I don’t have any ethical dietary restrictions, but if you did this to me, you would have just forfeited the use of your bathroom for the rest of the evening. I am very, very, very, very lactose intolerant. Any sort of milk or cream, even just a little bit, gives me agonizing stomach cramps and the worst case of the shits you could imagine.
Not everyone is a vegetarian for ethical concerns. It’s not always an all-or-nothing thing. No matter how hypocritical or petty you think a person is being, or how dumb you think their reasons are, there is no excuse for tricking someone ingest something they’ve expressed a desire not to eat. Everyone has the right to set their own boundaries and expect their friends not to violate them.
I consider myself a vegetarian. Why? No good reason. Mostly meat just squicks me out…veins, tendons, etc…ick. I spent most my life hating everything that was served to me by my meat-heavy blue collar family. Eventually I discovered all the food I didn’t like was meat, and instead of spending my life eating stuff I hated or seeking out the one or two things that didn’t make me queasy, I decided to go veg.
I’m not overly concerned with it and it doesn’t affect my life (I think I’ve been two exactly two restaurants in my life where I couldn’t find something good to eat) at all. Yeah, at Mexican restaurants I don’t worry about the beans and rice. I don’t worry when I want a pack of skittles or starburst. But when shopping on my own, I seek out canned soup without meat in it. And I will never eat stuff that has hunks of meat in it. Is it logical and consistant? No. But I don’t have any particular imperitive to be logical and consistant regarding what I choose to eat.
As for the label…well, maybe I don’t have the right to use it. But it’s the best way to make sure I don’t sit down to a meal with friends and end up offending them by not eating the large slab of meat on my plate, and it’s a helluva lot easier than explaining the ins and outs of my very personal and lackadaisical system.
I think her point, even sven, was that her friend said she doesn’t “eat anything with a face.” So it sounds like she IS a veg for ethical reasons.
I’m a vegetarian for very committed ethical reasons, deepened upon the 20 years of living that way.
To address the OP directly, the ethical reasons for not eating meat has a basis of not causing suffering to any creature more than I have to. I also apply that rule when dealing with human beings. So, if you were doing your best in offering me a meal, I would be thankful for that, and wouldn’t berate you at all. If you were interested in what really constitutes a vegetarian diet, and why I adhere to it, we could talk about that.
I don’t like the violence that I see in raising animals for meat, and I don’t like to apply hurtful tactics in social dietary situations either. Just say, whoops, you didn’t know, and hear the vegetarian in question out as to their specific reasons, then ya’d know the next time.
Last X-mas I had my mother cook the turkey at her house and bring it to my house because I wasn’t interested in having it cooked in my house. For some reason I got over this, this past thanksgiving, and roasted a turkey myself (I didn’t actually eat any). I suppose that the daughter isn’t the owner of the house, but if she’s a very strict vegetarian I think respecting her ethical stand is actually a pretty nice thing to do, particularly if the grandmother is able to do the cooking.
OTOH, if the daughter wears leather, and eats fish and lamb, and is just trying to be difficult, well then she’s a PITA that deserves liver in her tofu (I have to be honest - that line made me gag).
This might not be true for her, but a lot of people who are just starting to be vegetarians ease their way into it. First by cutting out red meat, then chicken, then eggs, then dairy, then the incidentals you don’t usually think about (like lard, bone char or gelatin).
As well, not everyone is strict about vegetarianism. For a long time carnivore, the switch over is really difficult to get the hang of. Some people don’t actually cut animal product out of their diet, but rather just limit it as much as they feel comfortable with and continue on this diet indefinitely. It’s not an ‘all or nothing’ decision for anyone (except strict vegans). If you skip over the veal at one meat but eat your Jell-O at the next, you’re not negating the fact that you still skipped the veal. Whether or not these people can call themselves vegetarians in the traditional sense is a whole other debate.
The main concern as far as I am concerned is dietary intolerance - some people can become very ill or even die from eating something I think is harmless. A very good friend of mine is vegan - both from ethical and dietary reasons. She has a severe lactose intolerance combined with asthma - milk can literally kill her. There have been cases (don’t have cites) where children have been made severely ill by a well-meaning adult giving them a peanut butter cookie - not knowing the child was allergic to peanuts.
If you know someone has dietary restrictions - whether self-chosen or not - I don’t think it’s a “joke” to play with them.
Not philosophical objections, no, but I cannot eat soy in any fashion except ‘soy protein isolate’. No edamame, no soy milk, no textured soy protein. Actually, soy sauce is all right.
I’m one of those lucky people who cannot digest the oligosaccharides in soy. Feed it to me, and for the next 2 days I will be so gassy I will be in pain, and no one will want to be in the same room with me. In my sophomore year at university, I ate at the dining hall, and was sick, sick, sick all year unless I lived on cold cereal and hard boiled eggs. I went to Hall Health. They sent me to a psych grad student, who administered the MMPI. I was “diagnosed” with a number of neuroses, and too much stress. I was put on Tagamet(!). I still couldn’t sit near anybody in class. Ever. The whole school year.
