It’s easy to see why the story about the YouTuber Yovana Mendoza went viral. But ‘Fishgate’ highlights the dangers of looking to online personalities for dietary advice
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.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2CEsLwx
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