Broccoli Brandishing Baboons
With vegetarianism becoming more popular each day we need to look beyond our preconceived ideas and start to offer more options to accommodate the change. There are many different reasons to become a vegetarian whether it is simply for health reasons or a personal belief, we are all in the same boat. Personally, I have been a vegetarian since I was three and a half. My family made their commitment about a year before I did and they let me make my own decision. The deciding factor was the day I was eating some chicken and my sister looked over at me and said, “You know that is the Easter chicken right?” I haven’t touched the stuff since.
As my grandmother so tenderly put it, “I don’t know what to feed you people”. Well, it isn’t that hard to get your mind around it. Try to visualize ‘vegetarian cuisine’ you’d probably start to think about things we can’t eat rather than things we can. If you think of almost any food you enjoy eating - just picture it without the meat. We can have pizza without pepperoni, pasta without the meat sauce, even tofu-dogs as opposed to hotdogs. When I do go to my grandma’s house she usually just gives us cake and leaves us to fend for ourselves at a road stop on the way back home.
I can understand her ignorance because, to her generation, it must seem awfully strange. But if I am willing to dismiss her ignorance, shouldn’t she be able to cope with our differences? The day she recited that quote she stayed at home and ate a frozen bagel, apparently the only one she had left, while my family and I went out and had some nice quiche at a local bakery. I would rather have eaten the quiche than the frozen bagel but she probably didn’t join us because she though that we would go somewhere ‘flakey’. I don’t really mind though because these are the stories that make a family interesting.
It is impossible to come to any conclusions based on what people eat, yet somepeople seem to. I guarantee you that you couldn’t pick out a vegetarian in a line-up. I’ve had some friends for more than six years who have never noticed. I’ve asked various people the first thing they thought of when I said ‘vegetarian’ and I got anything from “hippies” to “broccoli”. Canadians are to igloos as vegetarians are to hippies. We aren’t all that extreme. While I’ll bet some Canadians live in igloos and I’m sure some vegetarians are totally insane, we can’t stereotype the majority based on a small percentage of the total population.
I’d like to leave you with these thoughts fresh in your mind and remind you not to judge a veggie by the brand of broccoli they prefer. I’m not claiming that some of these stereotypes don’t apply, I’m simply saying that there are exceptions. If the next time you encounter a vegetarian and you don’t know what to feed ‘us people’, just keep an open mind and I’m sure we’ll somewhere in the middle.
Photo: http://trevor-brown.deviantart.com