Vegan no more
 

Excellent blog entry about getting your head back together when you learn your beliefs aren't what they turned out to be.

Not the first time misguided ethics have hurt the individual, but at least she was only hurting herself... except for her vegan flatulence.

Many vegans live healthy lives, but I respect her in the same way I respect meat-lovers who become vegetarian for specific health issues. Admitting your diet is unhealthy and then doing something about it is always admirable. And something I aspire to...

Vegans don't exist in reality.

I have never been attacked by a vegan.
I have never eaten a vegan.
I have never stepped in vegan shit.
I have never had sex with a vegan.
Based on this info...vegans do not exist.

I've never stepped in vegan shit either.

I went to an event where a friend was speaking over the summer.

It was not just a vegan, but worse, a raw vegan dining club.

Instead of just kneeling over the lawn and nibbling on grasses, they has something like a pot luck. I was nearly cast out for not bringing my own bowl and sustainable cutlery.

I ended up going on the spur of the moment and didn't have anything to contribute for the meal, but ended up having some lovely roast chicken courtesy of another attendee there for the speaker who heard the "potluck" and "dining club" parts, but missed out on the "raw vegan." Or perhaps she didn't, and wanted to twist their heads around a little. I liked her a lot.

Most of the entrées looked like mud with slivered raw almonds scattered over them. I think I took a small stalk of broccoli to be polite. The only fruit offering had coconut all over it. Ick (and anaphyllactic shock). And a nice hunk of that chicken.

I also risked banishment by using insect spray instead of slapping and scratching. Fuck that shit. I didn't want malaria from the swamp in the backyard, since they apparently didn't believe in drainage.

Most of the raw vegan dining club members looked like aliens. Thin, wobbly on their stick-like legs, with big eyes and pale gray skin. At least one of them had a distended malnourished belly like the kids in the commercials with Sally Struthers. Totally.

Needless to say, my friend and I hit the first WaWa we came to on the way out of town.

I have known healthy vegans, but they were very careful to eat specific foods to make sure they got all the required nutrients, and took multi-vitamins as a backup.

And I saw via 2 or 3 degrees of separation on facebook, someone cancelling their raw food stall at a festival because of ... yup, you guessed it ... food poisoning. Sure, cooking may beat up a few vitamins, but it also kicks the crap out of E-coli.

I've been listening to phantom radio talk show host for 3 years now.

I was at Sugar Mom's one recent night (a Philly bar that offers vegan items on its menu), and overheard a girl asking if they had vegan cheese available for their vegan steak sandwich.

When told "no," she opted for Cheez Whiz, stating that she thought it was the closest cheese choice to vegan. Egad.

As a dairy product Cheez Whiz wouldn't even be close to being vegan.

There are vegan cheeses though, sometimes called 'sheese' around here, but any I've tried have been rather disappointing with the best of them tasting a bit like the cheapest of cheddars.

I've tried so-called veggie cheeses (which still contain milk products), and have been similarly disappointed. They aren't horrible, but really, there isn't any point to consuming these types of foods.

It just doesn't make any sense to me...cheese and meat are by definition animal products. If one is a vegan, why try to replace these types of things in your diet with fake substitutes?

I wouldn't want to guess at percentages but by far the majority of cheese sold in the UK is, nowadays, of the 'veggie' type.

I'm assuming folk know the difference.

To make cheese milk must be separated into curds and whey. Traditionally this has been done using rennet obtained from the stomach of a calf which is still being fed by its mother - a process which of course requires chopping the baby cow up into bits.

In veggie cheeses (and generally kosher/halal ones too) a substitute to rennet is used, usually fungi based.

Have a look on the ingredients next time you buy cheese, there's a good chance you are already eating a 'veggie' type at least some of the time without realising it.

After a quick 'Google' - it seems that around 90% of US made cheeses are 'veggie' types.

Rennet is a fascinating substance. It revolts me utterly, so I always check for it and avoid buying cheeses that use it.

It's one of those substances that shows the deep ingenuity of the human race; whilst at the same time ups the moral ante on animal consumption. It's the idea of it that I can't get past. First we take milk that's meant for the calf, then we the calf's stomache to partially 'digest' the milk. Bluergh. But brilliant.

That revulsion is a result of imagining yourself as something other than animal. Our "civilizing" has created this fiction where we are not dependent on extinguishing life in order to live. Sure we're not hunkered down on our haunches ripping flesh with our teeth, but knives, forks, and saying grace are really just window dressing for what is at its heart a pretty gruesome business.

Pass the salt, please.

I'm not that evolved. Must. Have. Beef. or Pork. or Chicken. or Venison. or Elk. or Bison. or Fish. or Caribou. or Rabbit. or Squirrel.

Has anyone ever eaten horse meat? How was it?

Stringy.

