Umm, can humans eat food that has chalk in it?

Chalk, the other white... stuff.

One of the things that makes me crazy about organic labelling definitions is the label on bags of sand in the nursery. Who knew that sand was organic? In my memory it's the very definition of inorganic.

(Yes, they probably mean it has no pesticides on it, and I hope they mean it has the salt washed off, but they should say that.)

Google says yes, strangely enough...I don't know, I think it would taste too much like antacid.

Monty Python's "Spam" springs instantly to mind.

Why vegans as opposed to non-vegans?

I assume you mean because it's composed, ultimately, of teeny dead animals? Aside from the more general question of who would want to eat chalk or food containing it, I would guess the answer for most would be "sure, why not?"

My logic for this is that most vegans fall into one of two groups:

• morally conscious people who've taken a carefully reasoned position to minimize harm to semi-sentient beings such as animals, at some nuisance to themselves, and
• horribly undereducated, anti-scientific, pseudo-hippy flakes

The former would recognize that the lives and deaths of microscopic animals millions of years ago have no bearing on their ethical choices today, while the latter would be all like "No way! Chalk is like a rock or something, it's not like, made by bees!" Thus, no problem.

Hmmm. Chalk is made of the remains of little shelled creatures. Is chalk kosher?

Because it was made by animals (teeny little aquatic ones-foraminifera and such), making it an animal product, for all that it's millions of years old. (On those grounds, I'd say yes--the organism that made it died of natural causes and was not exploited--but that's just my guess).

Eric: I think so, since it's millions of years old and is made of inorganic matter, so its link with shellfish would be rather tenuous. (That raises the question of whether the microscopic chalk-forming organisms are treif--are they, or is there some sort of 'infinitesimal creature exemption'?)

It's questions like this that make me love coming here.

I had a former co-worker at Earth Island Institute tell me one day that I should eat salmon instead of beef because it was lower on the food chain.

Can complete, strict vegans eat plants? Very few vegetables are grown, harvested and shipped without causing animal deaths. And sometimes, as in the case of leaf miners in organic spinach, the animal is cooked alive!!!threeinbasetwo! Unless you eat only raw foods. In which case you're eating them alive.

I got curious about the vegan-ness of soy yogurt and actually found some folks asserting that the cultures render the product not acceptable, but most seem to think it's OK. So chalk (yum!) would probably be OK too.

What about bread and beer? Oh, those poor little yeasties!

I once made a joke in a cafe about the problem with the vegan cookies was picking out all the little bits of vegan, and horribly offended the barista. I hate to stereotype, but I've met more than a few really thin-skinned, defensive vegans.

I can completely understand being a vegetarian, and I can even understand banishing eggs. Dairy seems more of a stretch. Then again, I'm pretty much unafraid of eating things that are being eaten by other, apparently healthy people are eating. I'm also reminded of the vegan lion from the popples episode of Futurama.

Whales eat krill. Do vegans think they're too good to eat whale-food?

The really interesting question: if we could vat-grow human flesh with no (or effectively very little) cost to other lifeforms, would vegans eat it?

There's always the rumored fruititarian -- one who refuses to live by killing plants. Such a person may eat wheat (dead before they harvest) and apples (the tree is still alive) but not carrots or cabbage. Never met a fruititarian in the wild, though.

"Dairy seems more of a stretch"

Larry I'm a vegetarian and dairy's actually the dodgiest of the animal products I still eat.

Cause from my understanding cows need to calve to start producing milk. There's a 50% chance that they'll produce a bull calf which (as with any non-productive animal on a farm) will just about certainly be put down.

So yeah from an ethical perspective I really should be giving up milk as well as animals are deliberately killed to produce it(unfortunately I don't believe I have the will power for this yet).

"I'd say yes--the organism that made it died of natural causes and was not exploited--but that's just my guess"

Unless of course an evil mad scientist from our time went back in time in order to start the process of life amongst the primordial ooze in order to generate the chalk necessary for his disgusting dietary needs.

I bet none of you thought about that did ya?!

shame, I say.

if we could vat-grow human flesh with no (or effectively very little) cost to other lifeforms, would vegans eat it?

