It also makes Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners difficult.
It isn’t too hard. I’ve done it - my brother in law and his wife were vegan. It was a pain in the ass because SHE was a pain in the ass - but the cooking wasn’t too hard.
I have a great recipe for stuffed squash somewhere that works well for Thanksgiving for vegans. Its pretty and tastes good. You do two small squashes for the vegans, and a couple larger ones as a side dish for the people eating turkey
The real issue with mixed holidays isn’t the food. You can work around the food - there is plenty of it for a holiday like Thanksgiving and most of it is vegetarian to start with - leave the bacon off the brussel sprouts - and stuffing can be easily adapted. The real issue is people. If you get one person who has to make a deal over what other people put in their mouth - whether its a meat eater or the not meat eater - the whole meal becomes unpleasant. Or you get one person who insists that the only thing its acceptable to serve on Easter is ham - with a side of potatoes and some carrots, anything else - including anything more - is an insult to family tradition.
And meat eaters are just as likely to be the aggressors in a mixed meal.
A couple of times a year I like to do something nice for the office. Last month I made jambalaya, but in the past I’ve bought doughnuts. (Note: I’m not a manager or anything; sometimes I just like being nice to my coworkers.) There’s one person who is gluten-intolerant, another one who occasionally has gluten problems, one person is diabetic, and one person can’t eat shellfish. I haven’t found any gluten-free doughnuts, and the doughnut shops don’t sell bagels (for the diabetic), and jambalaya just isn’t jambalaya without shrimp (there’s also one person who won’t eat foods where ingredients touch each other – except spaghetti).
So I bring in the doughnuts (or the jambalaya, on Lundi Gras) and my coworkers eat it or they don’t. The ones with dietary restrictions appreciate that I’m offering, and everyone else gets a treat.
truthSeeker2 - are you OK with people eating insects and other invertebrates?
I think that’s a nice approach. However, back when I worked in an office, our boss was a vegetarian. Once a month she bought us all lunch. Nice, right? Except she’d invariably buy high-carbohydrate types of vegetarian food, with lots of rice and pasta. Having apparently failed to notice that around 75% of her minions ate Paleo-type diets, there were several people with diabetes, and none of us were vegetarians. It was kind of awkward. Every single month.
This is wrong. Humans have always used animals to expand their options. You let your chickens run around eating bugs and weeds and you get eggs and meat (plus fewer bugs and weeds). Your cows and sheep eat grass and turn it into edible meat and milk, plus you don’t have to mow the lawn. Your hogs eat all the stuff you don’t want, and turn it into edible meat. Your goats eat everything, including non-food, and turn it into edible meat and milk. Not farming animals is a serious economic mistake.
It’s possible that the system of factory-farmed, grain-fed animals is not sustainable but it’s a relatively recent invention.
If they feel the pain then I am not OK. Basically I don’t want to give pain or distress to anyone.
Trinopus mentioned in previous page that when cattle are shot dead properly they don’t feel pain. But how can we be sure which method was used and whether or not it was used properly and how was the animal treated before killing it?
Btw, vegetarian north-Indian food is so tasty that I have never missed non-veg. I used to eat chicken, mutton and fish. And honestly, I now find the sight, smell and taste of a few non-veg dishes pukeworthy. Sorry. I don’t mean to offend anyone.
There are cuisines where I never eat meat - Indian is one of them. Why eat meat when paneer is so delicious. Its easy to eat vegetarian in most Asian cooking and not feel like you are missing anything.
But emotionally, I’m the product of an Italian father and a German mother…Italian sausage and wurst are comfort foods. And I’m enough of a product of middle America that steak is a treat. Are they gross to even think about how they are made - absolutely. But they are still comforting or luxurious to eat. Are there ethical issues with the footprint - yep, but as a upper middle class American with three cars in her garage that uses a lot of packaged products and consumes a ton of electricity, I have bigger footprint issues than meat - giving up meat is like taking my own bags to the grocery store, gives me a useless sense of moral superiority, drop in the bucket for my suburban American middle class lifestyle.
There’s a*** Lundi*** Gras too? Why wasn’t I informed?!
As to the OP, I eat meat because it tastes good and provides protein. I don’t believe animals suffer or that killing them is cruel.
I telecommute on Tuesdays, so I brought made the jambalaya in the office kitchen on Monday when I was in the office.
I suspect that you will never find gluten-free doughnuts. At least, in a form that resembles doughnuts. AAUI, gluten is the protein that gives the spongy structure to bready/caky food things, the only alternative would probably be some kind of mutant rice cake like thing.
And bagels are not really that much better for diabetics. The blood sugar spike takes a tad longer, but it would still be kind of non-trivial.
no, I don’t think it is sustainable. but it’s partly a product of us expecting to be able to buy a hamburger for $1.
Back to manure.
How are you going to fertilize organic produce and crops without animal manure? Notice that most organic farmers also raise alot of chickens.
Oh and just so you know, when it comes to quality manure it goes 1. chickens, 2. hogs, and 3. cattle in terms of quality.
I confess, I’m a little sad at the degradation that occurs to some species after long periods of domestication. Wild Turkeys are clever brutes, whereas farm turkeys are so stupid, I think you could program the entirety of their behavioral suite on an Arduino Chip.
In one sense, we’re getting closer to the ideal of pain-free meat-producing, but, in another way, we’re destroying something wonderful that arose from millions of years of evolution. It’s like breaking up Michaelangelo’s David and using the marble to build staircases. Very practical, but of doubtful ethics.
Still, that said, I feel more comfortable killing really stupid turkeys for dinner than killing really canny ones. I’ll feel better yet when we can vat-grow meat without it ever having a mind of any sort at all.
The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things:
Of Brussels sprouts, and cabbages, and kale, and collard greens.
Educate me on one of the finer points of botany, please (Brussels sprouts)
As a long-time avid gardener who has raised many generations of edible plants, I have come to realize the cruelty involved in thinning seedlings (discarding many to slowly dehydrate and die), plucking or burning out unwanted weeds with a propane torch, and finally grinding living plants between my teeth and swallowing them, where the shards of living tissue are burnt and digested by my gastrointestinal tract fluids.
It is such a cruel process (arguably as bad or worse than consuming animals bred for slaughter) that my diet is now confined to roadkill* as I transition towards breatharianism.
*and occasional Peeps.
Trying to work around other people’s medical conditions can be tricky if you don’t know much about the condition, it’s easy to do something well-meaning that’s actually worse for someone. For example, Dunkin doughnuts sells both bagels and doughnuts, and a chocolate frosted doughnut has 31g carbs while a plain bagel has 64g carbs. While there are other factors, the main ‘does a diabetic need to watch this’ factor is the carb count,’ so most diabetics would be much better off eating a single sugary doughnut than a single non-sugary bagel.
But what about the bacteria in your intestinal tract? You are deliberately starving them. They need to eat, too!
I worked with diabetics who could eat bagels, but not doughnuts. I assume they know what they can eat. Were I to find a doughnut shop that sold bagels, and were I to get one for the diabetic, that person would know whether or not it’s OK to eat.
I have heard of these things, but have never seen one. Is there evidence that they really do exist? And are actually edible?