I had a discussion recently where someone accused me of not being a “real vegetarian” because I eat eggs. I know that’s kind of a grey area, and it differs for each person and their reason for being vegetarian (religious, texture, health, environmental, ethical, etc); but what do you personally eat?
For me, personally, I keep it simple. If it looks and tastes like meat, I don’t eat it (except special occasions like religious holidays). It makes me feel bad, and I dislike the texture anyway. Feels like an animal died specifically for me, and I didn’t even enjoy it. A waste of a perfectly good life. But I’m ok with “regenerative” animal products like eggs and cheese and honey and such, as long as the animals were treated with respect (hard to find dairy that meets this criteria).
Probably the most contentious is bones. Someone once gave me some ramen, and later told me they were surprised I ate it because the broth was made with chicken bones. I didn’t know, but also it didn’t really disturb me either. Those bones would have been thrown out if not put into soup; and the end result was soup, not a drumstick or something obviously meaty. If nobody told me, I wouldn’t even notice. For some reason, occasional bone broth is fine by my books. I’m not an extremely strict vegetarian in the first place though, and everyone I asked said that bones are not vegetarian.
It makes me think about Blood & Bone fertiliser. If you grow tomatoes with it, are those tomatoes not vegetarian…? Where is the line? Curious on others thoughts.
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Someone knew you were a vegetarian, served you chicken broth with out saying anything, and then later acted surprised you ate it anyway? Wtf?
Yeah they forgot I was vegetarian until later lol. I’m not sure why they thought I could magically detect the stock in the broth though
Eggs don’t sound like veggies to me but, at the same time, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. I cut beef almost entirely out of my diet, but I still eat other meat. I also eat offal and such, though. Still, beef can be really bad for the environment so I decided to make it something I have a couple of times a year (or if served it as a guest). Will purists or vegetarians or vegans largely dislike this decision? Probably. Still, I’d rather slightly reduce my impact than do nothing at all.
There is no vegetarian authority. If you can live up to your own standards you doing better than most of us.
There may not be a vegetarian authority, but God help you if you cross into vegan territory. Those guys are real sticklers.
Not to mention that reducing your consumption of animal products, whether or not it’s a total thing, is still a very good thing and is probably the single most impactful thing you can do as an individual to help out the planet and your health, especially when it comes to red meat.
This is the mindset most should have about it
Perfection is hard
People shouldn’t be giving others grief for making moves in the right direction just because it’s not as far as they’ve gone
The strange thing is that the person griefing me was in no ways vegetarian and eats meat twice a day 😂 I didn’t take it too personally
You’re doing great, king, far better than I am! Keep it up.
reducing your consumption of animal products … is probably the single most impactful thing you can do as an individual to help out the planet
I seriously doubt this
The single most impactful is to have one fewer child than you had ‘planned’.
this is dangerously close to malthusianism and misanthropy.
It’s basically true. Animal agriculture (land use, resource use, and pollution to create animal products) is a major source of pollution which competes with transportation for the biggest source of global warming.
Unfortunately the more nuanced take is that it’s not a single thing; it’s a series of choices that eventually become habit. But so is not owning a car.
I think technically the single most impactful thing you can do is to remove major polluters from the planet (though in many cases that is illegal so, in case cops are watching, I’m certainly not recommending that).
No one ever expects… THE VEGAN INQUISITION!!!
Incorrect. I am the vegetarian authority.
I’m vegetarian mostly for environmental reasons.
If the food is going in the trash if I don’t eat it, I don’t really care if it’s meat or not. I’m mostly trying to reduce eating meat, but throwing it away otherwise is dumb.
To me a everything that’s not part of or made from a part of an animal’s body is vegetarian. So no meat, bones, liver, gelatine etc. I would consider vegetarianism to be first and foremost a diet.
Veganism on the other hand is more like an ideology. It is the belief that no human has the right to exert control over another animal. So obviously a vegetarian diet that also excludes products that are obtained from animals, like eggs, milk, honey, leather, wool, etc. But also being against zoos, pets, working animals (such as police dogs) and other stuff like that. I think though that veganism is an ideology that requires nuance. It’s going to be basically impossible to be a “perfect” vegan and most probably wouldn’t go so far as to reject everything I listed, or would agree that compromises can be made for the greater good (for example I don’t believe police dogs should be a thing, but I wouldn’t want to take away a blind person’s dog and I can’t help but like pets).
tl;dr: If you eat meat or bones sometimes you’re by definition not a vegetarian and probably nobody is actually 100% vegan. It’s perfectly understandable that you’d call yourself a vegetarian to keep it simple, even if it’s only 95% true though. I certainly call myself vegan, even though it’s definitely less than 95% true.
I’m not trying to be perfect, I’m just trying to make a difference. Purity ideals are for 13 year olds.
I’m level 5 vegetarian with couple of missionary badges and gold stars for public protest. Next year I hope to adopt couple of old chickens and ascend to level 6.
Making a vegetarian dish for your friends without telling them and having all of them enjoy it and none of them go “Is this vegetarian?” Earns you a blackbelt.