"Soylent Green is people!"
"Oh, good, I was worried it might contain dairy products."

Is honey OK? After all, as far as I recall, the bees aren't killed in the process- at worst they are temporarily stupefied by smoke when the combs are extracted.

Can vegans eat Venus flytraps?

Years ago, I ate Thanksgiving dinner at the house of a vegetarian friend. We had what I referred to as "... and all the fixings". At one point her father (who was goodnaturedly skeptical about the whole thing) asked for the salt. There was none on the table. I said, "What, vegetarians don't eat minerals either?"

Depends how strict they are. I'm a vegan, and I'd be okay with it, but I also eat white sugar, which stricter vegans wouldn't, as it's refined using charcoal, i.e. animal bones.

But then, there's gelatine in disk drives, and in camera film, and most vegans still use those. The medication I'm on is only available in gelatine capsules. I take it, but if there were tablets I'd ask for those instead. It's an imperfect world.

Larry Brennan: yes, horribly thin-skinned, some of them. I think it comes being guilted into one's dietary choice instead of making it freely. I like your joke. It reminds me of the one item in the Buddhist vegetarian supermarket that really weirded me out, the tins of vegetarian intestines.

Zak: how would it taste? I'd prefer vat-grown beef or chicken, myself. But not everyone's a vegan for ethical reasons. Lots of people cut out dairy, eggs and meat for their health. The added protein might not agree with them.

The ex-vegan across the room woke up long enough to say, It's like the Jews put it. If at any stage it's passed through a form an animal wouldn't eat, it's fine.

So driving your car to the shop to buy (organic, cruelty-free) vegetables doesn't make it non-vegan. (Animals died to bring this meal to you, but it was long enough ago not to count.)

I once made a joke in a cafe about the problem with the vegan cookies was picking out all the little bits of vegan, and horribly offended the barista. I hate to stereotype, but I've met more than a few really thin-skinned, defensive vegans.

I'm just enjoying the mental image of picking out all the little bits of vegan from the cookies. The vegans I've all known personally have made it a complete non-issue, although I got some "I want to have your babies" comments from one after making her a vegan chocolate cake that tasted as good as an egg-and-butter one, if not better.

Cause from my understanding cows need to calve to start producing milk. There's a 50% chance that they'll produce a bull calf which... will just about certainly be put down.

Right about the calving. The bull calves aren't "put down". Well, not on the dairy farms I've known. They are sold - for pet food, I've always assumed.

My sister's a vegan, and typically pretty strict (and do you know how expensive vegan boots can be? ;P). However, she's started eating honey (and, logically, drinking mead) again after making sure that the beekeeper's treat their bees, well, nicely I guess? We live in a rather rural area and my mom happens to know a lot of beekeepers personally. My sister and I visited some of them (I for research, she out of sheer curiosity) and asked them all sorts of questions. Turns out the particular type of bee our European plants rely upon for pollination would be extinct if it wasn't for beekeepers: there's apparently some sort of parasite the bees can't fight on their own which has spread widely. So, basically, the beekeepers are keeping certain types of bees alive. My sister liked that a lot, and decided that in THAT case, she could eat the honey. (Also, the beekeeper explained to us a number of advantages in the sugar-water that they give to bees instead of their honey to carry them through the winter, but I forgot exactly what those advantages were. My research focussed more on the bees' dance and whether or not they could communicate things like "Bandits at the gate to the manzzzzion, mazzzzzter") (turns out they can't)

I'm vegan. I would have no moral problems eating chalk. It deeply, deeply offends me on an aesthetic, culinary level, however.

Larry Brennan: Much of the defensiveness comes from being constantly subjected to other people's mocking opinions or pseudo-scientific lectures about your "weird" diet, when it's none of their damned business. Some charming people will actually go so far as to sneak animal products into your food to make some kind of bizarre point. It can be hard to tell when a joke is just a joke and when it's the start of something more.

okay, I'm going to show my ignorance here.
I thought charcoal was made from slow-cooking plant matter so that almost all that was left was carbon? Getting charcoal from animals seems inefficent, since the fats and bones don't burn cleanly leading to hardened gunk instead of highly flammable charcoal.

