Obfuscation and Delusion as a Way of Life

Someone gave us some “tofu milk” and some “vegan rice milk” they didn’t want.  It comes as a powder.  If we run out of real milk, I’ve been mixing up a batch of one or the other for my morning coffee.  It’s not too bad.  If you’re desperate.


Reading the ingredients on the rice milk, I find one of them is “evaporated cane juice”.  Seriously; who are we kidding, hippies?  “Cane juice”?  I’m pretty sure it’s not bamboo we’re talking about.  It must be sugar cane.  That’s right; we don’t like added sugar, but we like the taste, so we’ll use sugar and call it something else.  It’s not sugar.  It’s “evaporated effing cane juice”.  How dare you say otherwise.  What are you, a racist teabagger?


I’ve seen “evaporated cane juice” listed on some hippie kids’ cereal boxes, along with warnings about how corporations hurt animals and kids!


Call it “raw cane sugar” if you want to be accurate.  But no– you don’t want to be accurate.  You want to be deluded.  You want to fool yourself and hope no one else notices.  It feels better.  And instead of “statist” or “totalitarian” you call yourself “progressive”.  That makes it all better, doesn’t it?  Just use the language differently.  Now it all sounds perfectly wonderful, and anyone who calls you on it is a bad person.


Don’t anyone come on here and say I’m being unfair by conflating the use of “evaporated cane juice” with statism.  Note the aforementioned cereal box– it does that all by itself.  The same people who can’t be honest about adding sugar are warning us against corporations (while profiting in selling sugar-laced cereal to kids).  It’s all part of the same culture, people.

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8 thoughts on “Obfuscation and Delusion as a Way of Life

  1. And if it doesn’t come from a mammal, it ain’t milk, no matter what the vegans, hippies or yuppies say.

  2. To be fair, I don’t think hippies are against sugar. They are against _refined_ sugar, which is probably processed with chemicals and bleached and other stuff that is not considered good. It is entirely possible that rather than being a euphemism for sugar, it’s actually something that is less objectionable to folks who don’t like processed foods: juice squeezed from sugarcane and dried out. The end product may be pretty close to the same, but the way it got there was different, and that makes a difference. Kind of like how some people prefer milled receivers, and others are fine with stamped or cast or whatever, so long as it goes bang. 🙂

    The only time I’ll drink those products is when I’m out in the desert for an extended period of time and I know that my ice will run out. That stuff really isn’t milk at all.

  3. “evaporated cane juice” … yeah that sounds like some sort of simple carbohydrate. Possibly could be used in some deflagration mixture. That is if the rest of the “milk” powder doesn’t hinder the reaction. Have you thought about making Veganite to complement Boomerite?

  4. It’s worse than you say. The same people who can’t be honest about adding sugar are warning us against corporations which are evil because they profit from selling sugar-laced cereal to kids, but those people lecturing us about evil corporations are not only themselves profiting from selling sugar-laced cereal to kids (excuse me, evaporated cane juice-laced cereal), they are likewise profiting from the corporate form. I can guarantee that they have formed a corporation in order to benefit from the limited liability they derive, so they can continue to sell misleading products and avoid the liability that would come from creative lawsuits for selling misleading prouducts to children who don’t know any better and to their parents who should know better. It is indeed all part of the same culture, the only difference is in the form of the advertising used to persuade people to buy their products.

  5. Tim; it’s raw sugar. All cane sugar is, technically speaking, “evaporated cane juice”. In this case it’s raw instead of being further purified. I’ll call it “impure sugar” just to tweak the hippies. Whether it’s high fructose corn syrup, beet sugar, cane sugar, concentrated organic fruit juice extract, et al, it’s “sugar”. Call it what you will.

  6. Lyle: Yes, exactly. I think you are missing the point of what I said which was: I think your ire may be misplaced. You think that they hate sugar, so they rename it and thus that is hypocritical. I think that the manufacturers of those products are producing something that the target market wants. Hippies don’t want processed sugar. They want impure, unprocessed sugar, which is probably less damaging to the environment. Thus, they get “evaporated cane juice”. No hypocrisy at all. They are different products. One comes with less environmental damage. Both result in sucrose being delivered to the tongue.

    However, if you were to instead point out that the concern over processed sugar is silly when compared to the fact that these “milk” products are probably created through some crazy industrial process (or maybe it’s not… I sure don’t know), then I think a better case for hypocracy could be made. 🙂 Though I believe they would counter by saying that industrial processes are a better tradeoff than exploiting animals. But then, I would respond by saying “why do you want milk at all if it’s such a problem?”, and the debate would go on for a long time.

    See, I think that I have a pretty good understanding of how those folks work, having lived within a stone’s throw of Berkeley for 10 years or so. 🙂 They have some strange values, but they aren’t generally inconsistent. I’m sure they thought the same thing of me, a lone Idahoan living in Oakland. 🙂

  7. My daughter has to use “rice milk” and “rice cheese” or something similar because she’s allergic to milk. In the past, I’ve eaten “bocu meat” that was supposed to be protein, made to taste like meat, but didn’t.

    Between these two things, I’ve come to realize this: the tofu, the rice or almond or soy milk, the veggie-burgers, and these other things touted as “natural” yet trying to emulate something that is natural, are all unnatural evil, and should only be used in the gravest of circumstances. In the case of meat “substitutes”, the gravest of circumstances is probably “I’ll sooner die than eat that stuff, and under no circumstances am I to be buried in a plot of land within a five-mile radius of where that stuff is buried in a landfill”.

    And the most unnatural things of all are those things that are made of soy–soy milk, soy cheese, soy ice cream–although things made from rice (the cheese and the ice cream, at least) are surprisingly almost acceptable as substitutes!

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