# A question(s) for vegetarians. **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [November 2, 2008, 9:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-s-for-vegetarians/470701 "2008-11-02T09:01:52Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![MLS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/919ad9/32.png) [@MLS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MLS)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2008, 5:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-s-for-vegetarians/470701/41 "2008-11-03T17:57:17Z")
> [@Snowboarder\_Bo](#): > > I’ve been a vegetarian for more than 18 years now, and in all that time, a good rule of thumb has been: nothing with a face. So, oysters are OK? ---
**Author:** ![Risha](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/5fc32e/32.png) [@Risha](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Risha)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2008, 6:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-s-for-vegetarians/470701/42 "2008-11-03T18:52:00Z")
> [@zweisamkeit](#): > > The only annoying thing with people who say they’re vegetarians but eat fish is that a _lot_ of non-vegetarians will just assume that that’s what every vegetarian is. So you say you’re a vegetarian, and they beam and show you a fish dish (and everything else has meat. Potatoes or green beans or mac n cheese will have bacon, etc). Uh, no.[/sub] Yeah, that drives me crazy. I know it’s a personal prejudice, but I just can’t bring myself to consider pescetarians to be vegetarians (though I certainly wouldn’t start an argument with one about it). But it should be the default at any party to offer a dish without _any_ sort of flesh in it. Who looks at a fish and thinks, “Hey! Meat-free dish! Bill’s set.” I also hate it when people think that being a vegetarian is some sort of complicated process involving weights and measures and charts in order to stay healthy. No one gets sick eating a vegetarian diet who wouldn’t otherwise be sick from eating jerky and frosted cereal three meals a day. ---
**Author:** ![Dangerosa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/22d042/32.png) [@Dangerosa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dangerosa)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2008, 7:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-s-for-vegetarians/470701/43 "2008-11-03T19:15:03Z")
> [@DrDeth](#): > > And the term has changed meaning over the years- back in the WWII and prior years, “Vegetarian” pretty well included “pescatarian” to the common man (true, some Vegetarian societies had stated that fish are not part of a vegetarian diet). Many Vegans are even today pushing hard for “Vegetarian= Vegan”, with “Ovo-lacto-” having to be appended in front of “Vegetarian”. This is silly, IMHO. But as you can see, it has worked pretty well in the past as most now exclude pescatarian from “vegetarian”. Then there’s the issue of honey, once OK, now considered non-Vegan by most Vegan groups. I find the discussions by vegetarians on “who gets to call themselves that” to be as silly and as offensive as similar discussions on “Catholics and the LDS are not real Christians.” Another strange form that I’ve run into a few times now “home vegetarians” - these are people usually partnered with a vegetarian who keep a vegetarian diet at home, but will eat steak if they get the opportunity when they are out. They usually don’t describe as “vegetarian” - but it can be easy to misunderstand them because they’ll say something like “we have a vegetarian household.” ---
**Author:** ![Anne\_Neville](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Anne\_Neville](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anne_Neville)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2008, 7:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-s-for-vegetarians/470701/44 "2008-11-03T19:35:01Z")
> [@Dangerosa](#): > > Another strange form that I’ve run into a few times now “home vegetarians” - these are people usually partnered with a vegetarian who keep a vegetarian diet at home, but will eat steak if they get the opportunity when they are out. They usually don’t describe as “vegetarian” - but it can be easy to misunderstand them because they’ll say something like “we have a vegetarian household.” This is reasonably common among people who keep kosher. They’ll keep kosher at home, but not when eating out. Even more common is someone who’s stricter about keeping kosher at home than when eating out. From a practical perspective, that makes sense- unless you are super-strict and will eat only in a kosher restaurant, you can’t really read ingredient labels in a restaurant to the extent you can when you’re buying food to prepare at home. Home vegetarians would run into the same issue. “I keep kosher” is similar to “I’m a vegetarian”, too, in that different people interpret it in different ways. For some people, “keeping kosher” might just mean “I don’t eat pork”, or even “I only eat pork in Chinese restaurants”. For others, it means they will not eat anything in a non-kosher restaurant or home (because it has presumably been prepared or served with utensils or dishes that have been used on non-kosher food). There are all kinds of variations in between. I think they’re both defined differently by different people for the same reason- namely, there is no central authority or committee who can set the rules for all Jews or for all vegetarians. ---
**Author:** ![Quercus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/7ab992/32.png) [@Quercus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quercus)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2008, 9:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-s-for-vegetarians/470701/45 "2008-11-03T21:28:27Z")
> [@Dangerosa](#): > > I have now met three people who describe themselves as vegetarian who won’t eat farmed animals - but will eat wild caught fish, birds and venison. For them, the vegetarian thing is an ethical relationship to their food. I don’t get it myself, but they find their philosophy to work for them. I have followed this philosophy at times as well. It seems pretty clear to me: killing an animal and eating it is a part of life. Mutilating it and torturing it in a cage for it’s entire life is not. I mean, most people think there are things worse than death. For some, there’s also the concern of the environmental damage caused by factory farms: a feed-lot raised steer causes more problems downstream than a moose wandering through the woods. ---