I searched in vain for a pun, Dana.

Here's one.

'Maybe they should have taken the bridle off before they butchered it.'

How about

that was a spelling mistake, they were supposed to serve chevaux not cheveux

[Washington Hogwallop] I slaughtered this horse last Tuesday. I think it's startin' to turn. [/Washington Hogwallop]

When hungry, raw horse meat dipped in soy sauce is the best thing ever.

Thanks youse guys. I feel better now.

Was that ewes guys?

I've given this some thought. What I finally came up with was that: 1.) there is no possible way to live without hurting other animal species. and 2.) every living thing has to die eventually anyhow, so it might as well nourish another.

Silly though it sounds, my main impetus for avoiding vegetarianism/veganism comes from Steve Irwin. In an interview once he pointed out that although proponents of vegetarianism will say you use up more resources with meat animals than crops, many more species can live in the same space with the meat animals than the homogeneous area used for one crop. And then I read somewhere that millions of small animals are killed during the harvesting of crops -- mice, squirrels, voles, etc., anything that happens to be in the way, so how can you claim a mass-harvested vegetable crop to be more humane than, say, a professionally slaughtered cow?

So I'll enjoy my steak, thank you! I still would prefer to get my meat from local farms where they're grass-fed and treated well, vs. factory farms, but that's something I'm working on. Time and expense are factors.

Up till this fall though we did raise our own egg-laying chickens. But alas they have stopped laying; too old I guess. We're down to two out of an original six and may or may not repopulate the hen house; haven't decided yet! I can't stand a regular grocery-store white egg now, though!

I'm sorry but I can't agree with much of that. It sounds like you're ready to eat your pets and family when they're gone. I'm not sure I can liken accidental killings to deliberate slaughter either, we certainly don't do that in the human world.

It's a slippery slope! One minute you're killing voles in a field, the next minute you're eating your wife and family and there's not a DAMN THING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT!

Sorry, but I'm that amoral. I'd never hurt Diz, and I'm pretty sure I'd never kill a family member. But if it came down to my survival, I'm I'd eat them when they're gone.

I'm all for ethical farming - I do what I can to support it. Animals raised for slaughter should live lives as natural as possible, and be transported and killed as humanely (if that's not a misnomer) as possible. Which means I completely support hunting where the animal is eaten, and disagree with intensive farming.

Oh and yes I've eaten horse too, when I was on an exchange programme in France. Chewy, is my only contribution. But then everything was peculiar and strange, and I was only 15. I fell completely for the countryside (especially for the Puy de Dome - extinct volcano), the village itself, medieaval and high on a hill, and the utter FRENCH-ness of it - the boulangerie, the abandoned vinyards on the way out of town, the boules and fountain at the centre, the mists and mellowness (okay, it was Autumn)

ROFL Undertoad -- this sounds a lot like something my Glenn Beck-watching husband would say. :rolleyes:

Nope, I personally would draw the line at anything that died on its own. But that's not to say it's morally wrong to eat deceased pets, just 'cause we wouldn't do it. If you grew up on a farm, you might become fond of your cows, pigs, chickens, goats. You might go out and pet them each morning, talk to them while you filled their feed troughs. But then when the time came, yes, you'd slaughter them and eat them. On a farm there can be a fine line between pets and livestock. You don't love them quite the same as you do a dog or cat, which makes it too emotionally heart-rending to dispatch them. (Of course sometimes it happens . . . and that "meat animal" ends up living a long happy life.) *I* could not do it. I mentioned the chickens in my previous post - they're about 4 years old and don't lay anymore, but I'm not going to eat them because I'm too "chicken" (ha ha) to kill one and dress it. I'm not a farm girl, but I know people who are, and I understand it. I don't love the chickens or anything - we never named them (couldn't tell them apart anyway) so if I gave them away to someone who was going to eat them, I wouldn't really care.

As far as the accidental killings - well, say you *know* that there are hundreds of mice, voles, etc. that live in your field, but you have to harvest the crops anyway. Is that really accidental?

There's only so much you can do. My husband's uncle once ran over a baby deer in his field while haying. Cut its leg off. Very sad. Of course being the kindhearted man he was, he took the deer, dressed its wound, put it in his shed and nursed it. That deer lived for two years in his shed as a pet. Was it happy, though? Probably not, really. Would have been far more humane to put down the deer and have baby deer for dinner.

I guess that's a digression -- but speaking of deer, we have umptyzillion of them around here of course. Too many. I dislike the idea of deer hunting, would never do it myself, but it absolutely *has* to be done because they are always overpopulated and will suffer if they are not thinned out. Would that happen if people didn't live in their spaces? Probably not -- but only because there would be plenty of natural predators for them instead, so therefore we have to become the predators.

