Well, a chicken basically is just a vegetable with legs. 
That’s odd. I’ve never heard of anyone who eats chicken refer to themselves as “vegetarian.” I would expect those are the sorts of people who are doing it for health reasons, not ethical ones. That’s what I would call a “flexitarian.” Apparently, there is also a word, pollotarian, for what you describe (or pesce-pollotarian if they eat fish, too.) Never heard either of those two words in the wild, though.
I don’t think any of them actually say that onions, etc., are meat.
It’s possible that this originates in Jainism, in which people go to great lengths to avoid eating animals, even tiny insects, like running water through cheesecloth and that kind of thing. Jains avoid eating all root vegetables, and especially layered things like onions, because they believe that there is a high risk of accidentally eating small insects or other animals not visible to the naked eye.
Certain types of Hinduism might have absorbed the onions and garlic thing from Jainism. These days, Hindus justify it by creating various classes of foods – sattvic, tamasic, etc. – and they say that like meat and onions and garlic and chilis are tamasic – they stimulate the senses, angry up the blood, submerge you in the physical world and make you all sexy and stuff. But I suspect that these things are ex post facto justifications.
There’s also the fact that onions and garlic are commonly associated with meat dishes in Indian cuisine, so it just might be an association thing.
It just struck me that I used to work with an Indian whose last name was “Jain.” The rest of us were not Indian. One day, at lunch, I said “I don’t understand how the hell you can go through life without eating ANY meat.” His response - “None of the Jains have ever tasted meat.”
And idiot white guy over here didn’t ever make the connection to Jainism. :smack:
Most Thais are not vegetarian. My experience is they think vegetarians are a bit dotty but will respect their wishes anyway. Much (most?) of the time, however, so-called vegetarian dishes on the menu here are cooked using lard anyway.
It doesn’t seem so crazy to me to suppose it just originated within Hinduism of its own accord, without being imported from Jainism as some root vegetable avoidance thing (why not import the ban on potatoes and such as well, then?). Garlic is clearly a very pungent food, and onion is of course very closely related and also strong in the sense that it makes your eyes water and so on. So I can easily imagine some ancient guy saying “Clearly, these are unwholesomely powerful foods which we ought best avoid”, and that becoming a religious proscription same as any other silly religious dietary proscription, without having to postulate it as a side effect of Jainism’s reasoning.
I just don’t think it’s likely that these complex, esoteric food categorizations are responsible. After all, chilis are also categorized with them and avoiding garlic and onions is much more common than avoiding chilis.
My own feeling is that it’s much more likely that garlic and onions are gastronomically closely related to meat dishes and Muslim cuisine in India and that’s a more likely origin of this avoidance amongst Hindus.
You could be right. I don’t really know. It would be interesting to find a properly researched history of this practice.
Just noticed this…
You do know that vegan is a coined word, coined by a specific person in 1944 with a specific meaning? And veganism is a specific ethical movement?
And that both forms of the word have held that meaning pretty consistently until the last few years? Are you asserting that a few years of some people confusing the term constitute language drift?
If I say you’re a pink tutu, you’re not. But if I say it here and there for a few years and someone repeats it, now you are?
Vegans aren’t dead, you know, and have as much right to define what their word for themselves means as any other institution or movement.
Yeah, but language changes and you can’t stop it.
from wiki "Ethical vegans reject the commodity status of animals and the use of animal products for any purpose, while dietary vegans or strict vegetarians eliminate them from their diet only"
and as far as the founder goes “The term “vegan” was coined in England in 1944 by Donald Watson, co-founder of the British Vegan Society, to mean “non-dairy vegetarian”; the society also opposed the use of eggs as food.”…In July 1943 Leslie Cross, a member of the Leicester Vegetarian Society, expressed concern in its newsletter, The Vegetarian Messenger, that vegetarians were still eating dairy products. A year later, in August 1944, two of the society’s members, Donald Watson (1910–2005) and Elsie “Sally” Shrigley (died 1978), suggested forming a subgroup of non-dairy vegetarians. When the executive committee rejected the idea, they and five others met at the Attic Club in Holborn, London, on November 1 to discuss setting up a separate organization.[16] Suggestions for a concise term to replace “non-dairy vegetarian” included dairyban, vitan, benevore, sanivore, and beaumangeur, but Watson decided on “vegan”—pronounced “veegun” (/ˈviːɡən/), with the stress on the first syllable—the first three and last two letters of vegetarian and, as Watson put it in 2004, “the beginning and end of vegetarian.” The meeting saw the foundation of the British Vegan Society with 25 members.[17] Fay K. Henderson published Vegan Recipes, the first recipe book with “vegan” in the title, in 1946.[14] The word was first independently published in the Oxford Illustrated Dictionary in 1962, defined as “a vegetarian who eats no butter, eggs, cheese or milk.”
Thus under the original term, vegans could have honey, wear leather, etc.
I’ll just add that more than one local vietnamese pho place in my area offers ‘vegetarian’ bowls that use the very same beef broth as the meat options. To them, vegetarian simply means ‘the customer wants a vegetable mixed in’.
Personally, I think it probably has most to do with Ayurvedic Medicine and how that translates to Herbal Medicine, and assigning certain mystical or religious, and medicinal, characteristics to different substances and their affects on the body’s humours. You also see it in Chinese medicine with chilis, garlic, and onions all being considered “yang” ingredients in the dualistic Taoist belief, Too much, yang or too much yin (hot or cold) will throw the body out of whack according to that medical philosophy.
I find it hard to believe that an esoteric thing like ayurvedic medicine is the origin. I’m more willing to believe that it was the other way around. Generally speaking, people decide what they like to eat, influenced mainly by environmental conditions, and then retroactively justify the choice with moral/ethical/other reasoning. That’s how it happened with cows in Hinduism and with pigs in Judaism and Islam.
I know some Buddhists (particularly, in person, a Zen monk) who don’t eat onions or garlic because they are particularly forbidden as too exciting to the senses in certain sutras. (Wikipedia says “This is based on teachings found in the Brahamajala Sutra, the Surangama Sutra and the Lankavatara Sutra (chapter 8). In modern times this rule is often interpreted to include other vegetables of the onion genus, as well as coriander.”)
However, the Buddha specifically ate meat, or rather whatever was put in his bowl.
Is their name “Pho Q.Y.T.”?
And well, the Buddha was a Brahmin of the Hindu Caste system, and I’m assuming that avoidance of these foods was probably also tied up in the traditional Brahmin dietary restrictions even then.
He wasn’t. Caste and family weren’t really important to him, but legend says he was a member of the Shakya clan, which was Kshatriya.
Hmmm yes, that’s true. I suppose he was probably greatly influenced by the Brahmin caste assuming the path he took and the borrowing and spiritual fundamentals that Buddhism and Hinduism share. Probably educated by Brahmins and then influenced by asceticism before coming to coalescence in the middle way.
Of course, Buddhism is Hinduism packaged for export.
I suppose it’s not impossible. I’d like to know what your evidence is for that, though.
I don’t think I can provide the necessary citations other than the entirety of the dhammapada and its reflection.