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Nobody was supposed to see Yovana Mendoza eating the fish. The 28-year-old influencer, also known as Rawvana, has amassed more than 3 million followers across YouTube and Instagram by extolling the life-changing properties of a raw vegan diet. She has built a lucrative brand around veganism. But a couple of weeks ago, Mendoza was recorded eating seafood in a video posted by another vlogger. Realising she was being filmed, she tried to hide the fish, but the jig was up. “It was one of the worst days of my life,” Mendoza told the Daily Beast, recounting the ensuing vicious backlash from “vegan YouTube”. “I felt like someone had died.” Well, mate, someone did die. The fish. That’s why the vegans were angry.

Happily, the fish died for a noble cause. As the controversy escalated, Mendoza posted a 33-minute video titled This Is What Is Happening, where she admitted she had stopped being a vegan for health reasons. Her periods had become irregular, and she had been having digestive problems, so she had started eating animal products to see if that helped. In a perfect universe, Mendoza’s digestion would have been of no interest to anybody but herself. But we live in hell; her video has been watched more than 850,000 times, and the postlapsarian drama (dubbed “Fishgate”) has made international news, covered by everyone from the Washington Post to the South China Morning Post.

It’s not difficult to unpack this story’s virality: people love laughing at vegans. But there is a more serious side. Most obviously, it highlights the artifice of the internet: everybody filters their life to some extent, selling a more aspirational version of themselves.

Fishgate is also a worrying reminder that people are increasingly getting health advice from unqualified online influencers. The registered nutritionist Rhiannon Lambert told the Telegraph that she had seen a rise in clients coming to her clinic with symptoms resulting from poor nutrition and, in severe cases, with eating disorders, having taken the advice of social media stars.

Not only was Mendoza promoting a restrictive diet that was making her sick, she was extolling dangerous practices, such as 25-day water fasts, to her millions of followers. And she is far from the only influencer promoting extreme eating. Jordan Peterson, a prominent psychologist, has been outspoken about his all-beef diet, claiming it cured his depression and his gum disease. (Unfortunately, it hasn’t cured his pseudo-intellectual prattling.)

The internet seems to have ushered in an unhealthy age of food fundamentalism. There are, for example, “bitcoin carnivores”: a small but intense community of cryptocurrency enthusiasts who believe that you should only eat meat and only use bitcoin. The internet’s ad-centric infrastructure has accelerated this march towards food fundamentalism.

Last year, the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci wrote a piece for the New York Times headlined YouTube, the Great Radicalizer, which argued that the video platform was pushing people towards more extreme content because it helped generate clicks. “Videos about vegetarianism led to videos about veganism. Videos about jogging led to videos about running ultramarathons,” she wrote. “It seems as if you are never ‘hardcore’ enough for YouTube’s recommendation algorithm.”

“You are what you eat,” has never been so true as it is in the digital era. Whether we are vegan or carnivores, it seems that a lot of us are hungry for community, and will go to extreme lengths to find it. Fishgate may seem funny on the surface, but it’s a tiny part of a much larger problem.

Broomstick wrote: ↑2019-03-27 05:42pm I think if Mendoza said "hey, I've been having health problems so I went to a doctor and this is what the doctor recommended, that I occasionally eat fish or other animal origin food" people would not have been so very angry. That would have been honest. Instead, she lied, continuing to claim she was a raw vegan. Of course, then she wouldn't be a raw vegan anymore and might have lost some of her audience - oh, no! But at least she'd be able to claim honesty so when she went on to her next whatever occupation she'd at least have that.

ray245 wrote: ↑2019-03-27 05:55pmThe problem is some of the people are more annoyed with her eating the fish than being dishonest.

K. A. Pital wrote: ↑2019-03-28 06:36am Capitalistic idiocy. Idiots fighting other idiots to make profit for their masters.

People forgot about the fact balanced diets include proteins, people believe in whatever new fad capitalists throw out to make a quick buck (veganism for the well-off! Carnivorism for the well-off! Soylent (not green yet - lol), and mindless “consumers” rush to buy.

