I can, and do, happily eat vegetarian - when it's my choice, and only when it's my choice to do so. For example I love Indian food and actually prefer to eat veg only in an Indian restaurant. When I was working, the meat offerings in the cafeteria were usually so unappetizing that by choice I would get two veggies, or a veggie and some starch, or veggie and salad, and not miss or crave the meat.
But I'm not a vegetarian, nor do I aspire to be. I eat red meat, chicken, fish and shellfish as well as veggies and salad. I don't eat that much meat compared to some, but I don't care about comparing myself to anyone else, and if someone attempts to lay either a guilt trip or a shame trip on me about eating meat, animals slaughtered for food, etc. it will fall on not deaf, but hostile ears.
I don't mind what anyone does themselves, whether it involves food, belief systems or romance. But don't think you can guilt or shame me into seeing things "your way" because I never will. You can't "you're ignorant", "if you only knew" and a hundred other comments aimed at making you feel superior and special and me feel like a sadistic ignorant clot, "force" me into seeing and doing as you do.
I had a BFF who was a vegetarian - and always sick and rundown, never mind that she shopped almost exclusively at Whole Foods and consumed every supplement known to man, but...her business.
However - if we were in a grocery store and someone in front of us was buying meat, she would insist we had to move to another lane because "it made her sick to look at it" and she could smell it (it was tightly wrapped in cellophane), thus affecting me, and my time. If we ate out, she not only had to pick the restaurant to be sure that it accommodated her needs/wants, but she also needed to control what you ate in the restaurant as well. It was "not nice", "poor manners", etc. if I ordered shrimp! (That was the beginning of The End for us.)
She and her husband had a business dinner with someone in anticipation of a job, where people like hubby were plentiful and the other party could hire anyone. It was an "impress this guy" dinner. He ordered a burger. Both of them (according to her) apparently couldn't refrain from gagging, being uncomfortably rude, etc. He didn't get the job; she said he didn't want the job under the circumstances, but I think she just lost him a job, because he would eat meat if it was politic that he do so, because the Crusade was her life, not his.
Vegetarians know that the West are meat eaters. They are free to be vegetarians; they are not free, IMO, to make superior, people-who-eat-animal-flesh-are-disgusting cracks anywhere and everywhere because they need to be not simply vegetarians, but Crusader Vegetarians.
Meh. Don't care. Will never care. The tactics say much about insecurity and desperation, and need for attention.
And FWIW, I "hosted" a group of 8-9 Englishwomen who were in CA on vacation. They were all vegetarians, due mostly to the Mad Cow Disease issues at the time, and no meat being sold in the UK at the time. We ate anywhere. They all found something to eat on any menu and never said a peep. I wasn't choosing the restaurants, but they weren't choosing vegetarian restaurants to eat in. They were a pleasure to be with. They worked with their limitations and didn't insist on making their limitations mine.
Life without Mexican food is no life at all
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