I also thought that once you got a cow lactating, you could perpeutate that indefinitely so long as you kept milking it. (Sensory feedback loop from milking -> oxytocin production -> milk letdown).

I am facinated and amused at the thought of chalk being treyf. I remember learning in 8th grade that the beautiful marble altar at the cathedral was made of compressed dead animal bones, and thinking how very odd that was.

Andy asks "That raises the question of whether the microscopic chalk-forming organisms are treif--are they, or is there some sort of 'infinitesimal creature exemption'?"

Depends on who you ask, apparently. The Central Rabbinical Council has ruled that Orthodox Jews should use filters to remove copepods -- tiny crustaceans -- in the New York City water supply.

http://www.uswaternews.com/archives/arcquality/4orthjews6.html

Question for vegan Roman Catholics:

Is trans-substantiation vegan?

I know of vegans who think that honey is not OK, because--no matter how well they're treated--the bees are being "exploited". These same people occasionally claim that one shouldn't keep pets.

Kinda reminds me of a terribly 70s "anthropology" book that Carnegie Library used to have. All about how we ought to all move to the coasts and set up small communities; keeping of any animals should be banned, along with farming on a larger-than-family scale; boys (yes, just boys) should learn to hunt for meat...it was great stuff.

Larry Brennan: I would guess a toss-up between "horribly thin-skinned" and "that's the fifteenth time I've heard the joke today, go home!"

I get the cannibalism jokes directed at me less often than most vegetarians I know, since people seem to sense that I'll just roll my eyes and make some cheerful pointed comments right back. (The problem with most vegetarian ribbing* of omnivores, I think, is that it's based around the ideas that "meat is disgusting" or "meat is unhealthy" and not only does the truth of these ideas vary from person to person, but they make the vegetarian attempting the joke sound like someone's mother. I generally stick to stories about anthropologists being served fried maggots, and usually manage to convince my detractors that what one eats is a cultural and personal matter, among other things, under the premise that if it were a machismo contest, I would not be the sole loser.)

*The pun may or may not be intended by the author of this comment. Is it intended by the reader?

/delurk

Human: The other, other white meat!

Apparently -- and this is total hearsay. I have no direct confirmation of this in any way (and I'll stick to that in court) -- cooked human looks, smells and tastes very similar to pork. "Long pig" is a euphemism for roast human.

Mmmmmm. Human bacon!

/relurk

Bearing in mind that I'm not a dairy farmer, not even a farmer any more...

Bull calves can be castrated and reared for beef. But the beef from dairy breeds of cattle is reckoned to be a lower quality. This can lead to it not being worth raising bull calves for beef, making them worthless.

The cow's lactation cannot be maintained indefinitely.

Why do non-veggies ask such stupid questions? Is it because eating meat rots the brain?

Cause from my understanding cows need to calve to start producing milk. There's a 50% chance that they'll produce a bull calf which... will just about certainly be put down.

Right about the calving. The bull calves aren't "put down". Well, not on the dairy farms I've known. They are sold - for pet food, I've always assumed.

Silly non-meat eaters ;) the baby bulls either remain a bull and go on to foster future generations or they become steers (Rocky Mountain oysters anyone?), go to a 'grow-out' type operation and become steaks, yum!

;)

Why do non-veggies ask such stupid questions?

Why is that a stupid question? I thought it was a perfectly fascinating question.

See also vegetarians re: rennet.

I'm neither vegan nor vegetarian, but I respect a person who, having adopted a principle, takes it seriously enough to wrestle with questions like this.

It will be interesting to see if a sort of vegan Talmud evolves out of the ongoing discussions of these issues.

Re: the milk issue--might sheep's milk be more acceptable, as the male lambs would be used to grow wool rather than slaughtered?

And I'd like to recommend this cookbook for its Vegan Chocolate Death Cake, which I have happily consumed at the restaurant on many occasions.

For those who, like me, follow their dentition and eat omnivorously, I'd like to recommend the book All Flesh is Grass by Gene Logsdon as a glimpse of a better way to go about meat production.

