Could you elaborate on the flaws?
Well, the big one is that lack of movement does not imply a lack of everything else. A person with locked-in syndrome or a paralyzed lab mouse can’t move, and yet doesn’t somehow stop being an animal that can’t feel pain or react to being eaten.
As to the argument that oysters don’t have a central nervous system and thus can’t feel pain - I just did a quick google, and we’ll need an expert, as the first two pages of results are split roughly half and half between “has” and “has not”. None seem particularly definitive or scientific. (Ironically, most of the “has not” links are talking about this slate article and a related NYT article, and cite those as their source!) Also, I’m not good enough in biology to know off the top of my head if “no central nervous system” equals “no nerves”. If there’s anything there that can register damage, I’m not going to give him an automatic pass to veganhood, any more than I do people who say that a cat or dog can’t feel pain because they’re not sentient.
Hey, my acknowledgment of my biology-fail is all over this comment, so if an actual expert shows up, I’m ready to listen. But it’s certainly not as automatically clear and obvious as the author is trying to make it sound. Either way, he sounds like an “ethical eater”, not a vegan, to me, though those two terms can be used pretty much interchangeably almost all of the time, so it’s not surprising that he uses the latter. A vegan is someone who does not consume animal products or use their byproducts. Period. There are any number of reasons why someone might go vegan, and the author’s concern for the environment is probably number one, but it’s not the only one. If I were to go vegan (which I’m not), it would be because I don’t like harming animals of any sort if I can avoid it.
But if his statement, “oysters don’t have a CNS,” holds up, you wouldn’t harm it by killing it, cutting it, or even poking it with a stick or waterboarding it.
Tr0psn4j,
Lover of eating Sea Kittens!
The term my vegetarian grandson and I have decided on is “flexetarian.” This means that while his diet is overwhelmingly vegetarian he sometimes has a craving for a bit of bacon or a barbecued chicken thigh or seekh kebab or something of that sort, which he’s entitled to have and nobody’s allowed to give him shit for it. Since I’m a conscious omnivore who tends to go without meat fairly often, we don’t have too much trouble finding meals we can share without hassle, especially if I make him blueberry pancakes whenever he stays over at my house.
Well, no, you would be damaging it, just not hurting it (though either way, I suspect that oysters are A-OK with waterboarding). But are there nerves of some sort in there that register damage?
(Keep in mind I LOVE seafood, by the way. I just think that he reads like someone who’s desperately trying to rationalize his love of seafood into his dietary ethics.)
But he’s right. Oysters are not animals. They are big disgusting globs of snot. I’m glad I keep kosher now, so I have an excuse not to eat them any more.
This bugs me too, because I don’t eat red meat if I can help it (although, I admit, I’ve cheated with the occasional slab of bacon) and I hate it when my kids refer to me a vegetarian.
I eat fewer vegetables than any vegetarian I know.
Thanks for the response Risha.
But if it doesn’t have a nervous system, how are you damaging it anymore than a plant?
Anyway, I don’t really want to get stuck defending his position. 
The truth is that a lot of folks will do whatever mental gymanstics they need to do to justify their eating. The bigger issue of course not what they are eating, but that they feel the need to justify it for whatever reason. Why not just, “I don’t eat meat except oysters and don’t ask me why because who cares?”
Vegetarians do eat all of those things. That’s actually the typical definition of vegetarian, at least in the United States.
I didn’t know until just recently, actually, that all Thai food is cooked with fish sauce. A good friend of mine who’s vegan clued me in. Since then, when I’ve had Thai food, I’ve made a point to ask for my food to be prepared without it. It hasn’t been a problem, and the food is still plenty tasty.
Would you know if they were lying to you?
Totally honest question. I understand some vegetarians and vegans stop being able to digest meat protein - their bodies stop producing the necessary enzymes, or perhaps just less of them - and they suffer GI problems if they inadvertantly eat something with meat in it. So I was wondering if you would know if the fish sauce was still in there.
