"I can taste the chemicals" "Tastes so artificial" "I can tell this was made in a lab"

Like... lady, I made this out of beans and cashews, not formaldehyde and petroleum.

Like even junky commercially made substitutes I still rarely see any really questionable ingredients, mostly just different plant products, but these people will still swear up and down that they can tell right away how many "chemicals" are in it.

Like... cheese made of vegetable fat and potato starch is automatically considered an unnatural, manmade, 'fake' chemical shitstorm, but cheese made out of another species' lacteal secretions, acidified, processed with enzymes, pressed and aged is considered 'natural' and 'real' and 'wholesome'. It's just always been weird to me.

This is sort of a pointless post, just wondering if this is something anyone else sees a lot. My mom's one of those hardcore Weston A. Price, paleo, 'nourishing traditions' type people. I was making a grilled cheese earlier and my girlfriend just offhandedly comments "I wonder how they make this stuff" while looking at the package of cheese; my mom immediately pipes in "Plastic, probably. Or... petroleum byproducts." Like, not even in a snarky way, she just honestly thought that was an accurate answer; that vegan food is all made in a lab somewhere out of inorganic compounds.

I'll usually show her the ingredients when she says something like that, and she'll be really surprised and say "oh! that's not bad at all...", but then she'll be right back at it like 10 minutes later, like it goes in one ear and out the other. It's just so weird, I feel like she's been brainwashed sometimes.