We all have that one friend who prefers eating shiitake to steak, paneer to pork, or just plain potato without bacon. That same friend orders plates of fries at a restaurant, complains about not having innovative vegetarian menus or that the options available are ridden with mushrooms, finds it tough to travel to South East Asia where every second dish contains fish oil or oyster sauce, doesn’t get enough of vague nutrients such as Vitamin B-12 and Omega-3 fatty acids, avoids omelettes and pavlovas but silently eats cakes that contain an absurd amount of eggs. I’m that friend.
I’m usually not one to condemn people who eat meat; who am I to, actually? People eat what they want to eat and as long as they’re not hurting any person in the process, it’s fine. Recently, old information in a new article has been doing the rounds — about how certain vegetarian foods are not what they seem to be and are, in fact, non-vegetarian and therefore everything that we believed in were big, fat lies, much like elaborate Ponzi schemes. To those who think they’ve brought our attention to the fact that cheese isn’t vegetarian, we thank you for the thoughtfulness, but we hate to break it to you — we’re aware that cheese contains rennet. And that white sugar may contain charred cattle bones. Or cod liver oil supplements contain fish oil (okay that one was redundant, but you get the drift).
You know what would be helpful? Not telling us that what we're consuming is anyway akin to meat so we might as well eat juicy ribs or smoked salmon while we’re at it. Because while almost everything is non-vegetarian, some of us have made the choice (or have gotten used to) eating “a rabbit diet” as it’s called. It’s not like we’re asking you to eat other people while you’re eating meatloaf, are we now?
ADVERTISEMENT