I respect the vegetarian diet, and if a guest tells me ahead of time that she’s a vegetarian, I will prepare a vegetarian option for her.
But I do admit to being pissed when someone tells me they’re a vegetarian, so I do make the effort to provide a vegetarian entree option for them, then they proceed to eat the salmon and shrimp and crab entree just like everyone else at the table.
Next time don’t tell me you’re a vegetarian, tell me you eat seafood but avoid other forms of meat.
Fish aren’t as easy to empathise with as mammals. I don’t consider someone who eats fish a vegetarian. Wouldn’t dream of giving them shit about it you understand, just a personal opinion. Would be like a vegan who drinks milk.
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.
Actually, many game birds are farm raised and then released into defined hunting areas for people to shoot.
And, they have hideous websites.
At the risk of stating the obvious, it’s always good to ask, anyway, what kind of vegetarian they are. I haven’t anyone yet who eats seafood identify as a vegetarian, but I do occasionally get vegetarians who don’t eat milk or eggs or animal products of any type (vegans) or they won’t eat onions and garlic, etc. Usually, vegans identify as such, but not always. It should be up to the person with the special diet to elucidate their requirements, but, as a good host, I always ask just to make sure.
If I had any desire to eat meat I would probably be like that*. I’m a vegetarian for a variety of reasons, the first and foremost being that I don’t like meat. Probably the second most important reason is an ethical/economic one: farmed meat, cattle especially, consumes unbelievable resources. I recall reading (though I don’t know where) that America’s cattle farms use as much grain and water as it would take to feed every starving person in Africa. I know that that shift in use is never going to happen, but I personally am not comfortable paying into that system. Plus then you can get into the costs, financial and environmental both, of the daily operations of farms, of transporting the animals, slaughtering and packing…it’s not a cheap business.
So if that’s really your only reason not to eat meat, I think it makes perfect sense to eat things that you (or someone in your immediate community) hunt/fish naturally: it may not be cheaper for you, but it’s easy to see how it could seem more ethical from an economic point of view.
*Maybe, assuming I liked that stuff, none of which I’ve ever tried.
I’ll answer for myself only, I don’t know if it will help but here goes.
I usually keep a vegan diet. I am not strict with myself - if I feel an overwhelming urge to have a slice of cheddar cheese, I will and I’m not going to beat myself up over it. I started keeping a vegan diet when I read some things about meat processing and packing (modern day The Jungle type literature - things like Skinny Bitch and Don’t Eat This Book). It doesn’t matter that some of the info in those examples I gave are pretty far out there (Skinny Bitch, for example, is a real how-to on eating disorders). I read it, it grossed me out, and I don’t eat meat anymore. I didn’t like much dairy to begin with so I just crossed all of it off my list. I feel better. I don’t like to think about the nasty killing floor and rotten chicken that I might be eating. Eventually (and rather quickly) I lost my taste for meat. The idea of drinking a glass of milk makes me a little nauseated.
However, I eat catfish. Yes, I know it’s a conflict but here’s how I rationalize it. There is a catfish farm close by. I know that the fish I get has been cleaned but there has not been much more processing done to it. I think that fewer hands have been on my food. I feel the same way about places where I can find shrimp that has come off the gulf in the last few days (people usually advertise this fact). Now the people might be lying to me. I may very well be eating something that has been bleached like the rotten chicken - but I don’t think so and it doesn’t gross me out to eat it and I like it so I do. If I could find someone that would slaughter me a cow and I would know it didn’t eat ground up diseased cow as its feed (Matrix cow!) or I had someone that I could regularly get fresh chicken from I probably would. In fact, it wouldn’t be that hard to find around here but I can’t shell out for a whole cow right now.
Anyway - I know that’s a long way of saying this - I’ll eat certain things that seem contradictory because my reasons involve something (the hormones, the feeding the dead cow to the cow, the multiple hands and germs) that I can control with the consumption of locally farmed fish.
Also, if it’s strictly a “I can’t eat a sweet animal” type thing - well, it’s hard to feel cuddly for a fish. And yes, as a fish eating “vegan” I do think it’s hypocritical if you don’t eat meat for the cuddly thing.
Having seen live fish get killed and prepared for cooking, I don’t think the bleeding is that much different from larger animals or mammals in general. What is different is that it’s a little easier to not anthropomorphize the fish. The fish does not make a sound, it doesn’t cringe or make facial expressions you could liken to fear or pain as we understand them. It just flops around and gapes its mouth. 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’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.
nvm
I’m a ‘vegetarian’ like your step-dad - but I refer to myself as a vegaquarian (eat fish, prawns and scallops), but won’t eat meat or birds.