Probably not. I hate fish, so if I could taste it, I would have realized this long before, but I clearly never realized that Thai food is traditionally made with fish oil.
I am not one of the vegetarians who is affected by eating meat. I’ve accidentally eaten bites of meat here and there (got served the wrong soup once, took a bite of what I thought was a veggie pizza that turned out to have sausage, etc.) and I’ve never gotten sick as a result, so I doubt I would know.
I do ask, though, and I’m not going to follow the waitperson into the kitchen to ensure that they don’t use fish sauce. If I were that anal retentive, I wouldn’t be able to eat out at all.
Sorry to resurrect a zombie but, the term I’ve heard is mafist.
I worked at an Ananda Marga school for several years (a neo-humanist group with doctrines drawing fairly heavily on Hinduism).
The rationale I was given for the prohibition on onions and garlic (and mushrooms) was that they, along with things like alcohol and coffee, “stimulated the lower chakras” (never stopped me…I ENJOY having my lower chakras stimulated. :D)
I stopped eating meat about 16 years ago but in the last few have started eating fish now and then (just 'cause I like it/felt like it). I still call myself a “vegetarian” since in every other respect, I AM (still eat no other form of flesh and rarely consume fish). It’s just simpler and the most accurate description of my typical diet (the whole “pescavore” label aside).
I do not, ftr, eat shellfish…clams and such are, imo, slugs and crabs/lobsters are, imo, like giant insects. EEEWWWW!
But I get the irritation with the “I’m a vegetarian but I eat chicken, fish, maybe sometimes beef or pork” angle. :rolleyes: OR, the “I’m a vegetarian…I only eat meat like, 2 or 3 times a week”.
FTR, it took my mother-in-law about 10 years to understand that chicken wasn’t a vegetable. (“Oh, we’ll go to this place…they have chicken you can eat instead of meat.” :smack:
I have not eaten any kind of meat or poultry for almost 17 years, including broths, gelatin, lard or other similar foods containing animal by-products. I do eat eggs and dairy when the mood strikes, without giving it a second thought. (I also wear leather shoes or belts when I feel like it)
That said, I eat seafood at least a couple of times a week, (because I really enjoy eating seafood) and feel no need to describe myself as an ovo-lacto pescatarian or any other silly label.
I eat what I like, don’t eat what I don’t like, and if anyone inquires, telling them that I do not eat meat is always sufficient.
I have never understood the need that some have in announcing a personal choice (like not eating meat or only having sex with anorexic tax-attorneys) to the world at large.
Well, I got the information from Wikipedia, so I guess you’re correct–some people say it seriously.
And at least the new words use Latin an Greek prefixes, so their easy to figure out.
The real question is why do people only refuse to eat red meat? Almost all the people I know who are vegetarians do it for ethical reasons. I really don’t see the ethical difference between eating a chicken and eating a cow. I do know people who avoid red meat for dietary reasons, but it’s more a “I rarely eat red meat” than “I don’t eat it at all”.
Well, if everybody restricted their killing of humans to the number they could comfortably have for supper, the world would probably be a lot more peaceful than it is today.
I have to admit that the idea isn’t mine. There was some Icelandic guy - maybe a poet? - who had a brief period of infamy a few years ago by publicly stating something like this. Of course, the quote was thoroughly misunderstood by the international media. :smack:
“Hmmmm. It turns out we taste kind of like chicken.”
Well, one of the ethical arguments is that it’s wrong to eat an animal because it can suffer or has a mind of its own. Which when you get right down to it is also one of the better arguments against cannibalism. The question is, where’s the cutoff point? Chickens have a much smaller brain than cows, and although I’m not sure of their relative intelligence chickens are notorious for being stupid. Or to go farther, fish are even dumber, and oysters dumber still.
That doesn’t mean that a particular vegetarian has a well thought out reason of course, but you can justify distinctions like that.