. But there’s a place for political discussion of food-related topics, and I wish I could find it (and hopefully somewhere not-Reddit). I’m particularly interested in cultural appropriation, controlling restaurant waste, workers’ salaries, etc. Those topics have the potential to lead to disagreement, but that’s not something I typically shy away from.

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If you or someone else started a thread on a topic related to any of those, I’m sure there would be a fulsome discussion. I’ll pm you some past ones. It’s the baiting / one-track-mind irrespective of main topic that I personally anyway stay away from.

It may well depend on the discussion participants, but I’ve seen people flip their shit online over random things that aren’t even political or divisive, and I fear that it would generally escalate to name-calling and/or hurt feelings.

QED @chienrouge accusing me of bullying and hostility when I merely pointed out the site rules. The truth is some people go online almost exclusively to be offended at something, others exclusively to offend.

I suppose I would simply stay away from those discussions if they were allowed around here.

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Except they are against the rules, which is why they are taken down. There’s no point in moderating the board if everything is a gray area. There are people who delight in going full asshole on each other for fun, and I personally believe most members do not come here for that.

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