(to me anyway)
wiggles eyebrows
Yup!! I get this a lot when I say I’m veggie, “Oh, do you eat fish/chicken/prawns/cows/other-miscellaneous-animals then?”
I used to get annoyed, but now I just explain that, “No, I’m a 100% Meat-Free Zone, ta very much!!”
There are many types of vegetarians. Some eat one thing, some another. Sometimes a person will self-identify with a label (ovo-lacto-pesco-vegetarian), some will call themselves semi-vegitarian, and some call themselves just plain vegetarians.
To deride those who are not a pure as yourself is to advance the stereotype of vegetarians and vegans as intolerent, self-rightous, and holier-than-thou. I’m sure your fellow vegetarians will not thank you for doing so.
Carnivore, married to a semi-vegetarian (who, by the way, cooks a great steak – she just doesn’t eat it).
Sure. Would you say then that fish is a vegetable, to people round your way?
How about chicken? Vegetable or animal?
Would this be one of the states that still hasn’t accepted Darwinian biology, by any chance?
John
Thoroughly annoying I agree.
I liked Ricky Gervais’s take on the issue, in the Politics show.
John
Just for the record, I’m not a vegetarian of any kind and never have been. I prefer my food freshly killed and lightly grilled.
But I am interested in words. I understand that there are many kinds of vegetarians, but at a minimum, I think it’s laughable for anyone who eats flesh of any kind to claim to be a vegetarian.
I was married to a vegetarian, and HallGirl2 was a vegetarian for about five years, so it kills me when a vegetarian says, “Oh, I don’t want it to be any trouble…” Ha. I can’t tell the number of hours I’ve spent in the grocery store, pouring over the back of boxes of rice mix, seasonings, sauces, etc. to see if they contained any animal products. (Most do.) So, what they may typically buy for their own household and consider it free of meat products, it isn’t actually. That being said…
Watch out for “soul food”–much of it is prepared with bacon fat or lard.
A funny story to insert here…my mom (bless her heart) went out of her way to prepare food at family gatherings so HallGirl2 and ex could have their share of “non meat food” (“I don’t eat anything that had a mother,” HallGirl2 would say). One year for July 4th, she prepared two batches of BBQ beans. One meat, one without meat. She was very careful, even carefully washing the cutting board and knife in between fixing the two batches, using different spoons and frying pans to cook the onions, etc. Only she overlooked one important step. She used Pork N Beans for both batches of BBQ beans. :smack:
Thank you BrotherCadfael, for saving me from typing that. I know many people that as varying degrees of vegetarians. If someone goes to the trouble of asking what your dietary no-nos are, be pleased that they care enough to try to accommodate you, not insulted that they can’t read your mind.
To Bimble, talk to your host. Most people with bend over backwards to make their guests feel comfortable during their stay.
Well, I myself asked the SiL about this, and she said it was because fish was healthier than red meat or chicken, and they weren’t as abused in their raising. I admit it’s inconsistent.
I just think it’s rude to tell someone that they’re not a pure whatever. Shrug. How about milk and eggs? They don’t kill the animal.
I don’t remember ever usign the word “pure.” “Pure vegetarian” is a term commonly used in India and it usually refers to people who do eat dairy products, but who do not eat eggs.
For the word “vegetarian” to have any meaning whatsoever, as I said before, it must mean at the very least that no flesh is eaten, and that includes swimming, as well as walking and flying creatures.
Milk and eggs aren’t flesh. There are vegetarians who eat both.
Well, I would suggest that you take that up with the self-proclaimed vegetarians who eat fish, seafood, and in some cases chicken or even red meat. With so many people who identify as veggie still eating flesh of one type or another, it becomes a point of practicality to clarify what they will and won’t eat, and a point of obnoxiousness to make snarky comments about seeking said clarification.
If there’s an Earth Fare in your friend’s area, you might want to make that your first stop for groceries. It’s aimed at the granola set, so you’ll probably have a much easier time finding vegetarian/vegan-friendly packaged foods there than at most of the other grocery chains.
This is very good advice. For your breif visit, don’t be too picky, since it won’t make you sick or anything if there is a tad of gelatin in some item, or rennet in your cheese. Don’t ask!
Please dudes- there is much debate over “who is the one *true *vegetarian”. GQ is not the place for this argument. Please take it to GD, where I know it has been done once or twice before, but I don’t think very recently. There is no “GQ” answer, it’s a GD or perhaps an IMHO thing. Or even the PIT. 
