Oh. Mystery solved. They’re just ignorant. Nothing more to discuss here, thank you for your service.
What’s your answer then?
I mean, the problem is the binary thinking that if something is not in line with their worldview, then it must be actively against it. They view meat substitutes as somehow offensive and hostile, and therefore they’re against their worldview, even though in reality it’s just another menu choice.
How do you explain that? What sort of person has that sort of thought pattern? Why?
Maybe this will help.
“Are you kidding me? Who do you think your customer base is?” one person wrote. “I still order the double meat breakfast and it’s not even on the menu anymore.”
“What is this nasty sausage? Stick to the real deal, country sausage,” another added.
“YOU CAN TAKE MY PORK SAUSAGE WHEN YOU PRY IT FROM MY COLD, DEAD HANDS!!1DON’T TREAD ON MY PORK!!1,” one person wrote with exuberance.
It’s a combination of 3 things from what I can see.
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As is the case with most restaurants, menu items change over times. Items are added, others removed. Cracker Barrel removed items in the past that some customers liked, and when they see a new item they don’t like added, they feel like it replaced their favorite item(s). That offends them.
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Some people think that the real sausage is being replaced by a meatless one. They don’t realize it’s just another option. They think that they can’t get actual meat anymore.
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And there are of course people who feel that this is political. That Cracker Barrel is virtue signaling. If they eat at the restaurant, they are giving financial support to an organization that is catering to the political left, and that angers them because they don’t want to have to make the choice between politics and food they like. Some people only see being a vegetarian/vegan as a political choice, and ignore that some people just don’t like to eat meat, or do so for health reasons.
It’s up to you whether you feel they are dummies for having those beliefs.
So apparently this all started from a comment thread on Facebook? Makes sense. This may just be a prime example of “Never read the comments”: that’s where the nuts and trolls hang out.
I can imagine this starting with a small number of wackos who were genuinely upset, and then a bunch of other people decided to play along because it looked like fun to participate in recreational outrage in a way that would trigger the lib’ruls, and then those liberals get to have their own recreational outrage getting upset over all those idiot conservatives who are getting upset.
It could also be more leftward people and sundry rabble rousers stirring the pot to make conservatives looks like ignorant snowflakes. Really, it’s probably all of the above. Hard to tell who is sincere or not in a comments section.
Yes, this may just be a slow news day, and an attempt to manufacture a controversy by reporting on a few comments.
Well, and now a lot of people know that Cracker Barrel has meat-free sausage on the menu, so free advertising for them.
Given the incredible about of outrage/we’re the Real victims porn on Fox et al about equally stupid things why the fuck would think that this is leftist trolling?
I’m willing to bet a fraction of the posts are people mocking the “conservative view.” I used to do shit like this 20 years ago, and I don’t think I’m particularly unique in this regard. Most? I don’t think so, but I did say it’s “all of the above.” I don’t know why you are so incredulous.
Because I’ve watched the rightwing outrage machine go stupid over the smallest things.
Dr. Seuss
Mr. Potatohead
The “War” on Christmas
Mustardgate
Tan suit gate
shall I go on…
And you’re confident 100% of them are sincere right-wingers? Lots of people like to take the piss out of the other side by pretending to be the other side. You appear to be reading more into my post than I actually said. I’d also bet most of the people are right-wingers engaged in what they perceive to be a culture war. But some are just fucking around.
As @pulykamell said, it’s likely that at least some of the outrage, and probably most of it is real. But it’s also likely that one or two of the comments are trolls just pretending to be mad.
Trolls are real! I mean, real at being fake at least.
I first realized this during the beginning of the Covid pandemic. A conservative on Facebook was posting a list of reasons why people shouldn’t be required to wear masks. I was expecting it to be a list of pseudo-science BS about why masks aren’t effective - but then saw, I kid you not - “I can smell my breath” - with a sad face emoticon - as a reason not to be required to wear a mask.
It was hard to tell if satire or real. Many such folks are hopeless.
This is a good point, as are the ones I didn’t quote. All these things are true to varying degrees.
To my reckoning, the specific fear being triggered here is social engineering. Not in the traditional sense of a security intrusion, but conservatives’ fear that others are actively tinkering with society to change peoples’ tastes and behaviors. Perhaps with a side order of “gaslighting”, which in this context we’ll take to mean people making such changes and lying about the fact that they’re doing so, as well as the reasons for doing it.
