WFPB. WTF?

I ran into "WFPB" on the Rancho Gordo Bean Club Facebook page. Everyone seemed to know what it means except me. After puzzling over it for a while, thinking about all the things it could be, including a radio station east of the Mississippi, I asked.  Apparently it is "whole food plant based." It was explained to me as no meat, no processed foods. So I asked two more questions. Does no processed foods mean nothing cooked, dried or fermented, since those are all processes? No, it means no preservatives or extractions (e.g. white flour, white sugar). And my persistent question, why does plant-based always mean only plants (and fungi) when everything else -based does not mean that exclusively? (A fact-based narrative, for example, can use some poetic license.) I was told that WFPB is really a lifestyle.

So here are my two meta-questions.

Why must we refer to everything by initials? Because texting, I know. But really, you cannot expect everyone you share one interest with (in this case cooking beans) to be in the know on all the abbreviations, initials, and acronyms you use. It's just another way of creating in group out group dynamics, and we have too damn many in groups these days. Just to be fair, I hate it when knitters use cute in group jargony abbreviations, too. And church code words and alphabet soup - yuck.

And why are diets equated with lifestyles? Come on. I love to grow, cook, share and eat food. But my behaviors, my choices, my ethics are bigger than what's in my fridge and belly. My lifestyle is built from the intersection of many things, like a very messy Venn diagram.