Friday, June 13, 2008

Pure Vegetarian?

Last week my wife received a phone call from a friend whom she invited to visit us for dinner. My wife’s friend gave a courtesy call to confirm that her husband and herself will not be coming on Saturday but can make it on Sunday. My wife makes her favorite chicken curry and biryani on Sunday which is a customary habit brought over from her family. So she asked casually if they eat chicken. That was it. I could hear a barrage of hysteric cry on the phone from the other side. The cry was so loud that I could overhear her from a tiny cell phone that my wife was talking through while we were driving through a noisy intersection.

I know this post of mine will catch the nerves of some, but it does catch my nerve whenever I hear them say this - 'I am a 100% pure vegetarian' and they ramble about hysterically as to what should not be in their food as if the whole world out there is conspiring to get them to eat meat. I mean what does the phrase ‘100% pure vegetarian’ mean anyway.

If the above Para has some of you vegetarians fuming, sorry this is not meant to hurt every vegetarian out there. But please read through for what I am saying. I understand and respect your way of life. You want to be vegetarian whatever your reason might be. Good for you.

There seems to this superior feeling that they belong to higher strata in society fizzled by the Hindu theory of quad structured society and the top of it being the vegetarian sect. This sense of standing on a higher pedestal makes them look down upon us meat eating non-vegetarians that are bent on bringing them down to our level by contaminating their food with Non-Veg. Sorry to put a brake on your fast moving fancy dreams but there is no such conspiracy. You can have you veggies and leave our meat alone.

But what exactly does 100% pure vegetarian mean. Isn't 100% mean absolute pure that you have to qualify the 100% pure. Somebody is poor with maths. So is it % based on time or ingredients. This is what I mean. I eat veggies 5 days a week. Does that make me 71% pure? Or doesn't that qualify. If someone eats diary products like milk and cheese vegans don’t consider them vegetarians. So those of you who consume diary products are 82% pure vegetarians and vegans are 100%.

If you put the factoring of %s aside, socializing with some of these becomes a nightmare. I had a friend that I used to go out with. He had consumed chicken and beef before for a long time, but coming from a family of vegetarians, his sister took an oath to never to eat meat when he came to USA. Doesn't it seem like Manoj Kumar's movie and all so touching? Yes the story is touching but not socializing with him. So every time I went to have lunch/dinner to a restaurant, it was the same story. He would begin the order with 'I am a 100% pure vegetarian. I don't eat chicken, no beef, no pork, no fish, and no eggs'. He would go on and on enumerating all the animals, with his fingers out and counting them that would possibly be eaten by the lowly meat eating people. God! The guy taking an order would look at me and I would try hard to not meet my eyes with him and sometimes hide under the table to avoid embarrassment. It is even more hilarious if the restaurant was Chinese. After all his rambling there would be egg in his fried rice and pork in his spring roll.

For those of you who do not what kind of vegetarian you are a quick Google on types of vegetarian will provide the following classification and some say you can say vegetarian only if you are vegan.
Pescatarian
Flexitarian/Semi-vegetarian
Lacto-ovo- vegetarian
Lacto-vegetarian
Ovo-vegetarian
VeganRaw
Vegan
Macrobiotic
Fruitarian

So next time please specify what kind of vegetarian you are or just say you are a vegetarian. We all know what you mean. You do not need to qualify 100% and pure.

But the vegetarians have their own problems that I am fully aware of. I am a forced vegetarian for 2 days a week. Dont ask me why? It will be one of those movie stories albiet a cliched chick movie at that. Married men have to make a lot of sacrificies to keep the lady happy. The options to vegetarians dining out is very limited. The standard is Taco Bell with the order being 'Chalupa replace meat with beans por favor'. At BK it is the Veggie burger and at subway the Veggie delight. You need 2 footlongs of those Veggie delights from Subway to satisfy your hunger. There is also Qdoba that have veggie burritos and my favorite is Mexican Gumbo. If you have tried it, you should. It is like Indian sambar rice, only it is Mexican and very tasty. The list seems to be long enough but if you think about it for a minute not every place you live or work has all the 4 places I mentioned above. In most cases you have at most one of them and you are stuck with eating the same thing over and over again.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Alla
Yes, it did touch a raw nerve somewhere. What exactly are you against? Qualifying food as "100% Pure vegetarian"? Or being a vegetarian in the US? Because the 2nd part of your post (regarding a guy ordering food in a restaurant) seems like you are making fun of a guy who wants to remain vegetarian.

Let me answer those one by one.
a) 100% Pure Vegetarian - This is one of the many funny things you have in India. People say things like that sub-consciously, thats it. How many times havent we heard things like "Give it your 110%"? "100% Pure Veg" is similar to that. Might not be correct grammatically, but the idea behind it is that it is 'pure veg'. As in Lacto vegetarian.
My dad, for example, did not prefer eating in a restaurant which also served non-veg. Given the cleanliness (or rather the lack of it) in restaurants in India, I understand his point of view. However, I never had any such qualms, for example. As long as I did not eat meat consciously, I am/was fine. So, 2 people in the same family - and 2 different points of view.

b) Making fun of vegetarians - While the 1st part of your post was funny, I thought the 2nd part was slightly more offensive, atleast to me. The environment in which you were brought up defines what your food habits are. You happened to take birth in a house that eats meat. (Beef? Pork? No I guess). And I happen to take birth in a house where meat was not eaten. A lot of us are not very adventurous when it comes to food. So, I never tried meat. And I would like to keep it that way. Thats it. When you eat in India, you dont tell the restaurant waiter that you dont eat chicken, goat, lamb, sheep, beef, pork, fish, snake etc. Right? You just tell them that you want a "Veg Biriyani", thats it. And the waiter understands. However, restaurants in the US do not operate on the same page. If you order for a "Veg Burger" in McD and see what happens! That is why, you need to tell explicitly to the waiter that you dont eat meat including fish. What is wrong with that?
You might not understand what I am trying to say unless you go to some non-English speaking part of the world where the primary foods are beef and pork.
The world has enough insensitive people, please don't become one more.

Unknown said...

You should be open to all ideas and not have any opinions. If you do, you are not open minded enough and should not express an opinion that others find offensive. People who dictate that mantra become hypocritical by simple expression of it. This person is being insensitive to your opinions of the fact that some can be over bearing. Going into a restaurant and dressing down the waiter can be likened to stomping on a jelly cracker offered to you on the person's rug. Instead of just saying no thank you. Most likely the person is not a career waiter/waitress? If you want a person who's profession is such then you need to a high end eatery. If you go to McDonald's (who by the way was built on meat) and dress down the kid behind the counter; you are just being overbearing and obnoxious. People with no opions are sheep. People who try to supress others opionions are opressors of thought. Let's not forget the story of the old man, the donkey and the boy.