Breathes there a cook with heart so dead that he or she has not, at some point, wanted to kill a vegan?
There is, after all, nothing better calculated to ruin a nice dinner than inviting a vegan along.
Thus begins a piece by Megan McArdle over at WaPo. She’s a former vegan, and her post is about that tribe’s seeming inability to take a joke.
And though I am no longer a member of the tribe, let me delicately suggest that this is yet another area where vegans should forbear in a good cause. Calling for people to be fired from their jobs because they joked about vegans won’t make anyone more enthusiastic about humane food. It will, however, do a great deal to advance the stereotype that vegans are prickly, humorless prigs.
Read the whole thing and remember that vegans aren’t really all that different from other folks who believe they hold the moral high ground.
UPDATE—The Gentle Reader who has been a long-time visitor to this blog should remember that the late Mrs. Hoge was a gourmet cook. She was the founding director of Williams-Sonoma’s cooking school at their South Coast Plaza store and could cook a vegan dish that was actually tasty. However, she was an omnivore who loved a good steak. She also was as an excellent game cook. Our eleventh anniversary, the first after we moved to Maryland, was on open day of deer season. She sent me hunting. Our thirty-third anniversary also fell on opening day, and she asked me to take her hunting.
Mmmmm, venison.
That video is spot on. I was a vegetarian for a long time, but I wasn’t militant, and figured what other people ate was their business. What the video captured is the one way street mentality of many vegans and vegetarians: they expect accommodations but are not willing to do the same.
I can’t recall the last vegan I met who wasn’t insufferable on the topic.
I don’t care what you eat or don’t eat but I would kindly ask everyone return the courtesy in regards to my dietary preferences.
Mrs. Hoge was a gem.
Here is a little inside baseball: long term vegans (allegedly) who look great and are not emaciated are cheating and eating animal foods from time to time. I saw it with my own eyes, and some of these folks were considered to be gurus. And all those vegan moms who claim to have vegan babies, and are breast feeding them, should consider the source of said breast milk. By the way, some drink their own breast milk and feed it to the other kids in smoothies. Nothing wrong with that, but it is not vegan.
I wish I could have known her.
I had an in-law who was a really preachy vegan, thankfully no more. After some years of having to listen, more or less politely, to the screeching at family dinners (there was always plenty of vegan food cooked without any contact with any animal products, but our usual meats, too), I finally unloaded with a diatribe about how harshly fruits and vegetables were grown, force-fed and -watered, covered in manure and cancer-causing “natural pesticides”, their reproductive organs ripped from them prior to full maturity, forced into unnatural rows, stc, etc, etc that they ceased the haranguing.
Don’t miss them at family gatherings any more.
On Quora.com somebody asked for a recipe for vegan Swedish meatballs. I replied that the idea of vegan meatballs was as much an oxymoron as carnivorian tofu.