Joe Haldeman informed me, in one of his SF-writing classes, that burning human flesh smells like pork. Since he was an explosives export in the Vietnam War, I assumed he has some personal experience in the matter, although I didn't ask.

I once asked an Orthodox rabbi why white sugar is kosher, since (as mentioned above in this thread) bone-derived charcoal is used to refine it. The rabbi urged me not to repeat this question too loudly, lest I incite a panic among those with more piety than sense. (I assume the real answer has something to do with that "a dog wouldn't eat it, therefore it's no longer food" rule.)

Why do non-veggies ask such stupid questions?

It's because everyone's fascinated by arbitrary codes of behaviour - vegetarianism, halal, kosher, etiquette, criminal law - and wants to figure out the edge cases. There's a little bit of yeshiva bucher in all of us.

(That was a really unfortunate way to put it, given this thread is about, inter alia, cannibalism.)

(A rabbinical student tried to argue with me about dietary restrictions once. I ate his liver with chopped onions and a fine Manischiewitz. F-f-f-f.)

I've seen chalk listed as an ingredient in, if I recall correctly, some brands of commercially canned tomatoes. A thickener, perhaps? I've always wondered why it was there, and felt dubious about buying them.

I guess it really depends on how "far" the elements have to be from passing through an animal form. Anything you eat is going to contain atoms that at one time were part of an animal.

Bull calves are also likely to be turned into veal. Yum. Veal :D

On the treif issue, there was an interesting story Harry Turtledove put out -- I forget the title -- about a genetically engineered pig that, due to its hooves (hocks?) being smooth rather than cloven, was no longer treif.

I've heard elsewhere that pigs are also treif due to diet, not merely form, so I don't know how well this would hold up, but it was interesting.

As a chef with many, many years experience both in the kitchen and with various sects of vegetarians, I have a few observations. If you are a vegetarian and you come into my dining room, and ask for a meal made solely of vegetable products, I am more than happy to do anything reasonable to comply. The operative word here is reasonable--among the reasons thatI do what I do for a living is that I like making people happy. I don't do it so that I can be put through hoops, as vegans eating in my dining room have often assumed they have a right to do. By the way, anyone who would try to sneak animal product into a vegatarian meal is mentally ill--if you don't want to do it, say so.

I put a great deal of effort into writing a menu. Why would anyone come to a restaurant that does that and then ask them to do something else? Something they obviously don't specialize in. I have always wondered what the reaction would be if I went into a vegan restaurant and asked for a piece of meat.

If vegans want to eat as vegans, I am all for it. It would strike me as inconsistent, however, if they drove cars, ate vegetables grown in large factory farms, wore clothes made with natural fibers that required pesticides(good bye linen and cotton. Silk too since they kill the larvae.) Lived in a house made of wood since it destroys habitat--you can see where I'm going. If the answer is that this is just a gestural effort--make your gesture somewhere else.

Canned tomatoes often have calcium chloride (not chalk, which is calcium carbonate) added to keep them firm.

And on the subject of meat-eaters stupid questions:

1) Asking questions is never ... okay, rarely ... stupid.

2) Carnivores ask "stupid" questions about vegan dietary habits for the same reason Christians ask stupid questions about kosher laws, or permanent civilians ask military (and former military) types stupid questions about what war, battle, and the military is really like: Because they are wise enough to know what they don't know; and smart enough to try to reduce the general ignorance that usually results in friction among the uninformed.

Huh, I could swear I'd seen it somewhere. Maybe it wasn't canned tomatoes. Maybe I'm just imagining it! (Wouldn't be the first time that's happened.)

U.N. Owen: Actually, the Turtledove story was a about a pig that chewed its cud. It is the fact that pigs have cloven hooves but do not chew the cud that makes them treyf.

Fragano:

Thanks!

Obviously I either misremebered the text or focused on the wrong detail in reading it.

Ulysses: just so you know, there is now, and has been for at least 100 years as a distinct breed, a non-cloven-hoofed pig called the mulefoot hog.

