A Primer for Everyone Who’s Been Swiping Our Tofu

All you need to know about the other white meat — it’s good, it’s nothing to be scared of, and please stop hoarding it

Photo: Geraktv via Dreamstime

Hi there —

I know you’ve been in my neck of the woods because you left your calling card: the empty shelves in the refrigerated section at the grocery store, once the nearly exclusive province of herbivores and jam-packed with options, now a chilly ghost town. More often than not these days, it is picked bare, stripped of our beloved tofu and pretty much everything else, like a plague of vegan-curious locusts went to town on our little enclave.

My Vegan Family Needs You to Quit Hoarding All the Tofu

It’s been like this since early February, pretty much since the beginning of the pandemic panic. It’s not just where I live, either: I’ve seen distressed cries all over social media from my fellow vegans who have seen their once-reliable staple disappear from shelves and return in such reduced quantity that we seem to be experiencing something like a national shortage. On one of my grocery missions, I even saw…