Whoops, thanks for the warning, forgot about the stuff in the soul food! But Southerners are big on hospitality and everybody will swoon at your British accent anyway, so ask sweetly if they can cook ______ without animal products and tip well at the end of the meal and you should be fine.
You know, maybe it’s because my SIL and family are (nominally) Catholic. “Meat” is what you can’t eat on Fridays during Lent, so our finny and shelly friends don’t count.
And in case you’re unfamiliar with soul food terms:
Definitely meat: Chitlins, maw
Probably contains lard or other animal fat: Collard greens
May contain eggs or dairy: Grits, sweet potato biscuits, fried corn, banana pudding, sweet potato salad (has mayonnaise)
I got a quiz for you:
Yeast. Vegetable or animal?
Eggs. Vegetable or animal?
Cheese. Vegetable or animal?
Mushrooms. Vegetable or animal?
A friend of mine claims to be vegetarian, while downing a mushroom-and-cheese omelette served with toast. Shall I call her a liar? Shall I change my answer if I believe in “Darwinian biology” (whatever that unscientific term means)?
Grrr. Prescriptivists need Qualuudes.
Okay, to be helpful. Hi, Bimble! Vegetarian (or semivegetarian, or pescolactovovegetarian, if you prefer) in North Carolina checking in. As others have said, there definitely are vegetarians in this state; my town of Asheville has at least three all-vegetarian restaurants in it, all of which are skewed pretty heavily toward the vegan end of things, and most other restaurants have veggie options. However, it varies pretty heavily by where you go in the state (not county; North Carolina is a state comprising 100 counties). What town does your friend live in?
Definitely make sure your friend knows that you can’t eat vegetables cooked with ham, or pie crusts made with lard, or soups made with chicken broth, or anything like that; these are all common dishes in the region, and your hosts may not think of them as being meat dishes. And offer to cook something for them, maybe an English dish: can you do a good veggie shepherd’s pie, for example, or something similar?
While there are plenty of vegetarians and epicures in our state, there’s also a sizeable contingent of culinary xenophobes: I had a coworker for awhile who was deeply suspicious of such exotic foods as cheesecake. If your hosts think that Chinese food is way too weird for their tastes, you want to stay away from your delicious Tempeh Satay recipe. See if you can find out ahead of time how adventurous they are.
Good luck, and enjoy your stay! If you’re coming soon, you’ll be coming in one of the state’s most beautiful times of year: we do Spring right in North Carolina.
Daniel
As some of the previous posts have made abundantly clear, you probably ought to specify just what it is that you DON’T eat to avoid assumptions that you eat poultry or seafood or something. If your friend’s parents are particularly unfamiliar with vegetarianism, you may also want to make it clear that you don’t eat steak OR pot roast OR ground beef OR beef jerky OR beef gravy OR beef broth - some people take a while to understand that the common factor in all of those is “made from an animal” and not something about how it’s prepared or whatever. They also need to know that tricking you into eating meat is likely to make you physically ill, and that even if you don’t notice it, your stomach will. An appalling number of people will try to sneak meat into things they feed vegetarians, and it can help to head this off right away.
While this is true, there’s another group of people who don’t try to sneak meat into someone’s diet so much as they don’t consider a dish to be meat unless you can see the quivering muscle mass. It’s pretty common for people to think that a non-meat-eater will happily eat soup made from meat broth, because meat broth isn’t quivering muscle mass.
Do tell them, though, that you’re very excited about trying grits (cheese grits if you’re not terribly vegan) and biscuits–and if you get a chance, try some cornbread and some sweet-potato pie.
Daniel
I promise I’m going to stay out of this from now on, but this question is too simple. All these questions are legitimate points of disagreement for vegetarians. Whereas, in the case of fish, there is no question. That is undisputably an animal, even if you aren’t sure whether yeast, eggs, cheese, or mushrooms are.
That is all.
Pete’s top ten vegetarian cities. Number nine (Asheville) is in North Carolina.
Yeast is indisputably not a vegetable: it’s in a whole nother kingdom. Just like fish. Words mean what the speaker and audience understand them to mean, and in many cases, people who eat a variety of foods including fish and shellfish but not warm-blooded animals call themselves vegetarians. Those who object to this usage of the word are idealogues, linguistic ignoramuses, or both.
And that is all, unless you want to start a thread in IMHO or the pit on the subject. (Or, if you want facts, start a thread here about the origins of a word’s meaning and/or the usage of the word “vegetarian.”)
Daniel