I had people think there was legitimately crab in this recipe even though I told them before there wasn’t: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkVc5dN0eQ8
How much XP does it take to reach level 5?
We had a re-birthing ceremony in my friend’s hot tub. I am now a Level Five Laser Lotus in my Reformed neo vegetarian community.
This changes from guild to guild by mine follows the Old Denomination rules of Southern European Vegetarianism (Spanish branch) so it’s 75k points.
I did a few years as a lacto-ovo vegetarian, but I also had a carve-out for eating anything I was served as a guest. I would tell people ahead of time, but if they added bacon to the potato salad, I’d just eat it anyway because being a good guest seemed more important than strict adherence.
That’s a good motto; I try to do the same thing, to an extent. If I’m at a family Christmas party or wedding, I’ll eat some roast chicken. To refuse would be rude.
But also, I tend to find that if you acquiesce once, it’s too easy to become a habit. People will assume you’ve given up vegetarianism and serve you meat every time forever (in my experience, anyway). So I usually offend people on the first meal post-Christmas.
I read this interesting article that is somewhat related.
I was more on the “if they’re serving me roast chicken after I told them I’m vegetarian, I’m not going to be their guest anymore” side of things, but everyone in my life was very accommodating, so that’s easy for me to say.
Honestly, who cares. Eat what you’re comfortable with. The label thing being a real or not is do assine. People doesn’t eat certain things all the time.
All these labels…
I try my best to avoid beef and pork. Simply because, as an adult, i saw videos of cows frolicing in grass and getting pets. I saw pigs with as much personality as my dog. Any animal that will roll over to get a belly rub i can no longer bring myself to eat.
Thats it…no more reason than that… empathy.
This here. Although I also save spiders and all kinds of critters. And I do occasionally eat meat, but not with a clear conscience. I avoid most milk products, but still haven’t managed to let go of cheese. :/
I’m not vegetarian or vegan but in my mind eggs have always been fair game for vegetarians. It’s just vegans who skip animal by-products as well as meat.
Ovo-lacto vegetarianism is by default what people mean by vegetarian in the US at least. Maybe where you’re from it’s different but that criticism would be strange here.
I think most vegetarians try to avoid things like bone broth (or things containing gelatin if they know about it) but people are strict to different levels. Assuming a vegetarian would be fine eating a soup that included bones would be pretty rude so it’s not weird someone might be surprised you’re less strict than others.
That’s a good point. In my area we have a lot of Punjabi Sikh people from a specific sect (? not sure if correct word), so vegetarian is assumed to be lacto, with no eggs. I don’t know a lot about their religion, but it seems pretty strict. I’d imagine most of the world assumes eggs as well, it’s probably a local regional thing here.
They have some damn fine recipes too.
Funny: in much of East Asian, “vegetarian” doesn’t really exist as a concept and the best you can get is the “Buddhist meal”, which will contain fish.
If it tries to run away, I don’t eat it.
Take it by surprise, got it.
quickly shoos the family dog into the other room
You’re eating cats, dogs, pigeons and doves?
With the letter two I’m not seeing any downside I have to admit
Mrs Lovett agrees. Them pussy cats is quick.
I feel like a meat eater choosing to eat less meat makes more of an impact tham a vegetarian choosing to move closer to vegan, regardless of the specifics.
Personally, though? I’m a vegetarian who eats eggs and dairy, and occasionally whem dining out I’ll go for seafood. And I had chicken once last year in a super specific and special case (revisiting an Indian restaurant in Dublin that I had visited years before when I was only avoiding “red meat”, the chicken 65 was so incredibly good that I gave in). And I tried one small bite of blood sausage in Finland while visiting a good friend in Tampere who ordered it.
Basically, at home, ovo-lacto. Dining out, occasional allowance for pescatarian. Maybe once-every-few-years I might consider trying some meat thing if it’s super, super compelling for whatever reasons.
And I hate leather, I go out of my way to avoid it when buying a car.
I would feel better about myself if I went full vegan though.
It doesn’t make you sick when you eat meat after not eating it for a few years?
I don’t think that happened to me, no
Anyone gatekeeping vegetarianism can shush. Do your best, enjoy.
Once you start getting into the ovo-lacto-pecto-scattered-smothered-and-covered talk it’s already academic. It might be interesting, or it might be some jerk trying to hassle you for no good reason. And none of it’s necessary.
When people used to ask me what reason i had for being vegetarian, i said “all of them”. Because there’s a lot. Economic, environmental, health, and hell yeah animal rights. Which one did they need y’know?
I don’t mind hearing people talk about why they like being vegan - as opposed to vegetarian - heck, I like it. I’m aspirationally vegan when i can. But if they want to talk about my eating habits, that’s a red flag.
I consider myself a practicing vegetarian, as I never buy meat. I hunt though. Ecology is one thing that which we can neither own nor abstain.
We will be working to amend the sins of humanity for a long long time, one of them being the exterpations and extinctions of predators; upending trophic systems. Hunting is an ecology conservation practice, and a critical one.
