After 8 years of never ONCE accepting I get it. It’s not that the statement is impolite, it’s that they aren’t thinking of HER.
I don’t drink coffee or beer and yet every single time my FIL wants one he trys to ensure everyone has one in their hand. My MIL on the other hand prepares when she knows I’m going to be there by having diet coke or soda water on hand.
A substantial number of the people who seem to take it personally or even verbally attack me for being vegan claim to be hunters, but I suppose it’s entirely possible – even likely, given how worked up they can get – that they’re liars.
I keep kosher, and I run into this too. This is why some people who are vegetarian or keep kosher will quiz the waiter in a restaurant “Is this vegetarian? Does it have chicken stock?” and so on. Some people just don’t mentally classify chicken stock as meat. I think this is getting better over time, but you still run into some amazingly clueless people out there.
It’s not an easy thing to learn, either. I went from making a point of not reading food labels (if it was good, it probably had something I’d rather not know about in it) to keeping kosher. It took me about a year to learn. I like to think I’m a reasonably intelligent person, and that this is just hard if you’re not used to it. So I’ve got a fair bit of sympathy for people who are more like I used to be.
Some of you people in this thread know some rude motherfuckers.
Then again, some of you strike me as…less than gracious as well.
Oh. If they’re being that nosy, fishy is absolutely not how you want to describe the taste of seafood. I do believe the descriptor you’re looking for is “like vomit.” If they’re being especially dreadful, you’ll want to describe the exact food being vomited up, paying careful attention to the color, texture, and taste changes.
They’ll stop asking you these sorts of questions soon enough.
I tried to explain that…
I suspect most hunters don’t have guilt, but I also suspect most hunters actually have thought less about their relationship with the animal than I have. My dad not only didn’t have guilt, I don’t think the thought ever once crossed his mind that “hey, I just killed something.” Now obviously he knew that he had just killed something, but the thought of even giving that a second thought never would have entered his mind.
It was just something he did.
To be honest though I’m probably a bad barometer for most hunters, my hunting experience and experience in rural Virginia in general happened in abject, extreme poverty. We weren’t subsistence hunters or anything, but the money we saved by getting some of our meals from wild game had a real and meaningful impact on my family.
I’m probably not a very similar creature to the sport hunters or the guys who didn’t pick up hunting until later in life and do it mostly as a social thing.
Oh and for the record I think veganism is a weird, artificial diet. However, I don’t really care one way or the other about it.
I also think the diet of pretty much the entire world (mine included) is weird and artificial. I’m not some sort of raw food type, but I do find a lot of “sense” in the things I’ve read that say humans just plain aren’t meant to eat the stuff we eat. Growing all those cereal grains, eating all that processed food, all that livestock that is bred for maximum size and force fed things they would never eat in the wild and etc etc.
When I eat venison or wild turkey it really does stand in stark contrast to the mass farmed meat I usually eat. Wild turkey especially, it’s so different from the massive turkeys that are force fed and bred to enormous sizes. I’m not saying I don’t enjoy a good Thanksgiving turkey, but I think there is a lot to be said for eating animals that “live naturally and eat naturally.” In the aggregate the fact that pretty much all of humans now eat a heavily processed diet is probably weird and unnatural. Even in places where you don’t have all the frozen foods and such that we have in America, most food is coming from agriculture on a large scale. I understand it gets all 6 billion of us fed, but people weren’t chowing down on tons of rice, wheat, etc 15,000 years ago.
The meat guilt thing is one of those Freudian ‘you’re in denial’ issues.
The concept is meaningless because theres no way you can prove you arent.
Otara
It’s more the breeding than it is force-feeding, as I understand it. I read years ago that a specific mutation or suite of mutations produced the round-bodied, bulky, supposedly stupid domestic bird we know today.
Body comparison here, modern domestic vs wild.