**Author:** ![ToeJam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/dfb087/32.png) [@ToeJam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ToeJam)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2008, 10:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-s-for-vegetarians/470701/46 "2008-11-03T22:46:37Z")
My father is a Hindu Vegetarian. He won’t eat any animals- fish or not. Though he loves garlic, but he’s 50-50 on onions. Certain religious days he will not eat onions, but on other days he enjoys eating them, because his mother made them for him when he was a kid a certain way. But that’s not part of the “vegetarian” lifestyle, the onion thing is more religious/cultural for Hindus. He will drink Milk though as that doesn’t harm the cow (yeah, yeah, I know some of the more Peta-y of you will chime in that’s not always true, but back when he was a kid in India, it didn’t hurt the cow, and so he’s kept that tradition of drinking milk. Eggs are weird. It’s like a 50-50 thing. He doesn’t consider them yet born, but they’re not quite fully vegetarian either. So he usually just tries to visibly avoid them, but he likes cake and bread. He just doesn’t go around asking if it has eggs in it. Because if it does, then oh well. Except again on stricter religious holidays and such, then he’ll forgo such things. ---
**Author:** ![PastAllReason](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/f07891/32.png) [@PastAllReason](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PastAllReason)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2008, 1:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-s-for-vegetarians/470701/47 "2008-11-04T01:32:28Z")
> [@Acid\_Lamp](#): > > Only those who are truly hardcore do. These are also usually people who have researched every company they buy products from etc… > > For the rest, it’s either a health issue, or a ethical issue usually shallowly thought out and only applying to “cute” animals. Not to be all excited about this, but this is a pretty wide brush that you’re using painting people into three categories: 1) the “hardcore”; 2)health issues; 3)ethical shallowly thought through. You’re obviously entitled to to your views, but I find your categorization bordering on the offensive. And to the OP, I echo otherwise who would say that you need to ask your step-father. ---
**Author:** ![lavenderviolet](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/cdc98d/32.png) [@lavenderviolet](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lavenderviolet)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2008, 2:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-s-for-vegetarians/470701/48 "2008-11-04T02:22:18Z")
> [@CaerieD](#): > > The visceral response of seeing a fish die soundlessly and with physical responses that aren’t terribly complex is simply not as dramatic as the response to an animal humans can relate to better. I think this is the big reason that so many people who consider themselves vegetarians still eat fish. Certainly, fish are animals, just as much as mammals are (our own species included, of course). I’m not a big fan of meat, but I’ve always considered seafood the least appealing of any form of meat. I’d rather just have plain noodles than a tuna casserole (though the more onions and garlic, the better). Until I read [Consider the Lobster](http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_the_lobster?printable=true), I thought I was the only person who considers it sort of ghoulish to boil lobsters alive. ---
**Author:** ![Lust4Life](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/ecc23a/32.png) [@Lust4Life](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lust4Life)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2008, 11:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-s-for-vegetarians/470701/49 "2008-11-04T11:49:05Z")
I have known two “Vegetarians” who were as such simply because they did’nt enjoy meat and for no other reasons,moral or otherwise. I used inverted commas because one would eat fish and the other would strangely enough eat hot dog sausages but absaloutly no other meat or fish. ---
**Author:** ![Anne\_Neville](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Anne\_Neville](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anne_Neville)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2008, 2:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-s-for-vegetarians/470701/50 "2008-11-04T14:51:22Z")
> [@Hilarity\_N.Suze](#): > > You have to wonder about people who will not eat an apple pie. And who keep coming up with different reasons not to eat it. > > Picky eaters, the lot of them. (And I thought I was a picky eater.) I keep kosher. If someone offered to bring an apple pie to Thanksgiving at my house, I would ask them to either make sure it was not made with lard (as some pies are), and to bring something else if they were not willing or able to do this. I also wouldn’t eat it right after the Thanksgiving meal if I were not sure it didn’t contain any dairy products (I wait an hour between eating meat and eating dairy- that wait actually helps me to not be too stuffed to eat pie after Thanksgiving dinner, too). If I were at someone else’s house, and there was an apple pie, I would ask if it was made with lard. If the answer was “Yes” or “I don’t know”, I wouldn’t eat it. Maybe I’m biased, but I would think that making sure there is no lard in the pie and not eating it if there is or might be would be a reasonable thing for a vegetarian to do as well. Granted, I do think the “no unrefined sugar” and “no honey” vegans are extreme (the [Vegan Outreach Guide FAQ](http://www.veganoutreach.org/guide/qa.html#isrefinedsugarvegan) agrees with me on the refined sugar issue, too). I’m probably biased on the “no honey” thing- I’ve been stung by bees, so I don’t like them that much, and I find it hard to get worked up over killing insects anyway. (Yes, I know bees are necessary, but I don’t like them, because they stung me when I was minding my own business.) But I respect such vegans’ right to follow those strictures, if they want to. If one were coming to my house for a meal, I’d try to have something they could eat (actually, I’d probably suggest some activity other than a meal together, given how unfamiliar I am with vegan cooking). ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2008, 3:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-s-for-vegetarians/470701/51 "2008-11-04T15:31:40Z")
When I was vegaquarian, I reasoned not that fish **appear** less anthropomorphic, but that they really **are** less like us. That is, fish have simpler neurosystems, and there’s little evidence (PETA propaganda notwithstanding) that fish have an identity over time, an awareness of self, the ability to form long-term desires, fears, and so forth in the way that mammals can. For this reason, I avoided eating octopus: those little fuckers are smart, and I didn’t feel comfortable eating something that smart. Daniel [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-question-s-for-vegetarians/470701.md?page=2)