by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2010/10/29 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/10/29/10082624.aspx
This post is so not technical. Please skip if you don't care for the blogs that aren't about technology!
I am not a Vegan.
I am also not a Vegan, but were it not for speed of light issues maybe I'd spend more time there. That is a topic for another day....
You see, the Wikipedia definition perhaps helps put it in context:
Veganism is a philosophy and lifestyle whose adherents seek to exclude the use of animals for food, clothing, or any other purpose.
Now I not only have colleagues and former colleagues who are Vegans, but I also have several friends and even a few people I admire.
But it is just not me.
Some of that group I referred to above respect that, some tolerate it, and others are unaware and couldn't care less. It is a nice, wide range of reactions. :-)
Now I am also not vegetarian.
To be honest there have been times that I have been a vegetarian -- specifically periods of time that I was variously a vegetarian, a pescetarian, a pollotarian, and an ovo-lacto vegetarian.
In each of those cases, it was the fact that the person I was dating was that specific type of vegetarian or semi-vegetarian. Because when they were, I kind of was too. It is really all you can do if you want to spend time with them....
To be honest, I could probably be a vegetarian on my own merits, were it not for just a few basic issues, parts of my life that I find very difficult to do without:
Now if I didn't do the Fatburger I'd probably live, and the main appeal to the chicken for me is really the spices around it; whether I can substitute something else there depends on whether I can find a version of tofu I don't hate at that moment.
And I really do generally hate tofu. Sorry.
These two workarounds are generally the ones I use for my first two guilty pleasures on the list, when dating vegetarians who aren't pollotarians.
This just leaves one thing.
Bacon.
Now being raised a conservative Jew who was briefly an orthodox one (and a strong Dresnerian advocate) before retreating into a cynical kind of agnosticism, the idea of not eating bacon should not be so hard to contemplate.
And yet I really find that bacon is something I need pretty regularly.
Not every day or anything like that.
But now and then, on a somewhat regular basis, I find myself really wanting bacon.
Needing bacon.
And now I am going to point out a company I really like: Bacon Forever.
Disclaimer: this blog and this reference does not represent a paid endorsement, but they did send me a t-shirt as a thanks for being a "beta tester" of their web site before it formally opens on November 15th. The t-shirt did not influence me to do or say anything I wouldn't have done anyway.
There are two products of Chris and Tina, the folks behind Bacon Forever, whose products I first saw at the Fremont Sunday Market, that grab me in particular:
Perhaps one day I will be a Vegetarian for real, graduating from my flex lacto pollo baconarian type of vegetarianism to a lacto-baconarian type of vegetarianism (how else to allow for the Chocolate-Dipped Bacon?), and in truth I may well be heading in that direction now.
We each have to make our choices, right? This may even be not entirely incompatible with some future semi-vegetarian I date, though I will try not to assume too much there....
brazzy on 29 Oct 2010 10:36 AM:
Establishing tofu as a meat substitute in the mind of the entire Western world is the biggest culinary crime collectively perpetrated by vegetarians.
As a meat substitute, tofu can only ever disappoint. As a food in its own right with recipes that use it deliberately, it can satisfy, even excel.
I spent a week in a Buddhist temple (well, pretty much a hotel, really) in Japan, eating the same food as the monks (though I suspect that they ate much less fancy dishes than the guests on most days), i.e. vegetarian. Tofu was a major ingredient in many dishes, and it was truly delicious. If I had the skill and time to prepare it like that every day, I would not find it hard to become a vegetarian at all.
Alex Cohn on 31 Oct 2010 12:10 AM:
Twenty years ago I was living in Moscow. Once, we had visitors from the US, Jewish vegetarians. I could not believe my eyes: their scrambled eggs for breakfast was full of bacon. They showed me the package: this was vegetarian bacon they smartly brought with them. I still don't understand these people: if you cannot give up the taste of it, why go for chemical substitutes? As the Yiddish proverb goes, "אז מען עסט חזיר, זול רינען איבער די בארד".