This would, as Fragano points out, make it even LESS kosher, as what you're looking for is "parts the hoof and chews the cud". Giraffes make for an interesting case, as they do indeed have cloven hooves and chew the cud. The length of their necks, however, makes it impractical to perform kosher slaughter correctly; moreover there is not a continuous tradition of giraffe consumption by Jews. (You can google "giraffe kosher" for more info on this topic than anyone wants.)

For cannibalistically inclined vegans, there's always Hufu, the healthy human flesh alternative.

Re: transsubstantiation, eating the consecrated host is not cannibalism, so I'd assume that it's also not carnivorism [ok, probably not a real word]. I don't remember what that exact reason is that it's not cannibalism, but they made a big point of explaining it back in my Catholic school days.

Eve: ... I got some "I want to have your babies" comments from one after making her a vegan chocolate cake that tasted as good as an egg-and-butter one, if not better.

Was she making the same joke, suggesting that your babies would taste as good as the cake? (Were you?)

I'm fine with the cannibalism part of these jokes, but I'm never sure whether the question of whether <ethnic> cuisine is made with real <ethnic> (e.g., Irish stew, Neapolitan ice cream) comes out of my paleface arrogance. At any rate, it's pretty trite.

I spent a couple of years of my childhood growing up next to a dairy farm; they raised all of their surplus calves as veal.

Veal is not a big moneymaker for dairy farmers (Mr. Polk wanted more heifers, and counted it a good year when they outnumbered the bull calves). I understand that with modern herd techniques, the numbers of bull calves born on most dairy farms is going down--most farms use artificial insemination these days, and semen can be sex-sorted via centrifuge.

I wonder if this makes dairy production more vegan as a result?

ajay writes:

There's a little bit of yeshiva bucher in all of us.

(That was a really unfortunate way to put it, given this thread is about, inter alia, cannibalism.)

"Oh, I am a cook and a captain bold,
And the mate of the Nancy brig,
And a bo'sun tight, and a midshipmite,
And the crew of the captain's gig!"

Ulysses: the story is called 'The R-Strain' (r as in ruminant). It's in the collection _Departures_.

Husband used to be vegan; this is before we met. I just IMed this question and I got back:

"CHALK? EW!"

As for why vegans are so thin-skinned, I used to think it was because they weren't getting enough calories to sustain being nice. Now that there are such things as Tofutti Cuties tho' (damn they are addictive), I have no idea.

Re: vegetarian Thanksgiving: be thankful you never had Tofurkey. We did that once. ONCE. Now it's butternut squash ravioli with roasted garlic and a sage cream sauce.

Veal, yes. The problem with raising dairy steers for beef is that they're not bred to fatten as efficiently and so will grade lower at slaughter unless held longer on feed, which lowers the profit margin one way or the other.

A few years ago, anyway, there was some interest in switching to what's known as "hair sheep" to specialize in lamb because the price of wool was so low that shearing didn't pay for itself. I haven't heard anything about it lately but that may be related either to an actual change or to my place in the information food chain these days.

Just a note that I have a really close friend who's vegetarian, mostly for health reasons. If we eat out, we always go somewhere veggie friendly (usualy Indian, Thai or a veggie specialty place) and I seldom order meat dishes so we can share.

He's a cheese freak, though so he manages to look past animal rennet and recoginzes that he's probably eaten fish sauce and lard unsuspectingly as well.

It's an imperfect world. And yes, anyone who knowingly sneaks meat products into food intended for a vegetarian should be horse-whipped. (With a plant-fiber whip.)

Argh.

I really hate the term "veggie."

Besides being vague (it is used to refer to vegetables and vegetarians), it is too damn cutesy for my taste.

I have the same problem with pet owners who say that their cat "pottied" on the carpet, or that little Snookum's potty training (meaning, taking dumps on the lawn, not in a pot) is coming along just fine.

Mary Dell: Re: transsubstantiation, eating the consecrated host is not cannibalism, so I'd assume that it's also not carnivorism [ok, probably not a real word][*]. I don't remember what that exact reason is that it's not cannibalism, but they made a big point of explaining it back in my Catholic school days.

