Obviously the answer for vegetarians is always, but I’m wondering about the non veggies in the crowd.
How often, if ever, do you choose to eat a vegetarian meal as an actual active choice? How about vegan? Any particular reason?
I’ll go first - I eat fish about 3 times a week - other than that I’m vegetarian. I choose to eat vegan meals about 4 times a week. For instance tonight I’m having pita with hummus and baba ganoush. I really enjoy a green curry with coconut milk as another vegan option.
The Mr., on the other hand will eat vegetarian meals quite often - tonight it’s pasta with cheese and butter (his choice, not mine) and he regularly takes soy based meats in his lunch sandwiches, but he never seems to enjoy fully vegan meals. If I try to sneak him one he’ll have a huge glass of milk not because he’s being a shit but because I think he actually craves the milk (usually he’ll have juice or water or whatever).
So - how often do you choose to eat veggie? If never, is it because you hate vegetables? Love meat? Never have an opportunity? Can’t imagine what a vegetarian meal would consist of?
At least a couple of times a week, but I pay no attention to whether my meals have meat in them or not, being a huge omnivore. My only real concern is making sure I get enough protein from vegetarian or vegan meals.
I eat some form of animal protein with most dinner meals. I find “fake meats” uniformly revolting and soy cheese is just gag compared to the real thing. I do’t like tofu, or TVP or seitan. That rules out most forms of vegan protein other than beans.
My father is a vegetarian and the main cook in my family so I used to quite often eat meatlessly. I wouldn’t find anything objectionable about eating, say, pasta with tomato sauce. I’d just be thinking, hmmm, this could use some sausage. And cheese. And maybe a little proscuitto.
But eating vegan seems like a pointless sacrifice, since I love butter, cream sauces, cheese, etc, and the vegan variants are wildly inferior. I eat plenty of vegetables; I avoid eating meals that are mainly starch though. Since I don’t like for starch to be the center of a meal… most meals are meats + veggies.
I agree that soy based milk and cheese is quite nasty (although soy ice cream is really yummy); however, I don’t generally choose them when making a vegan meal. Instead I would use things like quinoa, nuts or tofu for protein. Coconut milk based sauces, etc. I’ve found when you don’t try to make a meat-eaters meal without meat, but instead set out to make a vegan meal things turn out much better.
I usually eat something with meat in it. Chicken or fish for the most part. I’ll eat Beans and rice, and if I have a little beef I might turn it into a kind of chili (also, sometimes meatless chili).
Other than that, not for dinner. I always tend to eat meat with dinner. Breakfast is often “vegetarian” and lunch can be depending on my mood/what I have nearby.
Eating vegan? Not to my knowledge, i.e not purposely. Actually probably not. I drink milk during breakfast, which I would guess is vegetarian, but certainly not vegan.
I totally agree with that. But why would I go through all that effort, when I don’t believe it confers any benefit whatsoever and I don’t really enjoy it?
If you make a lovely coconut green curry, I’d be thinking “mmm, this is good, I wish it had some shrimp.”
I don’t eat meat every monday and every religious holiday that comes up that my parents will observe (about once a month near the full moon or so is when it falls).
I’m not a fan of it, but it teaches me patience at least. Though it CAN be annoying if someone decides to bring in free pizzas or something for everyone and it’s got meat. I’ll still try to abstain.
:shrug:
Just something I do. I do it more for my family than my own religious reasonings. So it’s more of a culture things rather than a religious thing for me. But I’ll eat milk and egg by-products on Mondays just not raw eggs or any meat (including fish).
I knew a guy that would stave himself once a month for 48 hours to know what it felt like and to keep himself humble (he was a jewish atheist/agnostic)- I think he did it for social/political reasons, but still I thought that was more interesting/extreme than my little habit.
I generally eat meat with my lunch time meal and evening meal, but the rest of the day I eat vegetarian meals (I eat five or six ‘meals’ a day). I just need so much protein it’s really hard to get enough without chicken or protein powder (yuck!).
Likewise. We do eat a fair amount of vegetarian food, but generally not intentionally; we’ll just get a craving for chickpea curry or lentil soup or pasta primavera whatever, and the meal ends up being vegetarian. Vegan happens less often than vegetarian, but still a fair amount. And unless you’re just having toast, it’s difficult to come up with interesting vegan breakfast items.
I do detest foods that are created expressly as meat substitutes, though - I’d far rather eat beans that aren’t pretending to be something else than eat fake meat. I do have a mental block about tofu, though, from my mom’s ill-fated hippie cooking phase when I was a kid (hint: if you are going to feed your children tofu, you have to season it. You can’t just hack off a slab of cold tofu, plop it on your 10-year-old’s plate, and expect her to enjoy it. To this day I have a mental block about tofu, and it took me years to reacquire a love of lentils.)
