Response to comment

I could have sworn I just saw a recipe for vegan key lime pie--I'm looking for it. PCRM did just send out a recipe for vegan mango-lime sorbet.
In any case, I'd imagine it would involve silken tofu and key lime juice. I don't know if you squeeze your own key limes, but it's a huge pain in the ass.

I'd highly recommend anything by Isa Chandra, but here's another one with fewer ingredients. I found a couple on EHow and Food.com, but they involve a lot of crazy processed $hit.

Also, I wouldn't be too concerned about corn on the cob. It's the corn that makes it into animal feed, rather than sweet corn, that's highly engineered. Mind you, even organic sweet corn has clearly been genetically selected; the corn that once grew in this country was much more colorful and diverse.

Thank you, though, for getting my point and emphatically supporting it. I'm just so done. There was a point many years ago where I'd accepted as a part of life that I was going to have to field stupid questions and comments from people and I let it go, but now I'm more frustrated because of the double standard: if I say anything to them (why do you put that $hit in your mouth), I'm dismissed as a crazy, ranting vegan trying to impose my lifestyle on people, but they can drive me up the wall without that risk.

It's one thing when mom does it, because I get it. She has no sense of relativity, i.e. that people can do their own thing without believing that that's the only way or the best way, is a foreign concept to her. Mom automatically translates the act of [someone else] doing something with the act of [that person's] thinking everyone must do it. If I don't have cocktail sauce in my house, she reads that as my trying to convince her that she should never have cocktail sauce.

Ever since I was a teenager, my parents friends who would come over to dinner would say something like "isn't it tempting?" or "just have a little piece," and it was more annoying than anything else. I kind of expect my parents' friends to be annoying.

And I learned to expect RM to be annoying (specifically, but not exclusively, about food). Remember when he suggested I was on an eating plan? I tried to get out of going to dinner with him, so I said I'd just bought a bunch of fresh food and wanted to use it. So he said, "right, you want to stick with your eating plan." And I was speechless--I mean, of course, if you've never shopped for fresh food in your life or made your own meal, you'd equate any meal planning with a strict eating plan that must be adhered to. So there's clearly a case of people's own food habits informing how they interpret others' food habits. And, as we've established, we can just expect RM to be annoying.

But I don't expect my own friends to be annoying, at least not in that way. I'm frustrated in the same way I was frustrated when my parents drove down for my grad school graduation. I told them to take everything out of the car--I was living in Shaw at the time, and my roommates' cars were broken into regularly for a few visible coins or a candy bar. Mind you my parents were staying in a hotel in Foggy Bottom, but all of DC is just a good place to have nothing in your car. If you have visible stuff in your car, your car gives the impression that there might be more stuff somewhere in your car, some of it of value. So I was annoyed to find that my parents didn't take everything out of their car overnight, and surprised that they said, "but we did take everything out of the car!" Really? What about that pillow? What about those quarters? What about... [and so on]." But it was like they were so used to all that clutter that it didn't register to them as stuff. Even though I'd explained deliberately and in plain English that by nothing I meant nothing, my parents were so stuck in their paradigm of 'but that stuff is nothing' that they couldn't register what I was saying. Similarly, my friend is stuck in various paradigms, and even though I sat down with her and made it clear that she really, really needed to avoid added sugar altogether, and that once she did so for a few weeks she would no longer want it, she's still not there. And if she's not willing to consistently do what she needs to do to improve her health, she's going to react to seeing me doing what I do for whatever reason as obsessive dieting. I'm exaggerating a bit, but I think that's what it comes down to. It's the same basis that drives mom's behavior, only more subtle.