Cracker Barrel has of course always served side vegetables. From a cultural perspective, these aren’t objectionable because they’ve been a staple food of country cuisine forever. But eating meat is also a staple of country food. More than that, it’s become a badge of conservative cultural identity in a way that plant-based rural traditions haven’t. Conservatives eat meat and enjoy it with no guilt whatsoever about the environment, animal cruelty, or even their own health. In a larger sense, the meat isn’t the point, the real identity badge is flouting the concerns about those harmful externalities. They want to live (or at least dine) in a world that’s on the same wavelength. Of course, the meat lobby does its share to stoke this attitude.
Why did they think Cracker Barrel is that world? Over the years, Cracker Barrel has faced lawsuits for racial discrimination and sexual orientation discrimination. The ultimate disposition of those lawsuits isn’t important… what’s important is that they induced a certain segment of Cracker Barrel clientele to see it as a bulwark against “politically correct” culture gone amok. In that way it became cultural touchstone similar to Hobby Lobby or Chik-Fil-A.
To my knowledge Cracker Barrel didn’t encourage that perception, but they also didn’t discourage it. They were content to let a certain clientele (wink wink) see their establishment as a bulwark against political correctness and social engineering.
I don’t believe Cracker Barrel invested very much in marketing to its perception as a conservative institution. Had they done so, they would have realized there was an enormous risk in introducing a meat substitute, that conservatives would construe it as a Trojan horse of a social engineering effort to eliminate meat entirely. And they’re not entirely incorrect to see meat substitutes in that light. You don’t have to search very far online to find people claiming that meat substitutes are a vehicle toward eliminating farmed beef for environmental and moral reasons. That’s not an extreme or uncommon position. I happen to agree with it, though not militantly so. We really should get rid of meat farming. We should try to engineer society to see meat substitutes as equal or better than meat. And it’s that willingness to tinker social preferences that makes conservatives lose their minds.
Of course you can dismiss all these concerns as stupid and ignorant. All of their culture-war concerns can certainly be colored that way. But I personally find it more interesting to think about what’s driving this particular culture war in this time and place, and what puts collards on the “safe” side of the divide, whereas a different plant product is seen as culturally taboo.
On review, I’d suggest this one is a troll.
The “!!1”, the ALL-CAPS, the over-the-top declarations, if anything is satire this one is.
Fleecing the rubes for money and political power.
Has everyone forgotten Trump’s ‘If I’m elected we’ll go back to saying Merry Christmas’? Something that never actually stopped and was never actually within the government’s power to change in any way.
Even if it was, it’s another, “Look what you made us do!” moment.
Even so, they had warnings for the vegetarians that they weren’t necessarily vegan – notably the green beans – and to ask the server for details if that was a factor for the customer.
That’s exactly the one that jumped out at me.
That’s a good write-up, and it reminds me - on the other side - of a liberal woman who was angry (on Twitter) about Target selling a line of dresses that she described as “blessed be the fruit” clothing - long 1800s-era dresses that looked like they were from The Handmaid’s Tale or some homeschooling/Christian-fundamentalist society. Nothing prevented this woman from buying all the skimpy clothing or lingerie that Target had elsewhere to offer, of course. But she was mad about the cultural implication of Target’s blessed-be-the-fruit dresses, whether Target even intended them to come across that way or not.
I’m definitely not. I don’t think it’s so much “liberals fucking with right wingers,” though, so much as “some guy running a bot farm decided to make this an issue.” A huge amount of right wing outrage is just bots pushing an issue. Of course, this can become self-fulfilling, as actual human conservatives get caught up in the circus aspect and start repeating the complaint, but I suspect even that has limited real-world consequences. Has Cracker Barrel responded to the “controversy”? Have they pulled stopped offering the sausage? Looks like they’ve offered some corporate boilerplate in response, but I don’t see anything like an apology from them. Corporations have learned that right wing boycotts are generally toothless (in large part because so many complainers aren’t real people) so I’d be surprised if Cracker Barrel changes anything in response to this.
That being said, there is a bit of a zero-sum aspect to this. The more people pick meat substitutes over real meat, the more the market for real meat shrinks. And the environmental effects of large scale animal husbandry for meat production is a significant talking point on the left. “Americans need to eat less meat,” isn’t a loony left position, although there’s not much in the way of policy behind it, at least right now. And rural conservatives are probably pretty heavily represented in the meat industry. A very real side effect of Americans eating less meat is fewer Americans working in meat-related jobs. It’s honestly not unreasonable for people working in livestock raising and slaughtering to worry about their lifestyle become economically unfeasible the way coal miners have seen their lifestyle impacted by the move away from coal power.