Re: Marmite Crisps - Slightly pregnant

Richard Bollard wrote:

I do not understand why a vegan would refuse to eat a pheasant that
has been accidentally (and cleanly) killed in a collision with a
car.

Probably because most vegans would throw up at the prospect. When
we've all finished out-logicing people out of their firmly-held
stance on whether or not they want to put bits of dead animals in
their mouths, maybe we could move on to suggestions for persuading
folks to change their religion or sexuality.

This is obviously hitting a nerve with you, but the way I see it,
people argue about the various degrees of vegetarianism the same way
we argue about politics or religion. Some writers may appear to be
"offended" by vegetarian viewpoints in the same way that they or
others are "offended" by religious points of view. Some get upset at
what they see as irrational and will try to argue the toss. It doesn't
mean they care enough to do any more than verbalise their opinions. I
doubt that omnivores are going to take to the streets in protest
against vegos.

Teasing out firmly-held stances is some of what we do here, isn't it?

That's all very fair comment, Richard, and thanks. As I've pointed out
several times in this thread I'm not a vegetarian and certainly am not
interested in spreading 'propaganda' for vegetarianism. However, I
don't feel entirely comfortable about eating meat, on ethical grounds.
That probably goes with the territory when you spend your entire adult
life living with a veggie, but I do wonder if this nagging background
discomfort is something many meat eaters have in common, and which may
lead to a bit of an overreaction when vegetarianism is mentioned.

However, I have been really surprised in this thread by the amount of
intolerant and stereotyping reaction about vegetarians and
vegetarianism - in several cases from RRs whose opinions and insight I
value. I've also been very surprised that we're even having this
conversation in 2008. Doesn't everybody have veggie friends and
acquaintances? Isn't it just as unremarkable, where you are, that a
colleague on a night out has the veggie option, while another one
chooses a soft drink instead of alcohol, or another one smokes or not
(in fact, possibly less so than the last one), and has been so for
years? Or is that just a UK thing? Certainly a lot of the stuff
that's been coming across the pond in this thread I last heard in the
1980s.

As should be the way with AUE, much of this has hinged on language.
Again, I thought that use of 'vegetarian' as an adjective to mean 'food
suitable for vegetarians and not containing meat-based ingredients' was
universal. Maybe that's based on my own perspective of being married
to a veggie, but certainly that is a long-standing meaning. Mike B, if
you're reading, you'll find the 'vegetarian' section just near frozen
pizza in Tescos. It's not stocked with pallid teenage girls and aging
CND supporters in hand-knitted jumpers.

Given that that definition of 'vegetarian' doesn't seem to be
acceptable rather sends the point of my original posting down the
dunny, and we got bogged down with he idea that by challenging a food
stuff claiming itself to be 100% vegetarian I was suggesting that it
needed to have unrealistic laboratory-based levels of sterility.
That's bollocks. At the risk of sounding bloody-minded and pig-headed,
not to mention bringing mb down on me again, food is either vegetarian
or it isn't. It's about food being prepared using meat-based
ingredients, not about whether or not an ant's leg dropped off while it
was crawling across your nut cutlet or there are wasp eggs on your
apple. We also had some weird stuff about vegetarians not eating food
*touched* by animals or people - I think that's a different group of
folks entirely.

While it's not quite the same, I really wish that packet of crisps on
my desk last week had had '100% fat-free' written on it instead, as
I've had enough of trying to defend a position which isn't actually my
own. However, I felt the need to, faced with the astonishing amount of
hurrumphing that appeared out of the woodwork. (On a side point,
almost all crisps sold by the big UK manufacturers actually *are*
veggie, even if it says Roast Chicken or Smokey Bacon on the bag).

Anyway, I'm going to withdraw now. And probably have a bacon butty.

Cheers

DC

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