Also, a great album name… sent to the proper thread!
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And here I’d thought you were going for that retrospective of romantic ballads:
An Ass In Some Situations.
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it isn’t like plants grow specifically to nourish and be eaten by humans, nothing we eat evolved specifically to be eaten by us, that is the great thing about biologically being an omnivore, we evolved to be able to eat just about anything. frankly it is amazing what humans are capable of living off of.
being at the top of the food chain things don’t evolve to be eaten by you, you evolved to eat them, that is true whether you eat plants or animals.
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Apart from nectar-producing pollinating plants. And digestion-spread seeding plants (i.e. most wild fruit and berry type things).
Symbiosis is nifty.
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I am grateful to my fruit-n-berry symbiotes, so I do my Johnny Crappleseed bit right there on the ground.
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Nah, I suspect that millions and millions of people are effectively vegetarians, because they can’t afford meat. Probably not too many terribly poor people who abstain from all animal products.
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Only because you know he’s gluten-free by choice. That means he told you that he doesn’t eat gluten but he’s not gluten intolerant (otherwise how would you know?).
The problem is not that he’s vegan or gluten free. The problem is that he’s an obnoxious loudmouth.
There’s plenty of vegans and gluten-free folks who are not obnoxious. Please don’t contribute to stereotypes.
The "is honey vegan and “are figs vegan” debates are like vi/emacs holy wars. Not all vegans agree that honey is not vegan.
I suspect most (literally more than half) vegans would acknowledge that if they had to eat non-vegan food to survive, they would.
Again, the problem is not with vegans. It is with assholes.
They have a philosophical justification for it. If you listen to a reasonable vegan (someone who you probably didn’t even know is a vegan because they didn’t make a big deal about it), then it will make sense unless you go out of your way to misunderstand them. You may not agree with their philosophical justification, but that’s the thing about ethics: even if you assume there is a fact of the matter about what is ethical (and there probably isn’t), it’s not obvious what it is.
People aren’t necessarily “wackos” for having slightly different ethics than you have.
Then why’d you wrap it up in a bunch of judgmental, prejudicial bullshit?
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In a post-Bourdain world, is chef machismo still a thing? I figure this boasting and 2edgy4me shit has a lot to do with the culture.
I can sympathize with some anger over shitty customers though (which, “vegan” doesn’t count as.)
http://chadzilla.typepad.com/chadzilla/2008/05/raw-food.html
"Two women in the group claimed to be on the raw food diet, and I found out with less than 30 minutes to their reservation time. Even worse, they were owners of a condo next door… who are famously high-maintenance and we can never seem to please for some reason… despite our best efforts.
[clipped discussion of the great efforts he goes through]
So what’s the conclusion here… when I offered to answer any questions about what they were eating, both ladies declined. They also both ate the tuna from the plate and did not even touch the rest of it… insult to the chef! I try not to let such things get to me, but I did run around hyped up for a good 40 minutes on this dish while organizing the rest of the parties food. It wasn’t a masterpiece, but I was momentarily proud of it (at least in technique and flavor… not in presentation). Miami is full of trendy wannabe nobodies without a freakin’ clue. Rise above, Zilla! The bright side is that it allowed me to educate myself on yet another ridiculous food diet and its unnecessary rules"
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I get the point, but those didn’t evolve to be eaten by humans, they evolved to be eaten by other animals…
If the criteria for the original argument made any sense whatsoever, we’d all have to be fruitarians.
Whatever ate them and shat out their seeds to be germinated aided that evolution, human or otherwise. The plants didn’t care how it happened, but tastier fruits get eaten (and their seeds shat out) more often than non-tasty ones.
um…
…doesn’t make the original argument not wrong or stupid as f*ck. yes i get that while fruits didn’t evolve to be eaten, plants did quickly adapt and increased their sugars, and add digestive inhibitors to the seeds, as an adaptive strategy to maximize and utilize dispersal from being eaten and make themselves attractive for eating. they took the card they had been dealt and used it to their advantage.
trust me i get it, i do have a degree in botany.
the point i was trying to make is, if one argues that milk from other mammals didn’t evolve specifically for humans, that we shouldn’t eat it, that nothing evolved specifically to be eaten by humans and that is a stupid stupid thing to say. mammal milk evolved a lot more specifically to be eaten by mammals then any plant, in fact it evolved specifically to be a super food that can be the sole food of a young animal during its most intense growth phase.
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I once had a party come into a restaurant I was working in a touristy beach village. They sat down, ordered a couple rounds of drinks. Then after that demanded to see our vegan menu. Didn’t ask. Demanded. As if that’s a thing all restaurants have hidden away somewhere. We explained that we didn’t have a vegan menu but several of the menu items were either vegan or easily adapted and the chef would be happy to accommodate them after a quick chat about their needs. And we weren’t lying. Our chef got a huge kick out of mutating his menu to accommodate dietary restrictions. Saw it as many do as a sign of professionalism, but also found it to be a fun challenge on a slow night. Shit we had vegan or vegetarian food for shift meal a few nights a week just cause he was bored enough to experiment. The customers, all 7 of them, were not please. They were screaming and yelling. How dare we not have a vegan menu. We were apparently being very bigoted by not having a complete 100% vegan alternate menu prepared. At a restaunt that raised its own pigs for slaughter, and fished for its own seafood. A place that basically bills itself as murdering animals so you don’t have to. They proclaimed “we’ll just go to x”. Where in x is the high end small plate place a few doors down that advertises their accommodation of special diets. Thing is that place doesn’t have a vegan menu. They have a dish or two that can be easily adapted and a chef that will accommodate you after a brief discussion of your needs.