Just as my pagan friends make a big point of having a religion that doesn't practice ritual cannibalism. Anyway, if it's not cannibalism, it's theophagy--is that any more moral?

Another take is that the god is nourished by the sacrament, so the communicant is the one being eaten. I'm not worthy, I'm not food, and I'm not going.

Re: vegetarian Thanksgiving: be thankful you never had Tofurkey. We did that once. ONCE. Now it's butternut squash ravioli with roasted garlic and a sage cream sauce.

If God wanted people to eat fake meat, He wouldn't have given us beans or eggplant.

The problem with raising dairy steers for beef

There are breeds with both dairy and beef strains (shorthorns are the first coming to mind; my grandfather had a dairy with milking shorthorns). I've heard that dairy cows may end up becoming ground beef; the cows apparently are only milk producers for five or so years in the big-dairy world.

The real genius of Tofurky is the Tofurky Jurky fake-jerky "wishstix" that comes with the "Tofurky feast". When vegans can participate in even a pseudo-wishbone-ritual, we are all one.

Me? I'm an ovo-lacto-pesco-carno-vegetarian.

Gah. Tofurkey is some nasty stuff. As is Wheat Meat, Chicken-Style--worst molé experiment ever. But we had really good luck one year with a Quorn "roast" that I put in the oven per the carton directions, but basted with herbs-in-olive-oil. Since then, I've become really fond of Quorn's stuff. Wish I could find it, rather than Satan's Chicken (aka Morningstar Farms), at my regular supermarket.

My mother is of the "keeping pets is cruel" way of thinking--I'd never encountered the notion until she dropped it on me (she still eats meat, though--clearly I will never understand). I still don't really see it that way; domestication seems to my mind like a contractual thing, between us and plants, as well as us and animals.

I also eat white sugar, which stricter vegans wouldn't, as it's refined using charcoal, i.e. animal bones.

At one point before I decided it was Dumb And I Would Starve Anyway, I thought about post-apocalyptic blacksmithing. Which would require, in the absence of nearby coal, large amounts of charcoal. I was pretty sure you made it out of wood. And, apparently, mostly you do.

Wikipedia says that animal charcoal, or "bone black" is in fact usable for decolorizing sugar, it says that mostly they use something else these days.

And today I learned something.

People who ask questions about the vegan-ness of food in a non-vegan restaurant are often there because they are eating out with a non-vegan friend.

I was once out with a vegan friend who explained carefully to our waiter that she was vegan and did not eat any animal products at all. She carefully ordered from the menu, asking the waiter about preparation to be sure what kind of fats were being used in what appeared to be vegan side dishes.

When the food came, it was all covered in cheese. No where on the menu did it say that the food (broiled tomatos, sauted spinach, and french fries) would be covered in cheese. We sent the food back multiple times, and everything that came out of the kitchen had cheese on it. The manager finally came over, and professed extreme confusion as to why someone would order the food if they didn't want cheese. arrrgh.

What kind of restaurant was it, Beth?

(I'm picturing a place on the edge of a mall parking lot called The Minnesota Velveeta Kitchen.)

I'm a Wiccan (that's a species of Pagan) and I've been a vegetarian since 1978. An ovo-lacto-vegetarian. I generally ignore the question of rennet. I take gelcap pills when nothing else is available.

I am not vegetarian for fluffy-bunny reasons. I think fluffy-bunny vegetarians are silly. Humans kill other creatures in order that we may live. That's part of being human; deal with it. People who think it's "wrong to kill" can come to me when they've learned to photosynthesize! And what, pray tell, gives a chicken more of a right to live than a broccoli plant, which has approximately the same level of sentience?

I've written before, here and elsewhere, that if I had to choose between an ancient tree and a cute little kitten, I'd kill the kitten without hesitation (but not, of course, without guilt).

As for RCC "cannibalism," the way I've had it explained to me, the host becomes the DIVINE body (this is the 'host' as in 'of a parasite' or 'of a Guest', not as in 'a multitude of the heavenly'), and the wine the DIVINE blood. Jesus was 100% human AND 100% divine, remember; it's one of their Mysteries. (This explanation strikes me as nonsense, though: He said "this is My body, broken for you." The divine body was never broken, was it? That was the human body. So I think it doesn't hold up; but that's the explanation I've heard.)

