No; dogs can survive on a vegan diet, as long as it is fed a balanced, commercial food, albeit, the vegan foods I’ve seen are not popular. We tried sample sizes of a few once when we were looking for a food for a dog with allergies. We intended to mix it with some meat we bought that we knew was single-ingredient, so to speak, and we’d cook it in its own grease, no vegetable oil, but we had to establish that to food itself was not an allergen; she would not eat any of them. Oddly, our less fussy, non-allergic dog did, but her favorite food was blueberry muffins, and her least favorite was any kind of dog biscuit.
Cats, on the other hand, are obligate carnivores. They need meat. They can synthesize lots of things omnivores can’t, like vitamin C, and they do need a few other things in their diets for roughage, which is why they eat grass, but they have to have meat.
My two best friends are vegetarians. Not Vegans though.
With one We usually get vegetarian egg-foo-young (yes it has eggs). The other we usually share a pizza. She says to go ahead and get meat on my side, but I don’t mess with that. There are plenty of good vegi pizza combos (tomato, green olive and artichoke hearts is a favorite for me), so that’s what we do. I don’t really care. In these cases, the only reason to eat is to visit and talk over a few beers.
They are both sort of vegetarians, because they both eat fish. Nothing that lives on land with a face I guess. Whatever.
My mother-in-law was vegetarian because she simply did not like the taste/texture of meat. This apparently had been the case from a very young age, despite being raised in an omnivorous family and many battles at dinner time over her lack of desire to eat animal flesh in any form. When she became adult she was able to stop the forced consumption of meat and eat what she preferred.
It was never that she “must have had something big and unexpected click in their head”, she was apparently wired that way from the beginning.
Meh. Maybe maybe not. My college roommate was vegetarian (with an occasional exception for fish a couple times a year". It’s not so much that found meat disgusting as she just didn’t care for it much herself. She did take a trip abroad at one point and at times during that trip ate meat-based items because between the culture where she was and occasional language barriers it wasn’t practical to maintain a completely vegetarian diet.
Most of the vegetarians I’ve known long term seemed to either have that diet for health reasons or because they just simply didn’t care for meat. I really have not met that many ethics-based vegetarians in real life. I know they exist, and my experience may be atypical, but I’m not convinced they’re the majority.
I think a lot of the “fake meat” industry is oriented more towards omnivores looking to reduce their animal flesh consumption rather than actual vegetarians or vegans. Not say those folks don’t sometimes eat fake meat, just that they may not be the main audience for it.
It’s also possible he had a genetic predisposition to that sort of thing. There are people who will have sky-high cholesterol no matter what they do or don’t eat. Or maybe it was the ice cream.
^ This is me. I was not raised in a kosher household at all, but we just didn’t do things like add a slice of cheese to cold cuts or a slice of cheese on a burger so I never acquired a taste for it. Now, imagine encountering people for whom NOT having that slice of cheese on meat is equally unthinkable… hilarity ensues.
I didn’t grow up eating most forms of pork (exceptions being bacon and ham) and thus never acquired a taste for it. You won’t find it in my kitchen. If I’m at someone’s home for dinner and pork is served I will eat some but that’s it.
In actual fact, if the the genuine alternative is real starvation, Jews are excused from the kosher dietary rules as preserving human life takes precedence. Arguably, to prevent real starvation, they are required to break the rules. Of course, that might still be traumatic to them, as it might be so if a gentile had to eat a dog to survive or worse yet resort to cannibalism to survive.
It’s my very unscientific observation that non-kosher Jews are most likely to have bacon and ham than any other type of pork. My personal guess is that this is because bacon and ham are substantially altered and thus taste less like pig than most other types of pork products.
I worked with a guy who was in the USAAF in England in WWII. One very cold, very stormy (blizzardy?) night, someone went… somewhere for some food since they were all very hungry. All the guy could get was ham sandwiches. He made an apology to the Jewish airman. The Jewish guy took a sandwich and looked at it, and said ‘Ham nothing! This is fish!’ and proceeded to eat it.
Personally, I’d prefer cannibalism to eating a dog, in a crash-in-the-Andes sort of situation. I think I’d really try eating a seat cushion first, though.
A butcher shop in my town has t-shirts that say: “Vegetarian means BAD HUNTER.”
I buy as much of my meat from them, because it’s sourced as locally as possible, and that includes being processed by independent butchers.