To make things simple, I will casually refer to myself as vegetarian when talking to people generally - makes clear there is a wide range of food I won’t eat (and would generally prefer totally vege rather than fish, but it’s a compromise when eating out, when my meat-eating partner cooks, and when I struggle to eat enough protein when dieting). If someone’s going to cook for me, I’ll make clear I can eat fish, and I’ll often urge them not to fuss, that I can fill up on breads and salads etc very easily.
Being vege for me is ethical (I wouldn’t eat my cats, so why eat meat), and ecological - eating to live more lightly on the planet. Fish for me is, as I said, a compromise - lowish down the food chain (although the original book I read by Peter Singer says they still have enough of a nervous system to feel some pain), while prawns and scallops are meant to be a good option (depending on where they are harvested). I struggle with this compromise, but I guess every little bit helps.
All right, I give up. Why would a vegetarian avoid onions or garlic?
Religious reasons. Mushrooms are also sometimes on this list. You’ll find this among some Hindus and Buddhists. They are said to excite the passions or stir the blood or soemthing like that (at least that’s what Hare Krishnas have told me–I don’t know if it’s the same reason across religions), but somebody with better knowledge on this should chime in.
There are two influential religious traditions that treat fish as something different from meat- Judaism and the Catholic Church. Perhaps that influences some people to call themselves vegetarians even though they eat fish.
I think that the word “vegetarian” is short hand for a lot of different things and motivations. Its easier to say “I’m vegetarian” even if you eat fish than to use the more obscure pescatarian - which usually requires an explanation. If you don’t want to explain, you frequently go for the easiest shorthand. Some people with strange diets have discovered that most people do not enjoy listening to them describe in detail what they will and will not eat and why - making the less than completely accurate use of the word vegetarian the polite thing to do in some circumstances. Now, when going to a dinner party the more explanatory “I don’t eat red meat or birds, but I will eat a little fish” may be necessary to keep from having QtM’s reaction as a host.
But then, the motivation of a few (rare) vegetarians really does seem to be to make life as difficult as possible for the people around them - the “it pisses off my meat eating parents” motivation. In those cases, internal consistancy is not a huge factor.
The family of an Indian-American friend of mine, whose family is at least nominally Hindu, follows this tradition. (Well, my friend doesn’t, but his family in India does.) His wife is New Jersey Italian. They agonized about what to do about food at their wedding before finally throwing their hands up and doing two separate buffets.
One of my classmates is Indian, and in a conversation about food, I related that anecdote. She told me that she and her husband had to do the same thing - even though they’re both Indian and Hindu. Apparently his family doesn’t eat fish and her family is from a seaside area where fish is a major staple. Her father was horrified at the thought of not serving fish at his daughter’s wedding.
[/random hijack about food]
I occasionally feed a vegetarian whose rule is that if it had no blood or cold blood, he will eat it. That one is easy to figure out.
But I have had whole passels of friends I won’t feed anymore because it just got too hard. People doing macrobiotics who won’t eat tomatoes or citrus. Hare Krishnas who will eat cheese and other dairy products but won’t eat mushrooms, garlic, or tomatoes. People who can’t have gluten. People who will eat chicken or turkey but won’t eat red meat or fish. People who don’t generally eat meat, but will if it happens to be venison that they’ve personally killed.
One member of my circle of friends went to Thanksgiving dinner with some other of these people and took an apple pie. They asked her if she’d used processed sugar. Yes. The next year, she went to Thanksgiving dinner with another subset of these people, only this time she sweetened her pie with honey, as she’d been directed the year before. Okay–any animal products? Yes.
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.)
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.*
We have similar issues - from gluten/lactose/nut/soy allergies to vegetarians to vegans to people keeping as kosher as practical, to low salt/low protein for liver issues.
We have moved to potlucks, buffets, bring your own - everyone labels everything (Gluten Free! No Eggs!) Everyone stays as reasonable as possible (and the unreasonable ones no longer get invitations - if you have a cow because your veggie kid grabbed a slice of lunchmeat of the sandwich tray and ate it, that’s your issue - no more invites for you). People with a lot of issues eat before they arrive and then snack on what they can eat - and no one makes comments on anyone else’s diet - unless its “I didn’t realize you don’t eat cheese.”
The taco bar has worked surprisingly well for us as the vegetarian refried beans, meat, vegatables, cheese, soy cheese, rice, corn tortillas, flour tortillas, etc., can all be laid out and assembled.
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.