In any case, it's certainly theophagy. I see nothing at all immoral about theophagy. (Especially in the case of Christianity, where the deity specifically directed them to "do this in remembrance of me." Can't be immoral if the deity gives informed consent...with extreme prejudice, as it were!) Of course, I'd bloody well (npi) better not see anything wrong with theophagy, since as a Radical Pantheist that would leave me with nothing, whatsoever, that I could eat. Not even sand.

We practice theophagy explicitly and literally. One could argue that it's even more literal than the way the RCC does it, since there's no miracle involved; the bread is The God before the wheat is even harvested. And it's literally and materially His body we consume. If we form bread into the likeness of a man with antlers, before tearing Him up in a maenad frenzy and devouring Him, that's only to make it more obvious to our deeper mind that that's what we're doing.

These days I'm a vegetarian for two reasons. The minor reason is that when I get small amounts of meat by accident (the last one was in early 2001; bits of prosciutto mixed in with the bits of tomato skin in a pasta dish), I tend to vomit and have other signs of severe digestive distress.

The major reason is that when I consult my inner voice, and consider, say, tuna, it says NO WAY. Eating meat outright is geas to me. So count me as vegetarian "for religious reasons," I guess.

I had a friend in college who was a fruititarian. She ended up dropping out to spend a year in a mental hospital and was never seen or heard of since. It was a form of obsessive compulsiveness, I think. She nearly died from it, because of the crazy rules she had made for what she could and could not eat.

I find vegetarians in general to have a very poor sense of humour about vegetarianism with people who they think are not vegetarians. As I spent many years being a mostly stealth vegetarian (I didn't see why anybody needed to know my criteria for what I ate unless they were cooking it), I got a lot of it. The best was when somebody chewed me out for eating a vegetarian meal with them "because you're just patronizing me."

I also find non-vegetarians to be very defensive about vegetarianism, especially in situations where they are eating a lot of meat (barbeque restaurants). As if I care what you eat.

I think we need to spend less time looking at each other's plates and judging them and more time eating.

I think we need to spend less time looking at each other's plates and judging them and more time eating.

Hear hear!

Now please pass the carrots.

Xopher: A small point: Jesus said "This is my body, which is given for you." Both the divine and human bodies were given. OTOH, the host is broken after it's consecrated, which is probably significant of something-or-other.

May depend on the church. I've definitely heard 'broken for you' at All Saints Episcopal. I'm not sure if that's a difference in theology or just phrasing.

I think we need to spend less time looking at each other's plates and judging them and more time eating.
Ayse, I agree. I'm probably the polar opposite of a vegan, since I low-carb. But I don't talk about it much since I notice non-low carbers do get defensive. They make comments like "I couldn't possibly live without bread/potatoes/rice/whatever." Or they attack ("your kidneys will fall out", "your cholesterol will sky-rocket.", etc). And really, who needs contentious conversion while eating?

conversion
conversation.
sorry.

Then they're...not following the rules I've been taught. I'll stop now, except to say that I'm squicked in the original sense of the word.

At the masses I've attended the priest has always said "This is My Body, which has been given up for you."

I hear Pope Benedict wants a new translation of the mass done anyway, so maybe it will change again.

There are breeds with both dairy and beef strains (shorthorns are the first coming to mind; my grandfather had a dairy with milking shorthorns). I've heard that dairy cows may end up becoming ground beef; the cows apparently are only milk producers for five or so years in the big-dairy world.

All this is true. There are actual dual-purpose breeds; my grandfather had Devons, but before I was old enough to know anything about it they had graded over to Herefords because they offered more efficient beef production.

However, while I forget the numbers (one could Google American Livestock Breeds Conservancy), virtually all dairy cattle world-wide are the exceedingly single-purpose Holstein-Friesian ("a legal way to water the milk" as Richard Lewontin put it). And the eventual fate of dairy cows is a question apart from how bull calves are dealt with.