Anyway, I tried being a vegetarian when I first moved out, and figured out pretty quickly that it wasn’t for me. Sure, I did it all wrong (just eat what I was eating before, without meat) but I still know that I really need to eat meat to be satisfied. I can eat meatless meals, but a meatless diet? That just doesn’t mesh with my body.
I used to work with a woman who became vegetarian at age 7, when she found out what meat is, ahem, made of. She usually had Yoplait yogurt with her lunch, and I was NOT going to tell her that it was thickened with animal-sourced gelatin.
We worked with several men who hunted, and she told them that conversations about that would make her physically ill, as in she would have to run to the bathroom and throw up. They thought she was kidding; she wasn’t. I later stepped in when some men at the next table in the cafeteria got into a similar discussion, and I explained the situation and they did apologize and changed the subject.
I imagine I’d survive, but I really enjoy eating meat, and miss it when I don’t get it. I like lentils and chickpeas and beans just fine. But my bean soup tastes better with chicken broth…
Not being flippant, but nothing we say can come close to you asking a vegan relative or friend (you probably have them and don’t even know). I have asked a few friends, and the answers were all over the place, with a lot of nuances I didn’t expect.
In grad school, I shared a house with a bunch of guys, one of whom was vegan. He was never evangelical about it and he was always open to question from us (most of which were stupid).
In his case, it was strictly ethical. He enjoyed the taste of meat well enough, but he couldn’t justify it from an animal rights/consent standpoint. He wouldn’t starve to death rather than eat meat, and he said that he didn’t have any particular ethical qualms about human-based food items like cheese made from voluntarily donated human breast milk.
Hmm…it seems like most of the vegetarians I’ve known adopted the diet for ethical or health reasons, not because they disliked the taste of meat, but it’s an interesting question. Maybe it would make for a good poll: “if you’re a vegetarian or know someone who is, what is the main reason for not eating meat? Ethics, health, dislike the taste.” Maybe I’ll do a poll tomorrow, got to run some errands soon today.
As for the “fake meat” industry, if omnivores are eating impossible burgers and similar fake meat foods to try to improve the healthiness of their diet, they’re kidding themselves because I’ve heard that those fake meats are loaded with fat and sodium, making them as bad for you as real processed meat.
I was mostly vegetarian for over twenty years. I transitioned back to eating meat when my father and I decided to rebuild our relationship and made a habit of weekly meals together. As others have mentioned, it can becomes wearisome to maintain a vegetarian diet, when constantly accomodating dedicated meat eaters (who often enough have an aversion to vegetables).
For most of that time I still ate dairy and eggs. Once I was settled into the practice, I allowed myself to eat meat on special occasions, where my refusal would just be causing hurt feelings or difficulty for others. My pious concern for the treatment of animals cant justify hurting the feelings of some innocent grandmother, that just wants to show graciousness feeding me her home cooked meal.
I think most vegetarians that grew up meat eating really do not have any primary aversion to eating meat. I never, ever thought meat was repulsive. I had a friend that would tease me when he went out that he would buy me a steak. I know he liked his steak medium, so I always said, sure, al long as he ate with me and bothe steaks were blue rare. He never took me up on it.
I always liked meat, I just chose not to eat it. I did find that on rare occasions I did eat it, digestion was difficult. I have met vegetarians that had never much liked meat and mostly avoided it out of taset rather than ethics. I find orders of magnitude more people that don’t like vegetables, than don’t like meat.
I like my legumes, and honestly love properly prepared tofu dishes. I also love prime rib.
Probably. I can eat a little mustard as an adult, but as a child even a trace of mustard was too strong for me. And pickles clash with the rest. And I’m still not a fan of raw onion.
Salt and olive oil. So it was just bread, sliced beef, a little salt, and some oil.
The reason that Impossible Foods gives for selling their product is that decreasing consumption of real meat will reduce the environmental impact of the meat industry (which is enormous). They make no, or few, claims that their product is more healthy.
I’m not suggesting Impossible Foods and other companies making pseudo-meat products are falsely advertising health benefits, just that I’m sure many people assume it’s healthier than real meat.
I have a good friend who’s a strict vegan. She’s in her mid-60s and adopted the vegan diet/lifestyle 30 years ago. For her, it’s an ethical, live-and-let-live philosophy. She won’t eat any meat, dairy, eggs, honey, etc. In fact, when she was car-shopping a few years ago, she refused to test-drive a car which had leather seats.
She’s not really vocal in-your-face about her diet, but she will let you know why you shouldn’t eat certain foods, like jello.
