However, I’m always a bit bemused at the office when it’s Birthday Club day - one of my friends/coworkers is vegan and I always bring in a vegan treat for her (because apparently making something vegan is impossible/hard/etc). Interestingly, my vegan treats are usually more popular than the other items brought in (although to be fair, they’re usually store bought and not homemade). More than one of the gals will have 3 or 4 helpings of a vegan chocolate cake with vegan chocolate icing and then comment that she doesn’t feel bad because it’s vegan so that means it’s ‘healthy’.
Heh - clearly you didn’t see the amount of sugar that went into that chocolate cake.
We’re pretty much vegetarian, have been for a few years. It means we eat meat a few times a month (in the form of that: http://lesgourmandisesdana.hautetfort.com/media/01/01/148783120.jpg how is it called in English? smoked pork meat), and the occasional can of tuna (fish is too expensive this summer, otherwise we buy some when we’re on the coast).
If we eat at someone’s house and there is meat we eat it. We like meat, we just don’t care enough to cook it and eat it each day or several times a week.
We don’t like to eat factory-farmed meat and good organic meat is usually pricey or sold too far away from us (we do not have a freezer).
I stopped eating meat, dairy, and eggs for ethical reasons. I abhor factory farming, and I do not agree with killing animals for food. In my view, veganism is a natural extension of vegetarianism. From disagreeing with how “meat” animals are raised and treated, I learned about how the egg and dairy industries similarly mistreat animals. I just had to stop eating those things. I’ve been vegan for about a year, and vegetarian for 5 years before that. I find that for most animal-derived foods, there are adequate (or more than adequate) plant-based alternatives. I went vegetarian when I realized I can have satisfying meals without meat, and I went vegan when I realized that I do not find (most) foods with milk or dairy in them any more satisfying than those without.
Moonchild - I feel your pain regarding cheese. Happily, there is a new pretty good vegan cheese analogue: Daiya cheese. Whole Foods sells it bulk, and there are a number of pizzerias that offer it as an alternative to dairy cheeses. I just had a vegan pizza made with Daiya cheese few days ago and it was amazing; gooey and greasy. Yum!
I would say it takes time to develop a taste for vegetarian/vegan versions of foods. I find my diet diverse and wholly satisfying.
I have met people who were vegetarian/vegan, but lost too much weight (or had other health concerns) and went back to a meat-based diet. I have no quibble with them. I find diet to be a highly personal choice, and I am grateful that my vegan diet works for me.
Very rarely I do cheat with some milk chocolate or something with dairy in it. When I travel it can be very difficult to adhere to a strict vegan diet.
Cheese can be a real sticking point for a lot of people to go vegan. Just last weekend, I was talking to a friend, who said she realized she could never be vegan after she saw a notice on a board at a local co-op talking about some vegan cheese–“Now it melts!” Her reaction was, “Wait, the *big improvement *is that it’s gained an essential property of what it’s trying to replicate? :eek:”
I’ve tried a soy mozzarella on pizza. It does melt funny. I think it needs a higher temperature to melt all gooshy like real mozz. The soy mozz just kind of turned into squishy clumps rather than rubbery goosh.
ETA: Unmelted on a sandwich it was pretty close to the real deal though.
I initially gave up meat and ate turkey and seafood as a way to lose weight. It was just too hard to figure out the calories and portion sizes. I gave up turkey because no one could remember or figure out why I would eat turkey and not chicken (disgusting High School memory.) I’m now pescatarian (which freaking NO ONE ever knows what it means, practically!) I never miss the meat.
I’ve got two cousins who are pretty hardcore vegetarians. One of them has just disliked the taste of meat since he was a little kid - he thinks that meat tastes “like shit” (his words) and he doesn’t eat it.
The other was totally vegan - I think it was very much a moral issue for him, he didn’t like “exploiting our furry brethren” (actual quote when he was 13) so not only didn’t eat animal products he wouldn’t wear anything made with leather and so on.
I am not hardcore vegetarian anymore, but I just don’t like meat in general. I’m a little squicked out by big slabs of meat, especially when it’s still pink and leaking blood-colored juices all over the plate. I absolutely CANNOT eat chicken off the bone, it’s just… ugh.
I am perfectly fine with veggie burgers over regular hamburgers, tofu or seitan vs chunks of chicken, etc.
I don’t claim some big moral argument against eating meat, I just don’t care for it.
Mmmmmmn, still pink and leaking blood-colored juices all over the plate.
I’m with you on the chicken-off-the-bone thing, though. I’ve never been a fan of eating anything with the bone in–not because the idea squicks me out, but because I think connective tissue is gross.
Vegans don’t eat fish, not even occasionally. It’s not a sematic quibble; veganism involves more than just diet. Vegans try* to avoid anything that requires killing, harming, or abusing animals. That includes the obvious things like eating them, wearing fur or leather, and so on; it also includes less obvious things like avoiding circus acts that employ animals or wearing silk neckties (they boil the silkworms in their cocoons).
I put the asterisk by try* because that’s what we do, we try our best. We’re not going to have a mental breakdown if we discover the shoes we bought have leather in them after all, or a prankster slipped butter into our recipe. We’re not going to be unable to drive (most cars and, as far as I understand it, all tires are made with some animal products). But as much as we can consciously do so, we minimize the amount of harm we do to animals.
I’d say “pescetarian” for someone who eats fish meat occasionally. That IS a semantic quibble, however.