So they pay the bill and storm out. Left $57.23 for a bar check over $125. It was a slow night and we were bored. And I really,really can’t abide people who skip out on checks. So I called the local PD to report them (its illegal to not pay your bill, regardless of circumstances. Theft of services. And if the number is high enough it qualifies as larceny). It being a slow night the Cops decided to actually follow up. We gave them a description of the group and their car. The names we had picked up, and part of their license plate number The cop who took the report must have been really bored (or he thought my waitress was cute), because he made it a point to stop in later to give us a full run down. He’d apparently followed them stop by stop through town trying to track them down.
The group were kicked out of or denied service at a further 4 restaurants. Including their supposed vegan oasis, where they were spotted eating oysters. Among other living creatures. They apparently paid their bill at the one other place that served them but left no tip. And they were eventually pulled over doing 90 in a 35 zone on their way out of the area at 4:30am. They were ticketed for a bunch of shit and warned not to come back to the area (small theft, little proof, not chargeable apparently).
Point being @wysinwyg is right. The problem isn’t necessarily Vegans. And it is indeed assholes. Those people I had to deal with were not Vegans. They were assholes who thought it was cool to eat Vegan. When they could. In public. Where others would see. More interested in making sure everyone heard them say the words “vegan” than anything else.
Now in my experience restaurant wise. Your vegans, raw foodists, and gluten free types are more likely to be assholes. But the vegans tend to be at the bottom of that pile. 8 times out of ten you’re going to get an honest and understanding request for something without lard in it.
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I can’t, actually.
Please tell me what you think I should imagine all vegans are like.
…and that, to my way of thinking, is “evolving to be eaten.” I was under the impression that their edibility (and the indigestibility of their seeds) is one of the stronger evolutionary forces that led them to evolve into what they are. At least, the ones that spread that way.
I mean, sure, the seed of a fruit isn’t evolving specifically to be delicious. You’re the botanist; you’d certainly have a better idea than I do how many species of plants just drop their seeds wherever they land, whenever they’re ready, without being edible at all. I have to assume you mean that “the fruit” as a reproductive strategy didn’t evolve to be yummy, but just as a “here’s my next generation; I’ll just drop it wherever gravity lets it fall” sort of mechanism, and when it turned out that yummier fruits got eaten and dispersed farther from their parents, that that turned out to be a survival-positive evolutionary fork.
Whatever. Your point about milk as superfood and the adaptability of omnivores is unassailable.
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That’s a little bit true and mostly false, even ignoring that you’re apparently confused about the different between vegan and vegetarian. A cheap-as-possible subsistence diet will usually (depending on location) include eggs, plenty of dairy, and small quantities of meat. It’s actually wasteful not to slaughter some of your dairy animals/birds, because males produce no milk/eggs, still consume food, and you only need one to keep many females productive.
As omnivores, humans are built to consume mostly vegetables with periodic bits of meat. It’s cheaper to put a bit of meat in a large stew than to try to replace all the necessary nutrients in meat with non-animal sources.
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I thought cows, after calving, keep giving milk as long as they’re milked regularly?
In fact, Wikipedia says that they dry up during the last few months of pregnancy, so they can be ready to produce for the new calf. That suggests that you don’t want to keep dairy cows pregnant most of the time.
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If you’re doing it in your professional capacity, in a way that directly (and very predictably) impacts your employer’s public goodwill, then yes, of course.
If you’re going to joke around in bad taste, you really should make it clear that you are joking. Poe’s Law is real, and “but I was lying!” does not excite much sympathy.
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Surplus cows as a result of the dairy industry is a thing. But not for the reason @timstellmach implies. The cows aren’t bred any morethen they might be to produce extra calves and keep milk going. Because that’s no neccisary. But the male calves are “surplus” because they can not produce milk. A few will be needed for breeding, but otherwise they’re of no use to a dairy. And dairy breeds are not typically any good for beef production, so the males have limited use economically.Traditionally the solution was to raise them as veal. But veal consumption is down due to bad press over crate veal. So the male calves that aren’t sold as veal are typically (from what I understand) shortly euthanized and discarded or processed into animal feed. And an ever larger volume of male dairy calves fall into that catagory. The ass end of it of course is that crate veal is less and less of a thing. Veal crates are outright banned in the EU, and largely uncommon in the US (where its banned in 8 states and the industry is enacting a voluntary national ban next year). Crate veal at this point is largely coming out of Asia and South America for cheap imported meat. If its on the market in most western countries at all.
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It’s the combination - but probably the latter two things are what really make it bad.
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