Flooded Lizard Kingdom

Elisa Camahort writes a column called Silicon Valley Veggie. The latest installment is Party Meatless, and it struck a chord given the recent bout of wedding planning around here:

But would they be able to accept if I threw some catered event and didn't provide any meat dishes? I actually don't know. I suppose it could be argued that my CSO [Carnivorous Significant Other] would be partially paying for any such event, and that his portion could be allocated to the meat dishes. Luckily the CSO is very supportive of my vegetarianism, and I don't think he would consider such a solution necessary.

Everyone else? I'm not so sure. I'll just hope they can deal, for one day, with an "alternative" meal plan.

I would just as soon not have any meat at our reception, but my strategy was to have the wedding at a time of day that would allow us to not serve dinner. I figured we could get away with vegetarian for buffet appetizers, but not for a sit-down dinner. C-Man felt very strongly that the carnivores among our guests could just deal with it, since they get their way so often in the world. And since I did feel like I was sacrificing some of what I wanted by having the wedding at another time of day, we finally decided to have a sit-down dinner.

I know who will complain. It will not be anyone my age. I know very few people in my generation who reject food just because it doesn't have any meat in it. But older generations...

But Elisa also mentioned something that had never occurred to me:

So, I can accept that I will likely never host a family holiday meal. We'll get to a ripe old age, and my family will be well-used to my vegetarianism, but it will never mean that they'll want to come to my house for Thanksgiving tofu pot pie or Christmas veggie casserole.

It's not like we currently have a house where we could entertain, but we hope to. Given that the purchasing of said house is still so far away, I hadn't even gotten to the imagining holidays yet. But my father would not exist in my house for even two days without eating meat. Neither would my brother-in-law. I don't bar meat from my current home, and I probably won't when I have a house, because my friends who sometimes bring their food here are very considerate and even use disposable plates and silverware if I ask them to.

So would my family members run down the street to McDonald's every few hours, or would they not even come? Would it be spoken, or would it always just happen to be more convenient for the event to be held at someone else's house?

It would get me off the hook with all the cooking and cleanup, though...

While I have my differences of opinion with PETA on a number of fronts, I do applaud them for organizing useful information. When I'm going through the HEB, it's good to know what "normal" foods I can eat without guilt.

Automakers Getting a Taste for Vegan Values: Pleasing those who shun animal products is seen as key to reaching a wider, affluent group. By Sharon Bernstein, L.A. Times Staff Writer. August 23, 2004.

Is your car vegan?

...to automobile manufacturers trying to win favor among the increasing number of consumers who say they are environmentally conscious, vegans - who avoid all animal products - are what one marketing expert called the center of the bull's-eye.

From Vegetarian Baby and Child. Don't ask why I was there, just hush up and enjoy the post.

Justin (5): "We don't hurt animals."
Jakie (3): "NO! We pet them!"
Justin (5): "Yeah. We don't take their leg off and eat it."
Jakie (3): "That's YUCKY!!"
Justin (5): "Eeww, yucky!"
Jakie (3): "Pigs like to go in the mud."
Justin (5): "Yeah, they get all dirty!"
Jakie (3): "Maybe we should put them in the bathtub."

"My mommy is a vegetarian. I am a vegetarian. My daddy eats meat. He's not a vegetarian...but sometimes he eats real food like I do."

My friend Nicky and her daughter, Zebidee are vegetarian. Zeb spends a lot of time with other friends who are meat-eaters. The children were all sitting down to dinner one night and Zeb, who is three, asked her mother if she could have what the other two were having. "It's chicken, Zeb," said Nicky, so Zeb asked, "Can't you take the meat out of the chicken, Mom?"

Despite my fervent attempts to distract her, my 2-year-old watched our cat devour a mouse. Afterwards I explained that we were vegetarians and don't eat animals like Sam does. Several days later while talking to a friend she overheard me say "vegetarian," and she explained to my friend while shaking her head
"No mice!"

"This morning we woke up to Asher acting out this joke repeatedly with his toys: 'GRRR goes the carnivore dinosaur. I'm going to eat you!!! Then the vegetarian dinosaur comes. 'GRRR,' goes the vegetarian dinosaur. 'I'm going to eat YOUR SALAD!'"

I had never heard of Laura Fraser and her book The Italian Affair until I saw it mentioned on a blog. In this excerpt, she describes how she became a vegetarian because she was a poor college student and wanted to be political enough to fit in with her radical friends - then later haphazardly added some patchy concern for her health, animal welfare, and the environment to the mix.

She admits that her philosophy always had some holes in it. You can tell it's a story about choosing not to continue being vegetarian by the structure of the piece, as she debunks each concern in almost the same breath as she expresses it, leaving no room for anyone to decide differently.

Besides, as soon as you start spending your time fretting about the arguments that crowd the inner pens of animal rights philosophy--Do Fish Think?--then you know you're experiencing a real protein deficiency.

...the problem really isn't meat, but too much meat--over-grazing, over-fishing, and over-consumption. If Americans just ate less meat--like driving cars less often--the problem could be alleviated without giving up meat entirely. That approach has worked for centuries, and continues to work in Europe.

In the end, though, she went back to the Onmivore Universe not because she had thought through her convictions and come to a different conclusion, but because "meat is good." She helpfully points out that most vegetarians live in "America and England, places tourists do not visit for the food. You don't find vegetarians in France, and rarely in Italy. Enough said."

At that point I felt I'd had my intelligence mildly insulted. To Fraser, I wouldn't be vegetarian if I lived someplace where there was food worth eating, and I spend too much of my time tied up in mental knots about choices that really don't matter.

Unfortunately, I kept reading.

As a vegetarian, not only had I denied myself something I truly enjoyed, I had been anti-social. How many times had I made a hostess uncomfortable by refusing the main course at a dinner party, lamely saying I'd "eat around it?" How often did my vegetarianism cause other people to go to extra trouble to make something special for me to eat, and why did it never occur to me that was selfish? How about the time, in a small town in Italy, when the chef presented me with a plate of very special local sausage, since I was the American guest--and I refused it, to the mortification of my Italian friends? Or when a then-boyfriend, standing in the meat section of the grocery store, forlornly told a friend, 'If only I had a girlfriend who ate meat.' If eating is a socially conscious act, you have to be conscious of the society of your fellow homo sapiens along with the animals. And we humans, as it happens, are omnivores.

Am I reading this wrong: we should not make choices that fit with our moral and ethical frameworks if they will cause mild inconvenience to others?

Funny, it sounds to me like she just needs better manners and a boyfriend who isn't a jerk.

Alternately, I apologize sincerely to all of you whom I've been oppressing with my selfishness for the last 15 years.

Long long ago in the galaxy that I live in, vegetarians and vegans could buy and eat marshmallows that did not conflict with their ethical/moral principles. Then the factory that made them burned down.

Now we can have marshmallows again.

If you want to, you can read the best explanation I've ever seen of why I'm a vegetarian. There are a bunch of other facts that I can pull up to add credence, but it's essentially because of how my dog looks at me when she first wakes up in the morning. I knew it before I got her, but now I really know it.