Please don’t try to ascribe your dietary motivations to anybody else. A vegan is someone who tries to avoid using anything that involved an animal, including eating food that involves meat or other animal products. There doesn’t have to be any motivation behind it like you’re requiring. And while a *strict *vegan certainly wouldn’t eat fish, “vegan” can be a handy shorthand for someone who needs a way to tell people that they don’t eat red meat, white meat, cheese, eggs, etc. Even if they *do *have some fish every so often.
OK, now that people are getting into the definitions, I don’t know whether I’m vegetarian or vegan or not. I usually just say vegan for convenience sake because if I say vegetarian, it’s almost a guarantee that someone will offer me cheese.
I’m lactose intolerant, so I don’t eat cheese or dairy. I can eat it in very small amounts, like in dressings or a bite of ice cream. But generally it’s not worth it. I was keeping a food diary and found that I felt better when I didn’t eat meat, so I stopped. But I’ll eat stuff if it was cooked in a meat broth, just so the meat isn’t part of the dish.
So it’s just easier to say I’m a vegan than to explain all of that. And I’d say it was 95-99% accurate. For me, it’s just a descriptive term, not a moral stance.
I don’t eat food with a face because I think the concept of it is disgusting. If I can live on a diet that doesn’t include slaughtering animals, that’s what I’m going to do. Even if the animals are being killed “humanely”, they’re still being killed.
I learnt long ago that trying to push these views on others is a losing game, so I don’t do that anymore, but that’s how I feel.
Exactly. No need to have the discussion devolve into some sort of “no true Scotsman” thing. The question is *why *people are vegetarian–we’re not here to quibble over who “counts” as a vegetarian and who doesn’t.
That’s me. My parents switched the family to a vegetarian diet for a year when I was 8, and I stuck with it until I was 12; again when I was 15 I went back to it (I remember gorging on a sausage pizza the night before it began). I gradually returned to eating fish, and three weeks after beginning my job teaching, I started eating meat again: I felt that I needed some strength that I’d heretofore been missing.
Twice I tried going vegan. The first time I didn’t pay much attention to what I was eating, and after about three days I was shaking and staggering and constantly feeling like I was about to pass out. The second time I was much more careful with trying to get adequate calories and complete proteins and the like, and after about three days I was shaking and staggering and constantly feeling like I was about to pass out.
My reasons were primarily ethical: I’d read Animal Liberation and The Case for Animal Rights, and found the philosophical underpinnings of both books very persuasive (to the extent that they disagreed with one another, the Animal Rights case was IMO more compelling). My reasons for quitting vegetarianism were primarily selfish: I just feel better when I eat meat, and also I freakin’ love a good hamburger and don’t think any burger analog comes close. (A grilled portobello is also divine, but is totally different). I’ve justified my return by deciding that, were livestock given the choice of never being born and never being slaughtered or being born and being slaughtered, they might choose the latter, especially ones raised humanely; I try to buy humanely-raised meat when I can.
I also think that culture, especially your childhood eating habits, are intensely important to humans, and I think that the major animal rights philosophers downplay this importance. Eating a steak doesn’t merely give you the pleasure of its flavor: it also recalls feelings of love and happiness from childhood and can signify all sorts of other things, and this level of significance is terribly important.
I’m a vegetarian for two reasons. The first is that I seem to have inherited a naturally high cholesterol level. Going full vegetarian keeps my cholesterol level in the healthy range. The second reason is ethical. I won’t eat anything that I couldn’t kill.
Au contraire. Veganism is a specific movement with a specific founder for specific reasons. Please don’t misuse a perfectly cromulent term to save yourself the effort of detailed description.
Cruelty and exploitation are explicitly used in the Vegan Society’s own definitions:
There are many vegan organizations, but that one was founded by the man who coined the word.
Nobody owns language, Sailboat. Being a vegetarian or a vegan isn’t like being Catholic, even if you were the person who coined the phrase. There’s no official doctrine about what you have to believe; it’s a combination of dietary choices that people engage in for a huge variety of reasons.
And the extent of those dietary choices is often informed by those motivations. Which is why a thread like this is interesting, because we can find out who variously identifies as vegetarian or vegan, what they mean by it, and why they eat (or don’t eat) various categories of food.
All of which discussion vanishes out the fucking door, by the way, when someone marches in here sneering from under a pair of raised eyebrows to tell half the people who’ve already responded that they’re not allowed to talk because they don’t fit your personal definition, however historically significant, of the diet and motivation of a vegetarian or vegan.
(bolding mine, as that’s what I’m addressing specifically)
Can a carnivore ask a question? Can the people who feel this way chime in, please: How do you feel about lions? Tigers? (Not bears. Oh my!)
In all seriousness, though, how do you reconcile feeling this way, with the knowlege that many, many species of animals kill, every day, just to keep themselves alive?
Put another way … could you ever keep a cat as a pet? Cats are obligate carnivores, and although cracking open a can of Friskies removes you a few steps from the “face” that’s being used as food, your cat still requires that something with a face die so that Kitteh can live to see another day. Another day, another face has to die. And so on.
Are cats immoral? Are people who keep cats as pets immoral? Disgusting?
Or to put it yet another way … Let’s say I win a zillion dollars and open a wildlife sanctuary with the money. (An actual real-life “if I win the lotto” dream of mine.) Let’s say my sanctuary is well-run and is soon filled with happy animals who’ve gotten a second chance after misery, abuse, etc.
Let’s say my sanctuary has five clouded leopards. To keep them fed, I need to ship in, say, a hundred pounds of meat per week.
Is there some logical reason my clouded leopards can eat steak and I can’t?
I’d really, really appreciate it if any vegans could address that.
