Lettuce eat in peas: PETA encourages fake-a-tarians
I’ve had all I can stand, and I can’t stands no more! This columnist just won’t let one more fake-a-tarian slide without a serious grilling. Yes, the fake-a-tarians—you know, people who say they are “vegetarian” and still eat meat. Believe me, they are legion, and for the most part, very young. I am not sure who or what decided that only red meat was “meat,” but in my grandmama’s greased up 1938 Good Housekeeping cookbook of fluffy lard biscuit love; shellfish, turkey, and chicken are in the meat section. Claiming “vegetarian” status doesn’t seem to hold its weight as a carefully measured lifestyle, but instead, is increasingly a pop-culture statement putting the world on notice that you are part of the green generation. Now, if these wayward vegetarians are confused about what meat is, maybe it isn’t their fault entirely. Not only are there myriad subsets of vegetable-cosuming “ians,” but organized vegetarian lust for neophyte herbivores has led them to employ scare tactics that would make Bela Legosi pale.
How can you eat meat and call yourself a vegetarian? First, let’s back up and look at some of the vegetarian subsets. There are (among others) vegans, raw foodists, fruitarians, pescetarians, pollotarians, gravitarians, semi-vegetarians, ovo-vegetarians and my personal favorites, flexitarians and lessetarians; or those that more or less consume meat when they want and still get an –ian so they can sleep at night. However, it is the pescetarians (or pesco-tarians) at the heart of the controversy. According to Wikipedia and verified by yours truly, some entities do indeed consider the pescetarian diet to be a valid vegetarian diet, including MedicineOnline.com, Vegetarian.LifeTips.com, and the Centre for Cancer Education.
How is this possible? Fish is meat! How is it not meat? Fish don’t drink chlorophyll! I can’t plant salmon, I can’t water tilapia, and miracle-grow doesn’t make fish food.
Now, I doubt these confused souls who think vegetarians can eat meat are really finding solace on Medicine Online’s Web site to ease pangs of guilt about making vegetarian claims while stuffing their craws with mahi-mahi, but maybe they are scared into faux vegetarianism by PETA, whose Web Site www.GoVeg.com gives some, well…stark reasons to become a vegetarian. Here are a few:
- Because eating meat and dairy products makes you fat.
- Because in every package of chicken, there’s a little poop.
- Because meat is filthy and bloody.
- Because eating meat and dairy products causes impotence.
- Because you can’t eat meat and call yourself an environmentalist.
Well, if I am a young progressive chap, I certainly don’t want to be a fat, filthy, impotent, poop-eating enemy of the environment that promotes slavery and eats corpses! Maybe some of these fake-a-tarians are too scared to NOT be vegetarian so they look for any loophole that allows them to enjoy some dead bloody flesh and be an environmentalist.
Now don’t get me wrong. I actually admire the perseverance and lifestyle of true vegetarians and fully support PETA’s mission(s), if their tactics might rub me the wrong way from time to time. In many ways, I wish I had the fortitude to become a vegetarian, and on hindsight, wish I hadn’t stuffed my colon with enough BBQ to warrant purchasing stock in Maull’s. However, if you eat meat, you’re just not a vegetarian, no matter how you slice it. Instead of scaring people into squeezing carnivore pegs in herbivore holes, maybe PETA would do well to start a worldwide amnesty program to forgive us sinners of the flesh, and ease us into the vegetarian fold gently instead of using shock tactics that only raise defensive shields.
You can e-mail Lucas Hudson at lucashudson@thevitalvoice.com.
I never really called myself vegetarian, I used to say I didn’t eat meat, but if someone offered up the label of vegetarian I would agree for the sake of simplicity.
I left fish on the menu for years even though I never really cared for seafood, but it was an easy cultural out at restaurants when there was always salmon on the menu and I just knew the pasta dish would be absolute rubbish and I didn’t want to make social waves. Nobody ever called me on my vegetarian fish eating status though.
So I was a fake vegetarian, but I was also raised Christian, and while I knew that fish were not vegetables, at time of Lent and other meatless holidays, fish is not considered meat so I think that’s probably where the confusion comes from with the fish eating vegetarian. Jewish vegetarianism is similar in that fish is not considered meat.
The perception of a healthful status of fish and omega 3 fatty acids over other meats probably conflates the issue for health vegetarians as well. I also had this incorrect notion, that I suspect many people do, that at least fish are wild and live out their lives naturally. However, not only is this more often false since a fair amount of fish are farmed, but the situation with over fishing and depleting fisheries and the substantial collateral damage of by-catch is an under reported environmental disaster that makes the sustainability issues of industrialized livestock farming seem benign.
With that said, after years of not eating meat I actually did some reading on vegetarianism and stopped eating fish immediately. I never cooked it myself and I had to admit there was no good reason for me to be eating it other than restaurant social crutch. Admittedly, I did grow to enjoy it a bit more over the years, but I now knew that a person is not a vegetarian in the actual historical context if they eat fish. After years of not eating meat, I wanted to be a vegetarian.
But dietary issues like fish are just the beginning really, with the knowledge gleaned of what vegetarianism truly is I’ve become fairly stingy with who I privately regard as an actual vegetarian. As I’ve been fake-a-tarian in the past, I’m not critical of what people are practicing unless they are deliberately spouting ignorance or misinformation. Doesn’t really happen outside of the Internet though.
These days I’m vegan and my only regret is not having gone vegan much sooner.