I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not a vegetarian. My wife is.<\/p>\n
If you order a bloody steak, she won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t make a peep. If you have a dinner party and serve only meat, she won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t complain as she tries to make her parsley garnish last until we get home to the fridge.<\/p>\n
In other words, she doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have an opinion on what you eat. She doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t tell you that you should be a vegetarian. She doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t say that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s better, or that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s right. When pressed, which for some reason she often is, she may say that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s right for her.<\/p>\n
Recently, I mentioned this vegetarianism to some people at work, and found myself, once again, dealing with those who are annoyed by vegetarians. They were annoyed with a vegetarian they had never met, simply for choosing a different set of foods to eat from.<\/p>\n
I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get it.<\/p>\n
Why do people get so bothered by what someone else eats? Do they assume that her decision is a way to condemn them? Usually, these people complain that they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want vegetarians telling them what to eat. But I know a LOT of vegetarians, and they mostly just quietly eat their meals, hoping that no one pushes a hamburger on them or demands that they explain themselves.<\/p>\n
The pushy people are the omnivores. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re the ones who want to say how unnatural vegetarianism is, or how it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no better or more honorable.<\/p>\n
And then, in my conversation at the office, when I mentioned that every once in a while my wife will eat a marshmallow, even though it has <\/span>gelatin<\/a> in it, the response was that she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hypocrite. Not that she sticks by her morals 99% of the time, only allowing herself the occasional little treat, but that she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s more or less a liar for pretending to be a vegetarian.<\/span><\/p>\n And then come all the stories of people who are vegetarians but wear, or sit on, leather. Sometimes I allow my eyes to roll. Sometimes I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t.<\/p>\n My take on it is pretty simple. Don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t bother me and I won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t bother you. I know that I have morals which I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t follow to their logical conclusions. I believe in honesty, but not all the time. I believe in the law, but I still sometimes break even the ones I agree with. And there are a lot more.<\/p>\n And the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153natural\u00e2\u20ac\u009d argument is a joke. People only care about what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s natural when they want to say that someone else is wrong. Everything humans do is natural, because we evolved to have a brain that second guesses our older instincts.<\/p>\n Stone-age humans ate meat when they could find it. Definitely. But the average American eats many times what stone-age humans ate. Is that natural? (And before the stone age, developing humanoids ate even less.)<\/p>\n