Veganism.

[Stephanie]

I've started getting a flavour for the treatment vegans get; when choosing a vegan meatlike burger for a works lunch, a colleague spent the entire meal regurgitating anti vegan tropes*. It was quite tiresome by the end and based on this faulty notion that vegan food is for vegans only.

Moving the recurved wisdom from vegan as an identity to a food type is the next stage of the battle.



*..the thing I don't get is why do vegans want their burger to taste like meat? They've given up on that taste when they gave up meat. If everyone went vegan what would we do with all the animals in farms? Kill em? Well you're no better than meat eaters...

The trick is to keep doing it so it gets boring.

My schoolfriends never got bored of offering me meat several times a week at lunch. Mind you, the repetitiveness became a joke in itself.

my favourite was always "ah, that's why you're so pale and thin!"

whatever helps you feel better about yourself, eh?

[sTeamTraen]

One of the things that irritates me slightly about certain types of vegan is their fanaticism occasionally excessive keenness when it comes to avoiding *anything* that might be animal-based. "I can't eat that, I don't know if they used a meat-based stock cube" type of thing. I don't eat what I think is a lot of meat, and I can imagine going basically plant-based overall, but once it gets down to "OMG there is a 0.3g of dried milk powder in this" it seems to be to be getting like some of the more extreme religious diets. I read that one of the 9/11 hijackers, when he lived in Germany, refused biscuits in the office because they might contain gelatine which could have been non-Halal; had he been super-vegan he wouldn't even have had the possibility of going "Oh it's OK, they are halal after all". (My local halal butchers shop also sells sweets for kids that have been made with halal gelatine.) Yes, I get that it's a principle, but it would be like someone who has decided not to fly to save CO2 also not buying anything whatsoever that it hadn't certifiably been shipped into the country exclusively by sea.

I don't think it's about being keen, it's about disgust. There's all sorts of research about how people can't drink perfectly good glasses of water after they've had plastic cockroaches dunked in them or similar. I'm vegetarian, so obviously eat some animal products, but eating flesh is genuinely disgusting to me. It might not be rational to not want to eat a veggie burger cooked touching a meat one or similar but I can't do it. I don't like touching meat or washing dishes that it's been on.

I can understand that, as it's close to my sister's attitude towards meat. but I have difficulty in believing that people who drank cow's milk until they became vegan at the age of 25 might now feel genuine visceral disgust at the thought that a cheese and onion crisp might contain 0.1 grams of whey powder.

[snoozeofreason]

The idea that someone might be repelled by something that they previously found palatable seems no more remarkable to me than the idea they might enjoy something they previously found something repulsive. I would have thought most of us could find examples of our own tastes changing in both those directions. And even if I did find someone else's tastes hard to believe I wouldn't be daft enough to tell them that, or to question the logical consistency of those tastes, because there's no way I could have superior knowledge of another person's tastes, and expecting those tastes to be logically consistent would be a category error.

[Woodchopper]

The idea that someone might be repelled by something that they previously found palatable seems no more remarkable to me than the idea they might enjoy something they previously found something repulsive. I would have thought most of us could find examples of our own tastes changing in both those directions. And even if I did find someone else's tastes hard to believe I wouldn't be daft enough to tell them that, or to question the logical consistency of those tastes, because there's no way I could have superior knowledge of another person's tastes, and expecting those tastes to be logically consistent would be a category error.

Indeed. A relative became a lifelong vegetarian after being told to draw cadavers while at art school (this was a very long time ago). They noticed that the dead human flesh resembled cuts of meat in a butcher and couldn't stomach eating the latter.

[GeenDienst]

I had a relatively late-in-life epiphany over olives. All round my phany it went. I lurves 'em now.

[Gfamily]

The idea that someone might be repelled by something that they previously found palatable seems no more remarkable to me than the idea they might enjoy something they previously found something repulsive. I would have thought most of us could find examples of our own tastes changing in both those directions. And even if I did find someone else's tastes hard to believe I wouldn't be daft enough to tell them that, or to question the logical consistency of those tastes, because there's no way I could have superior knowledge of another person's tastes, and expecting those tastes to be logically consistent would be a category error.

Indeed. A relative became a lifelong vegetarian after being told to draw cadavers while at art school (this was a very long time ago). They noticed that the dead human flesh resembled cuts of meat in a butcher and couldn't stomach eating the latter.

Better than it going the other way

[JQH]

my favourite was always "ah, that's why you're so pale and thin!"

whatever helps you feel better about yourself, eh?

I'm willing to bet if you'd said "it's why I'm not lardy" in retaliation they would have accused you of fat shaming them.