No recipes today... check back Monday for next weeks appetizer. :)
I'm going to throw this post out there even though I know no one is reading it (yet) in the hopes that I will someday get some comments on it because it's something I'm truly curious about.
How vegetarian are you?
I guess it depends on your reasons for becoming a vegetarian. My reasons are that I don't want to cause pain and suffering. Therefore, I don't want to cause death to animals. I realize that our society has advanced enough that I can eat quite comfortably and healthily without eating meat.
So I don't. But how far should I take it? I was reading today that Burger King's veggie burgers are often cooked in the same oil that the meat is cooked in. Should that make me turn my back on the Burger King veggie burger? I can't see why, honestly. Just because it's cooked in the same oil doesn't mean a cow had to suffer for my veggie burger.
Enlighten me, veggie heads. Let me know how vegetarian you are. I want to know where you draw the line and why.
Let the oodles of comments pour in. :)
3 comments:
I think a lot of the need to avoid meaty grease in your diet is that once you've cut out meat products they will make you sick unless introduced back in gradually (same with milk). So for instance if you buy a can of refried beans, or get them at a restaurant, they have grease in them and you could feel like shit from eating it. That's why there are vegetarian canned refried beans. I'm guessing the same goes for cooking a veggie patty in oil that is full of beef grease.
Reasons I'm a vegetarian:
1. Couldn't stand the thought that I could have been eating someone's pet.
2. My stomach does not process meat well at all. As a kid I'd tell my mom that it felt like I had rocks in my stomach after eating hamburger.
3. Health reasons, and being over 300 lbs. is a good enough reason to change!
4. Fate met me at Thanksgiving. In brief: My fist time having thanksgiving at my house and I got to do the turkey. As it sat in the kitchen sink to rinse off before cooking, to my horror all I could see was a decapitated dead bird, not dinner. Somehow I made it through, but that was the last meat I ate after eating meat my whole life. 3 years later I'm still meat-free!
Ideally I'd be vegan, but since I live in an imperfect reality I'm a human lacto-ovo vegetarian. The human part comes in because there are a few things I just can't give up yet, specifically marshmallows and yogurt both of which have gelatin in them. My reasoning on this is if I abstained from marshmallows every 6 months, it really isn't going to save a cow, they are being slaughtered mainly for meat, not a byproduct. Something I try to pay attention to as well is cheese, because there is some (perhaps a lot) that use animal rennet instead of vegetable rennet. Lucky for me my favorite brand of cheese (Tillamook) uses vegetable rennet.
A more minor reason I became vegetarian was to eat more veggies. As silly as it sounds I bought a couple of vegetarian cookbooks looking for more vegetable based recipes, rather than ones full of cheese, other dairy, and starches. It is very difficult to 'move away from the heard' in a meat addicted society, as well as a family who seem to think that 'non-meat' means weird. It didn't take me long to discover that how I was taught to eat growing up, for me personally, was the worst way for me to be eating.
As for the BK Burgers, at first they didn't bother me too much (taste wise) but now I think it would just make me sick. One night my DH and I went out to Denny's for a nice meal because they had some veggie options. The fries tasted like shrimp, my veggie burger tasted vaguely like overcooked beef, just the smell of it was enough to make me feel ill.
Overall I try to do my best to check labels that I'm eating veggie to the best of my ability, but I really don't like going out to eat anymore because even if I ask if something has meat in it or is veggie, I'm not entirely sure it is. However the exception seems to be with pizza. I just order a cheese pizza with added veggie toppings (mushrooms, onions, peppers, olives, and tomatoes), although it's easy to get tired of pizza.
Cheers from this human vegetarian. :D
I go through fazes of being very vegetarian and then I have a hamburger!
I mostly eat raw food...hard in winter.
I eat lots of sprouts and find a bowl of sprouts to be very satisfying.
MM, You will find your own watermark with the vegetarian world.
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