It might not have been sudden. In fact, it probably wasn’t. I think that most people who become vegetarian after childhood do so gradually, eating less and less meat, or smaller and smaller categories of meat, until eventually they decide that they’re just not going to eat it at all.
Right, and because of this, upon learning that someone is a vegetarian, without any other context, I would not assume anything about them other than that they don’t eat meat, and maybe not even that. (Maybe they mostly avoid meat, or only eat meat under certain limited circumstances, but find it easier just to say they’re vegetarian).
For any possible answer you could think of to the thread title’s question, there are probably vegetarians out there whom it applies to.
I know a number of people who don’t keep kosher, nor did their parents in adulthood, yet find the idea of cheese on a meat sandwich gross. I’ll eat a cheeseburger now and then, but the idea of many meat/cheese combos strikes me as unpalatable. Cultural transmission of foodways is powerful.
Part of this is that after years of not eating a food, your taste becomes re-sensitized to it. This, plus whatever moral judgments one may have attached after training themselves to newly learned information (i.e. the actual sanitary conditions of a chickenhouse).
When I was a kid, I would occasionally eat venison when it was available and thought nothing special about it. Years later I had it as an adult, and found the gamey flavor so overpowering that I can’t eat it now. What had been normal became abnormal through lack of exposure, and the experience was so repulsive that I’m not interested in acquiring the taste again. I reckon it’s the same for people who have sworn off ribeye.
For instance, I used to know a fellow whose personal rule was that he wouldn’t eat any industrially-processed meat (he had once worked in a slaughterhouse, and was absolutely disgusted by what he saw), and he strictly followed that rule. Non-industrial meat, however, like venison a friend had hunted, was just fine with him. When he would tell people that he was “a vegetarian”, he was being strictly speaking inaccurate, but it was an easy way to get a dish he would find acceptable, and a lot easier than going into detail about precisely where his line was.
BTW, one reason why some people may become vegetarian is Alpha-gal allergy, caused by a tick bite and resulting in symptoms including “rash, hives, nausea or vomiting, difficulty breathing, drop in blood pressure, dizziness or faintness and severe stomach pain.” The allergic reaction is only to meat from mammals; chicken, fish and reptile meat don’t cause the symptoms.
(My brother’s younger daughter is vegetarian now because of some unpleasant reactions to eating meat. I’ve never pressed her on exactly what the problem is, but I wonder if that’s what she has.)
My version…
It’s like a certain percentage of meat is tolerable. Pepperoni pizza is okay. Hamburgers need a lot of condiments to cover up the meat.
My choice is no meat. If I make it, there isn’t meat. When others make it, I either skip the meat part, or cover it up with other stuff.
My wife is one in this category. She grew up in a very meat and potatoes home, and just had it as the norm, but unlike most of the happy carnivores in her family (and mine) she always had smaller portions, and had every piece of meat cooked to death/dryness and covered in sauces. About the only meat she ate with much joy was various fried stuff, which should probably have been telling as well. As we got older, and she became more comfortable about expressing her preferences (and realizing them!) she realized she just really didn’t like the taste of meat at all. So she stopped eating it, but had zero qualms about me doing so.
She always hated seafood, and while she loves the smell of bacon still, after years of not eating any meat she finds it and other foods too greasy, and/or too gross in texture. Still, she’s said that given an opportunity to eat a food she would otherwise NOT be able to do, she’d try it for the experience, but she has zero interest otherwise.
I think a key part in looking at this sort of thing is what substitutes does the person look for. She absolutely doesn’t understand from her POV the point of something like a Beyond Burger. She wants something that tastes as little like meat as possible, not a vegetarian option that tastes exactly like meat!
I grew up in a Reform household, where we didn’t keep kosher, but it still influenced our food choices. So while we might eat milk and meat, or bacon, we didn’t ever otherwise have pork in the house. We might have some at restaurants in green chili or stir fried Chinese food, but never in chops / slabs / slices of ham for example.
So every time I’ve been at a place or event that offered those style of pork dishes, it just didn’t click with me. Not to the point of discomfort, but if it was a choice of having such a dish, or just eating sides/bread, I’d only eat the sides. As I’ve gotten older, and commercially produced pork has been bred to be quite bland and tasteless (especially the popular lean loin sections) I’ve bought it from time to time to make stir fry, stewed/braised/slow cooked dishes, and others (including some I’m very proud of), but to this day the thought of having a pork chop or slice of ham sounds utterly unappealing.
But you can still eat people!
I’m a vegetarian because I hate meat. I always have. I hate the taste, I hate the textute, and I hate the smell of it cooking.
No matter what kindof meat it is, the smell of meat cooking smells like flautulence to me.
When I was a kid, there were lots of battles at the dinner table when I refused to eat the meat, and I had to sit there until bedtime, or until I ate a small portion. I sat until bedtime.
I ate everything else-- I loved vegetbles except eggplant, celery, and asparagus. Since I happily ate seconds and thirds of anything else veggie, my mother didn’t bother me much about those three-- we rarely had eggplant, never had celery because no one else liked it either, except in soup, and when we had asparagus, she would give me some raw carrot sticks, or cook a little frozen broccoli separately.