The next year, I moved across the state to another university, and lived with my aunt where all the food was made from scratch. The stomach problems went away. Then one day I had a glass of soy milk at a friend’s house and began suffering immeasurably. Bing!
Frankly, I think it’s quite reasonable for anyone to disclose ingredients of anything they cook for anybody else. I’ve even had to ask at restaurants: will someone go look at the ingredients on the box of meatballs, if it has soy in it - and I’ll give them the list of names it may go under. People don’t think about it unless I do. You just never know what you can have just fine, that they can’t. Just 'hey, I ran out of cow’s milk and put in soy milk, is that okay?" “Sure, I’ll give that a miss and eat more of the other.”
No. Never lie to anybody about what they’re eating. By commission or omission.
“Unborn baby chickens”?
Someone correct me, please. I thought hens’ eggs destined for the table were unfertilised, and you wouldn’t get a baby chicken out of one if you incubated it for a million years.
It’s not okay. Not only is it morally wrong to lie to people, you don’t know why they’ve chosen not to eat the foods they refuse. Oh, sure, it could because they have moral objections that you feel are silly, but it could be for their health too.
Tangentally, this happened to me at work yesterday: there are two shifts where I work. The night before last someone who used “my” computer apparently ate pizza or something else with basil in it, and didn’t wash their hands before they used the mouse again. Their hands probably didn’t even look dirty to them, since there was nothing visible on the mouse. But by the time I worked an hour yesterday morning, I had a three-inch welt on my palm and two rising on my fingers too before we found hydrocortisone and some cleaning spray to throughly clean the mouse; which is what I’m doing as soon as I get to work today, just in case.
That’s what happens when I touch anything with even the faintest trace of basil in it. If someone fed me something with basil in it after assuring me that it had none in it, I imagine the reaction would be much worse. (I imagine since it’s been 5 years since I last made the mistake of thinking eating pizza with the sauce scrapped off was okay. Did you know that your mouth, tongue and throat can itch too?) So, I never ever try to “sneak,” or deny it if I accidentally use, food from a person’s do-not-eat lists.
The person who used my mouse is blameless, but if I knowingly gave someone something that made them sick or caused them pain, I sure wouldn’t be.
I have a friend like that. “Since you are making tacos tonight, will you please make boca tacos for me so I can eat with you?” Then not two days later I find burger wrappers from fast food places in her car. She is a fashion vegetarian, trying to be different for the appearance of being different.
And then you said, “Then why did I spit it out, you lying whore? I DID taste it!” Then you shot her and hung the body up as a warning to other like-minded idiots.
No?
sigh
Well, I can dream.
That kind of behavior is so freakin’ rude and dismissive. I can’t stand it.
I’m not going to lie to anyone about what they’re eating. If I know about a dietary restriction beforehand, then I’ll adhere to it. I’m a fairly good cook and can work around most anything, as long as I know what it is and how to do it. Vegetarians and vegans are easy. Kosher I’d have more trouble with. ;j
Now, if I’m having a group over and someone announces before dinner that they’re a vegetarian, or can will not eat certain things, then I’ll happily go through the list of what I’m serving and what’s in it. If it turns out there’s nothing they can eat, then I’ll happily eat dinner while they sit there miserably. If I have carrot sticks or something you can eat and I happen to have, I’ll go get them. I mean, I wouldn’t want you to suffer. But really, it’s a matter of manners to let your host know your needs ahead of time.
Is it wrong to lie to people about what they are eating? Make a list of a few things that you would find digusting, dangerous, or objectionable to eat. Here’s an example:
Human Flesh
Fugu
Live Ants
There are cultures where people do eat these things. They’d probably laugh at your squmishness about them as much as you laugh at vegetarians. How would you feel if someone slipped you one of the things on your list, and lied to you about it?
Yum! Hey guys, that tickle in your throat isn’t a cough, it’s LIVE ANTS! In their own sauce!
I suppose it would be a good tactic to get rid of those people who always invite themselves over…
?? 
??
Really?
Nah, the ants are too busy eating away at your eyeball.
It’s earwigs that are in your throat.
[hijack] A local candy/novelty shop was selling bugs. Bugs in suckers, bugs in chocolate, bugs on their own. They had signs up which said something along the lines of “Yes, they’re real, and if you as we will hate you forever”. They weren’t alive though–the sucker reminded me of the amber in Jurassic Park.[/hijack]
alice, there was a tribe in Papua New Guinea that would practice canibalism at funerals-eating the flesh of the deceased. (It’s not like they killed anyone to do so).
Unfortunately, a regular habit of this leads to a disease called kuru (I know Cecil did a column on this, at least, I think he did). Maybe it’s like mad cow?
It’s the human form of mad cow - Jacob-Kreutzfeld disease. So, you know, kiddies, don’t eat human brains.
What about imitation crab meat?