I can’t find reference to a “single event” at the moment, but there’s an interesting page on the domestic turkey here, that claims that the spread of artificial insemination techniques coincides with the inflation of the modern domestic.
I won’t eat goose pate though, usually, as what they do to the poor goose sounds pretty cruel.
Perhaps there’s a reason people are “less than gracious”. (You should read some of the “foodie” threads, castigating picky eaters for what babies they are)
It’s insane. If I don’t want to eat something, I won’t eat it. Hey – it’s more for you.
Yeah. I do want to say though, that while I definitely consider our modern food supply to be out of whack with what we would normally be eating if we never invented agriculture(and I’ve read in some places that our diet immediately pre-agriculture was the healthiest it has ever been), I’m not advocating massive changes.
I agree very much with what Norman Borlagh said, if you get rid of all the things we do to increase agricultural efficiency, you also need to get rid of about 2-3 billion people that can be fed because of said efficiency. Even if everyone totally grew everything “organic” and non-GM, there’s still the fact that we’re relying on agriculture, lots of grains and etc. To truly get back to our immediate pre-agricultural state we’d have to eat a mixed diet of fruits, some vegetables that would have been found naturally, and whatever wild game we could find. It’s obvious humans wouldn’t be able to have the society we have today if we still had to get all of our food that way.
I recognize it as a trade off, we gave up the relatively balanced nutrition that at least some human tribes had immediately pre-agriculture, in exchange we can have vast, complex societies. What we eat may be bad for us, but the tradeoff (the society) has resulted in us being able to develop things like modern medicine which ultimately allow us to make net gains in life expectancy despite what we eat.
Of course, there are also sustainable changes that can be made that we could live with, that would help to get our diets at least moderately back in shape. I’m all in favor of those in theory. In practice I like the bad foods just as much as the good, and have reached an age where I’m comfortable with that fact.
Coffee is warming, stimulating, richly-flavored, and possessing deep, complex aromas that rival wine and chocolate. It can be as simple as a morning brew from grounds or as complex as espresso made from beans of a known origin roasted and ground on-site. Finally, like so many of the finer things, it can either be awful or ambrosial, making the hunt for the good stuff that much more satisfying.
Hey, don’t go projecting your irrational hatreds onto me! I don’t exactly love the beans, but I do enjoy them and I always thought they’ve gotten a bad rap, like brussels sprouts and broccoli, both of which I like a lot more.
You don’t want it? More for me! ALL FOR ME!
I don’t know if it happens in the US, but in Asia I have a constant battle with people who think I should be eating more. They can’t believe I don’t want more than one bowl of rice. “But you’re so big!”
It wouldn’t be so irksome if it were out of genuine solicitude, but more often it’s part of the “face” dog and pony show where people you hardly know claim (later, indirectly and through your loved ones) to be insulted and humiliated if you don’t conform to their unspoken expectations to the exact letter.
And how am I supposed to NOT notice? I’m not talking about “not say anything”, which I wouldn’t and Lazz didn’t, but when I’m piling the plates up to take them away, of course I notice which ones are scrubbed clean and which ones have food left, and which food is left and how it is distributed. What am I supposed to do, close my eyes while I clean up the table? :smack:
I’m pretty sure that’s what Zsofia meant by “not noticing”.
The same way you don’t notice the fact your guest has a hairy mole on his chin, or has managed to get a fragment of cilantro stuck between her teeth: You ignore it completely in the name of good social graces and allowing everyone to enjoy the meal.
Are you me? I don’t eat fish regardless of flavor because I’m a vegetarian, but way back when before I was a vegetarian, I still didn’t eat fish or any seafood because it’s GROSS. I’ve had people try to argue me into eating it with this stupid argument, too, not comprehending that A) I PERSONALLY find it immoral regardless of your definition and B) even if I didn’t, I thinks it tastes nasty.
Then Zsofia went a bit overboard in failing to notice that “I didn’t say anything” was already written by the person who’d brought up the issue.