It’s appropriate that someone name DrCube would ask such a thing!
http://static.caloriecount.about.com/images/medium/meijer-bouillon-cubes-chicken-134012.jpg
It comes in cubes or powder form and gets added to sauces or soup, or drunk in a steaming hot mug of salty goodness.
I agree with someone else above that this is the perfect answer.
If you want to live, something else has to die. We all draw a line somewhere along there. It’s very unusual to find a human cannibal, for example, so even meat-eaters who will eat any other animal have drawn a line.
My line is drawn due to animal suffering divided by my own needs. I identify as pescatarian but it’s not quite that simple. At home I eat some shellfish with no compunctions (I don’t think they miss their young, for example, and some shellfish like mussels can be easily bought from renewable resources), and eat other fish occasionally but am trying not to. I need omega three acids, for example, but the non-fish oil supplements don’t seem to be any worse than the fish-oil ones. And I order from a website rather than buying in a shop because capsules tend to have gelatine in.
At other people’s homes I don’t draw the line that strictly due to trying to be a good guest but it is surprising that lots of people will serve me fish with heads on it. I mean, lots of full-on carnivores have issues with that too.
Ethically I wouldn’t have a problem with eating meat raised in a nice pasture and killed humanely towards the end of the average lifespan it would have if it lived in the wild. In reality meat is not food for me any more and it would take starvation or something to change that.
Cheese is quite literally my guilty pleasure. I’ve cut down on it quite a lot in the past few years. Young male cows did die for my cheese board and I don’t like that. I try to buy from places that treat their cows better but there’s no getting away from the death thing.
TBF the plastic bags were only mentioned in response to the OP saying that he couldn’t understand, as a vegan, why vegetarians wouldn’t eat beef broth. He was making the point that we all make compromises, and here is possibly a compromise you didn’t realise you were making.
Though TBF most vegans I know are more scrupulous than the average person about using cloth reusable bags.
But even those cloth reusable bags have animal deaths on the users’ conscience, since without measures to stop pests eating cotton, etc, we wouldn’t have those bags.
We all have to draw a line and it is impossible to draw a line that means no animal deaths at all. We all choose a line somewhere.
Most vegetarians would not include meat broth as above that line, probably partly because it’s perfectly possible to make nice broth without meat, so we could easily change that.
I posted the question because I was under the impression that all rennet came from a slaughtered calf.
When I was 18 I spent the summer working on a small organic farm. I was a vegetarian and a hopeless bleeding heart, and so when I was hand-hoeing a row of squash and uncovered a mouse nest with a handful of pink babies in it, my first thought was how we could rescue, rehabilitate, or rehome these mice. I called my boss over to ask her, thinking maybe this’d be a project she’d like me to set up with her two young children.
Instead, she called the dog over, who slurped up the mice and trotted away.
In retrospect it’s an occasion to laugh at my teenage foolishness, but it was also a minor life-changer for me. Prior to that moment, I’d not given much thought at all to the deaths involved in growing plants, especially in an organic setting. But not I was intimately aware that animals had to die in order for summer squash to hit the table. That moment gradually–over more than a decade–contributed to my willingness to eat meat today.
This anecdote amuses me.
Not in a “gotcha, ya silly vegetarian” sense, as I have empathy for those who pursue such a lifestyle.
But more because it really demonstrates how ‘the devil is in the details’ and the more sure you are in the rightness of your point of view, the more poignant those moments are when you are confronted with blatant inherent contradictions to that point of view.
Thanks for sharing it.
If the welfare or suffering of animals is a concern, the most important question is not whether to eat meat at all–it is where your food comes from, and how.
The pinkies notwithstanding, a hand-hoed squash patch on a small organic farm certainly kills far less than most options–and returns more to its local food web.