I like lentil soup, and veggie soups, and leek dumplings, and pasta with tomato sauce or primavera sauce, and curried veggies on rice, and many other vegetarian dishes, so if I feel like making any of the above I end up eating vegetarian. If I feel like having chicken mole, or pork chops, I end up eating not-vegetarian. I guess maybe 2-3 times a week? (I don’t normally eat breakfast; if I do it’s typically yogurt and juice, so that would be more vegetarian meals.) I like tofu, and textured-vegetable-protein for chewy bits in veggie soups (kinda like tiny dumplings); I love those canned Chinese seasoned gluten tidbits, although that’s more of a snack.
I make no efforts to buy vegan foodstuffs, and so I can’t say what I would eat that’s vegan. Probably not a lot.
I just had a vegetarian dinner a few hours ago: Morningstar Farms riblets and two mini ears of corn. I eat no-meat meals about 50% of the time. Yesterday I had a MF veggie sausage pattie on an English muffin, for example, and last night I had a veggie burger, and then the riblets tonight. But for lunch today I had a Kashi meal with chicken.
I’d estimate half my meals are vegetarian, but probably only some snacks are vegan.
Oddly, I’m an omnivore who was raised such, and never exposed to tofu, tvp, etc. As a teen I started becoming a huge fan of Asian food and found I liked tofu; as an adult, many of my lovers have been vegetarians and they introduced me to tvp and seitan. All of which I absolutely ADORE. I baffle friends by ordering tofu Vietnamese hoagies alongside shrimp rolls, and prefer tvp tacos to ground beef ones. (Though both are inferior to steak or fish tacos.)
I don’t really think about whether a meal has meat in it or not - we eat several a week, certainly, with no meat. Meatless meals are easier to throw together from pantry ingredients without hitting the grocery store or defrosting something, I guess. Vegan, I don’t know, I really don’t pay attention to that, but a lot of the bean dishes we eat probably are as long as they don’t have butter in them.
We never deliberately plan a vegetarian meal unless we have a vegetarian coming to dinner. And we have never deliberately planned a vegan meal. We don’t have those dietary restrictions, and planning around them can be a right pain in the ass, so why would we go to the extra hassle?
We do, however fix meals a few times a week that turn out to be veggie or nearly so purely by chance. A lot of the nearly veggie meals could be tweaked a little and made veggie, but we don’t keep the stuff necessary for the tweaking on hand. Like my squash soup–if I used vegetable stock instead of chicken stock, it would a vegetarian dish. But that would require me keeping veggie stock on hand in addition to the chicken stock, and we just don’t do that.
Making our meals vegan would be much, much harder. I could use veggie stock and leave out the cream and make my soup vegan, but I typically make cornbread on soup night, and you can’t make cornbread without egg and milk. At least, not cornbread that’s fit to eat. We eat home-made bean burgers regularly in the summer. They’re veggie, right enough, but there’s an egg in there as a binder and I don’t know any way to make 'em hold together without it. We eat a lot of pasta, which has the exact same problem.
We eat vegetarian for dinner probably four times a week, which means I eat vegetarian for lunch at least four times a week, too (leftovers).
Forgot to add - I often eat vegan for breakfast (provided you consider apples, peanut butter & bread vegan) and a couple of the vegetarian dinners we eat a week that are vegetarian are actually vegan.
ToeJam, if you don’t mind me asking, what religion is that? I’d never heard of any particular religious significance to Mondays.
Back to the OP, I usually end up eating vegetarian meals for supper, not for any ethical or philosophical reasons, but just because I find it inconvenient to keep meat on hand. For lunch, I usually eat in the cafeteria in the student union, where I usually get something with meat, but even with meat available, I’ll still sometimes eat vegetarian if it’s something I like (they have a falafel gyro that I like better than the meat version).
I am not a vegetarian at all philosophically but I really like well made vegetarian food and I don’t crave meat all that much. I love Tofu in well made stir fries and even buy it myself sometimes. Red beans and rice New Orleans style are always great. I would take a great vegetarian meal over a steak any day. I can’t go without seafood but beef and pork are marginal and chicken is blah (except the good fried kind). I love Catfish though if that doesn’t fall in the true seafood category. Depending on your definition of ‘vegetarian’, I probably eat that way about 50% of the time. I don’t think I could ever be vegan though. Those people are insane and annoying.
