FYI, this is a 12 year old thread.
I reported this as a spam bump, but that’s offensive. I should’ve called it a tofu bump.
Sea cucumbers should be ok.
Right.
I’m an ovo-lacto-carno-pesco vegetarian. 
I know I am responding to a very old post, but I want to correct this frequently-repeated misunderstanding. There may not be a canonical definition of “vegetarian,” but the term vegan was coined by a specific man, Donald Watson, and indeed has a specific definition. Other people are free to coin and define their own words, but please stop pretending “vegan” doesn’t have an explicit, known definition, even if some people use it confusingly.
(elegiac) Ah, 2003! We were all so young and stupid!
Shame. I wanted to point out that if the following means anything at all:
-it means ‘a vegetarian who washes eight times’.
The horse has already left the barn on that. Watson himself defined it two different ways (dietary and lifestyle/ethics), and it has been used that way continually ever since. Quite a lot of people are only on a vegan diet and do not agree with the tenets of veganism. Others argue over what qualifies as “exploiting” animals.
It’s actually quite rare that the person who coins a term gets his definition respected–especially when describing a belief system.