Me too. I'm always kind of mystified by the taboo of cannibalism (aside from the questionable health of it, long-term.) I would not kill another person to eat them, of course. But if I were dying of starvation, and there were dead pets or people available, I would absolutely eat them. I would think my family would want me to use their body so that I didn't die myself. I would certainly hope they would do the same to me, rather than bury me and starve shortly after.

Unfortunately, no one knows anything else about the Donner family despite the efforts of the descendants to change their brand.

<deleted inappropriate comment>

I'd eat another person to stay alive - much like the soccer team whose plane crashed in the mountains...

I've eaten plenty of voles and almost never eat any family members.
What is all the hoopla?

I personally don't think human beings should feel guilty about their place on the food chain. Every animal strives to reach the highest point on said chain that they can, including sharks and big cats, who don't mind eating a bit of long pork every now and then of course.

We are not physiologically designed to be vegetarians. For starters our gut and our teeth don't particularly like it. We need more protien in our diet than a person in their normal course of life can achieve by eating just vegetarian options. Of course, thanks to advances in food production, we can suppliment a vegetarian diet so that we can be healthy, but at what expense?

There are pros and cons to all diet choices and when it comes down to it, individual health is the least of them as far as the rest of the world goes, but we cater for each other because that's the way our society works.

No one judges the lion when he eats an antelope because he's just doing what comes naturally. Why judge a human for doing what comes naturally?

I noticed how you neatly sidestepped the question of Voles vs offspring in your gastronomic analysis.

Does a pig with a sore throat count?

That's cause I don't eat voles or my offspring. I do sometimes eat my husband though. Does that count?

We'd have to ask him, now wouldn't we.

Only if you swallow.

Ooh, did I say that? :blush:

I've always assumed a (ovo-lacto) vegetarian can eat cheese. I guess not! So, if rennet is used in the process of making the cheese, it should be listed in the ingredients?

Depends. Do you chew him up?

I have a female friend that I eat occasionally. I don't chew her up though. Well, maybe a nibble here and there...:D

He doesn't like it when I chew; strangely enough. lol

Anyway, better stop talking about this. Apparently I'm getting a reputation. :D

Seriously, inquiring minds want to know. If you are a vegetarian, can you swallow, you-know-what?

Not that I would anyway. Yuck. :greenface

There's the difference between love and like.

:lol2:

Ya know, ya don't just get a reputation, ya gotta earn it.:D

I'm no vegetarian, but I'll go ahead and guess that it would be OK for them. Vegans on the other hand...probably not.

I've posed the question to fairly dedicated vegan friends before. The deciding factor is consent. Food animals are unable to give consent, whereas BJ recipients are generally on board with everything that is going to happen.

So...would a vegan eat human meat if they crashed in, say, the Andes Mountains, and a dying fellow traveler said it would be okay?

Vegans should eat cum and breast milk in large quantities if they want to stay healthy.

The late Peter Capstick put it more briefly: Everything dies and is eaten. As a professional hunter and safari outfitter, he saw more of that up close than many.

All life springs from death and dissolution -- into the furtherance of life. Veganism is for citified people who, well, are at odds with ecology in general.

(Shudder) Not for me, thank you. I much prefer chowing down on a vegetarian recipe than listening to the half-educated drivel that seems so much of veggie-and-beyond-veggie philosophy.

Some may be more comfortable devouring something that is highly unlikely to actually notice you devouring it, but I've never seen that that would make moral odds in light of the above.

That's my chief objection to veganism as a moral eating choice. It is based on a hierarchy where the closer something resembles me the more value it has and the less it resembles me the less value it has.

I think what makes it the most suspect is that the moral outrage about killing is really a thinly veiled attempt at self validation.

Cooking food unlocks the nutrients if a form of predigestion similar to how a fly uses its saliva to liquidity its food. We humans cook our food to help in the digestion process that is why we have the smallest stomachs (proportionally) to all the other primates.

Speak for yourself... and pass that cow. :lol2:

Thread drift: For me the amazing/impacting thing about the soccer team who crashed in the Andes was the fact that they walked out of there after 10 weeks of minimal food and that with the little energy they had left, they managed it, even though it took them 10 days. The eating dead bodies is barely a blip on my radar compared with the enormous physical feat that the two of them achieved. Their families and the families of those who died would have much preferred that at least some of them made it back, rather than all of them dying because they were breaking a social taboo. Having said that, I'm not sure if I would be able to in a similar situation.

And if a Jewish vegetarian, what then?

Human beings surprise themselves every day with the wonderful, brutal, and horrific things they can do when there's no other choice.

What's that got to do with it? Men are pigs? :p:

Oink, Baybeee. :blush:

"Ah! You have made a common mistake here...what you have there is a beet and you have confused it with food. Food is something like a ham sandwich or a bowl of chile."
- Paul Hinrichs

One of my favorite usenet quotes.