They deserve this if they live by the values of our sick system.

K. A. Pital wrote: ↑2019-03-28 08:06am How does this invalidate the fact that people who fall prey to marketing are deserving the consequences for making their decisions beholden to marketing and not to the objective conditions? Person tries “trendy”, person ruins own health; gets mocked in the end by fad followers.

All of it is a consequence of the idiocy of the rich. Their own satisfaction is taking on more and more grotesque forms, fads and fashions the like.

So people aggressively react to someone not acting fully in accordance with the fad.

I bet that this is in no way related to the fact that under capitalism, self-expression is a function of your consumption: you can drink elite whiskies or elite wines (buy them!), you can be a fan of one or other football club (buy memorabilia!), you can be a vegan, carnivorist, or a goo eating techbro (buy bio, buy meat, buy soylent), and so on and so forth. Stupid. Dehumanizing.

I am not a vegan, or whatever, but even if I was, first and foremost I am a human. Other habits which I have do not define me; my humanity does.

K. A. Pital wrote: ↑2019-03-28 08:22am “People are encouraged to be fundamentalistic in their habits”, yes. But encouraged by what?

When I have no material gain from a fad or fashion, I am likely to avoid tons of aggressive marketing that proves “people consuming X are righteous/superior/woke/more human”, because there is no point in it. But if I can profit from a subculture, I sure will make investments and try to make it a fundamentalist one to have a captive market.

Are people really tightly interconnected? Or is it actually loose, no-obligations connections, like the online ones, which foster this? I don’t think if I have 1k followers, it actually means 1k people who can help me or even 1k people who would like to have any personal relationship with me, be it acquaintances, friends or whatever.

Zixinus wrote: ↑2019-04-11 12:57pm
Capitalism isn't the problem, or rather, not the key problem. The key problem is how foods are designed and how. In most industrialized places, healthiness is seen as an aspirational ambition and turned into a premium that is attempted to be sold rather than a natural part of food culture.

Straha wrote: ↑2019-04-11 01:59pm

Zixinus wrote: ↑2019-04-11 12:57pm
Capitalism isn't the problem, or rather, not the key problem. The key problem is how foods are designed and how. In most industrialized places, healthiness is seen as an aspirational ambition and turned into a premium that is attempted to be sold rather than a natural part of food culture.

"Capitalism isn't the problem. The problem is merely how systems of profit can be constructed through the commodification of ideals and the creation of artificial scarcity for corporate gain."

Buddy...

But simply saying "it's all capitalism's fault!" isn't a really useful answer when there is a capitalist country that does not have this problem.

ray245 wrote: ↑2019-03-28 09:30am

K. A. Pital wrote: ↑2019-03-28 08:22am “People are encouraged to be fundamentalistic in their habits”, yes. But encouraged by what?

When I have no material gain from a fad or fashion, I am likely to avoid tons of aggressive marketing that proves “people consuming X are righteous/superior/woke/more human”, because there is no point in it. But if I can profit from a subculture, I sure will make investments and try to make it a fundamentalist one to have a captive market.

But we get that anyway with religions and ideas? It's the same for people who believe in socialism? You believe your view is righteous and will defend it to death but the alternative is seen as immoral?

The fact that people are willing to go to lengths to spread the value of their dietary choice even without getting paid or expecting to be paid, but make it entirely about morality is the far bigger problem than complaining about capitalism.

I will argue this is more of a product of recent Internet culture and the increased importance of people's self-identity. The internet enables people to find like-minded individuals and mutually reinforce a particular worldview. For many people, their humanity is defined by their habits. People are encouraged to be fundamentalistic in their habits, preferences and etc.

Vendetta wrote: ↑2019-04-18 08:11amNot really. The attempt to cultivate identity through consumption has been the central thrust of advertising at least for the twentieth century (Tobacco advertising and car advertising are particularly strong expressions of it).