My mother believed in a egg every day at breakfast, and meat once a day as well. She was flexible on the third meal, so I’d get peanut butter, lentil soup, beans and rice, or some dairy product.
As I got older, and could make something else for myself, she backed off on the “sitting at the table till bedime.” At some point, soy milk came out, and it didn’t taste great, but I’d add chocolate syrup and sugar, or sugar and vanilla. I could have a glass of that with a meat meal. When I had my own money, I could buy tofu pups, one of the very first soy meat substitutes on the market, and I’d have one at dinner.
There were some kinds of meat that didn’t make me gag, and I would eat-- several kinds of chicken, including roast and fried, and beef if it was brisket. Shabbat was nearly always brisket or roast chicken.
When I lived in a college dorm, I chose the vegetarian entree a lot, but still had chicken often enough not to be actually vegetarian yet. I also liked, for some odd reason, McDonald’s fish sandwiches, which was odd, because in general, I hated fish. Then one day, I found a very large bone in one, and I was done with them.
When I had my first apartment by myself, I became a full-fledged vegetarian, and except for some meat patty sandwiches I ate during basic training, because there was no other choice for field chow, and we were burning 4,000 calories a day, I’ve been a vegetarian since age 19.
Anymore, I get sick to my stomach if I accidentally get something with some meat-thing in it.
Mostly life long vegetarian here. I ate some meat as a child but at a very young age refused to eat most of it because I didn’t like it. Then I stopped eating chicken at about 13. I’ve never had most meat, like pork chop or steak. So I stopped eating meat because I didn’t like it and continue to be a vegetarian because I don’t want to eat animals. Also the idea of eating meat is pretty revolting to me now. I won’t eat eggs that have been cooked next to bacon, for instance. I won’t pick the meat out of something and eat the rest of it. If it has meat on it or has touched it, I won’t eat it.
One of my former supervisors was Indian and vegatarian, and he came to work one Monday raving about his meal at the old Gulliver’s restaurant. Gulliver’s was a prime rib restaurant, with, basically, three different cuts of prime rib and sides. But the sides were good…I especially loved the Yorkshire pudding. So, Ragu ate the sides, and what was he raving about? The creamed spinach. Which was made with bacon. He hadn’t known, and we hated breaking it to him, but we didn’t want him to continue eating it unknowingly. He was very sad.
So, it’s pretty obvious cultural aversions to certain foods are just that. Cultural.
Now, if only my mom didn’t try to force tapioca on me. That I will not eat.
I don’t know if you would get an accurate answer because no one knows how extreme it would get before they broke and ate the pork, dog, etc. I had a student once say she would willingly starve to death before she ate anything non-kosher. I doubt she would have … but maybe.
I’m an ovo-lacto-pesco-carno vegetarian.
That’s actually not the correct Jewish answer to that. The only commandment you are supposed to die for is not to denounce God. Any other commandment is not worth a life. It’s why even an Orthodox Jew will call 911 on Shabbat.
Does she seriously think the Nazis served kosher food to people in Auschwitz?
It’s a bit more complex than that.
In brief, there are three basic categories of things you’re supposed to die rather than perform: idolatry, weird sexual stuff, and murder.
Her point was that she had such an aversion to non-kosher food it made her physically ill to even seriously consider eating it. It was not about following Yahweh’s rules.
Huh, there are lot of “kosher style” foods that are indistinguishable from kosher foods if you don’t talk to the chef/read the label.
I’m the opposite. I don’t like a lot of condiments. They have too strong a flavor, and the flavors usually clash, and they tend to be greasy and overly salty. When I was a kid, I wouldn’t eat at McDonalds because the burger had all sorts of gross stuff on it. That was awkward, because McDonalds was cheap, and my mom liked to get it. (Fortunately for me, my father didn’t like it, either, so she’d buy subs across the street for the two of us, and McD for the rest of the family.) I’ve since discovered I can eat a McDonald’s fillet-o-fish if I scrape off most of the tartar sauce (or get it with less – turns out that’s an option) but I still won’t eat the burger. Ick.
I knew another woman who was part of the same social crowd as myself and the Jewish woman I mentioned previously. This gal was Gentile and Midwestern through and through. In her words:
I’m a meatatarian!
She was all for the Midwest meat-and-potatoes diet. As long as you left off most of the potatoes and included a double helping of whatever overly sweet Midwestern horror was planned for dessert. And the meat; lots of it.
My impression, from people I’ve asked is that not only is it permissible to eat pork if the alternative is to starve, it is actually obligatory. I actually grew up in a house that never had pork, as did my wife and neither have we. Oddly enough we did ear pork products like bacon and ham; go figure.
I have a very close friend whose wife, after about 15 years of marriage, converted and they became serious about religion. But rather than go through the whole kosher schtick, they decided to become vegetarian, plus pescatorian (but only fish with fins and scales–no shellfish). It is somewhat bizarre to go to a seder at their house and have a celery stalk instead of a lamb shank on the seder plate.
I don’r know what to make of vegans, who are eating a diet that, unsupplemented, cannot sustain human life. I knew one who had a cat and tried to feed it vegan. A cat cannot survive on that.