In the interests of full disclosure, it's also possible to cross-breed beef sires on Holstein dams, which are larger-framed and calve more easily--but in those circumstances a) there are no replacement dairy heifers, everything goes to beef; and b) some at least of the cow's milk production is diverted to get the calf on a good start to growing.

Ayse: too right.

My husband (hereafter Ian) prefers a vegetarian diet and is healthiest (physically and ethically) on one.

I'm a carnivore, and healthiest (physically) that way, at least partly because I have a peanut allergy. You cannot manage a peanut allergy and exclude meat, eggs and dairy (three large categories which fairly reliably are NOT prepared with or near nuts) and have any sort of a life, not when you need a lot of protein and have trouble eating enough food as it is.

... as you can probably imagine, we've had every sort of food joke there is, and a few long ethical discussions/debates/fights.

Somebody mentioned the gestural issue, and that's very real. We want to be doing things that actually make a difference or why bother? And I TOTALLY get the chalk question. If you ignore all the little shit, you end up undercutting your larger choices.

Our current compromise is that we buy halves directly from local ethical and organic farmers; there's part of a sheep and part of a pig in the freezer right now, and that's our meat.

I buy less organic food to buy more local food.

Decisions, decisions... but in the end I'd rather eat SW Ontario produce all winter and agitate to make conditions safer and better for the workers in a place I control and buy CSA in the summer than have impeccably organic produce trucked in from all over.

Also, the best vegan chocolate cake I have ever had comes from of all things the I Hate To Cook Book. She calls it Cockeyed Cake, and it is wonderful.

The last con I went to, the restaurant was full of peanutty desserts and things. I ended up quietly eating pot roast and plain salad, very specially done for me by the wonderful cook, and nobody said a WORD, bless them.

I'll cheerfully talk about food all day, but I hate doing it over dinner. :)

For what it's worth, the King James version has (I Cor. 11.24):

And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me.

I've always heard variants of that in Catholic masses as well, and I think it must be in the standard Eucharistic portion of the service (as I used to follow along as a kid, and I reckon I would have noticed). But I don't know what the Greek says. In any case, as a vegetarian and lapsed Catholic, I have never had any problem with theophagy.

As for chalk, isn't it a standard component of ordinary antacid tablets? I'm pretty sure I've eaten it. But can chalk be digested? Does it count if not? Possibly the theophagy works in the same way, or perhaps all those eucharistic hosts have enabled me to become partially divine.

And when it comes to rennet: well, I eat cheese, but I feel vaguely guilty about it.

One theory I read [1] about why vegetarians/nonvegetarians get so up in arms about these things is that food is a strong component of acceptance, in nearly every culture.

In my youth, I didn't drink wine, beer, coffee, or tea. Some people get VERY uncomfortable when they offer you a drink [2] and you say "no thanks." It's part of the hospitality process. Likewise, sitting down to a meal together is important, in some way, in almost every culture [3]. "Breaking bread", for instance.

So the idea is, when someone rejects your food they are rejecting your society [in the micro OR macro view.] It may be a universally recognized thing, like facial expressions- after all, rounding off, all humans have always been hungry all the time.

Hmm. I wonder if that's why pretty much every date involves eating?

[1] Possibly an issue of Granta?
[2] Any sort of drink. They calmed down when I accepted water.
[3] For this factoid, I have only the article for support.

Syllogism time:

A vegetarian is someone who eats vegetables.

I am a humanitarian.

...

Oops, I take that back. The Eucharistic rites that I can find online all have "given for you", so evidently I'm misremembering. Sorry.

What I think I have in my head is the hymn:

This is my body, broken for you
Bringing you wholeness, making you free
Take it and eat it, and when you do
Do it in love for me.

We certainly sang *that* in Catholic mass.

"Right about the calving. The bull calves aren't "put down". Well, not on the dairy farms I've known. They are sold - for pet food, I've always assumed."

I know that I'm just not sure what you guys call bobby calves (also my friend lives on a goat farm and they really do kill most of their bucks as soon as they're born, mostly for dog tucker).

if we could vat-grow human flesh with no (or effectively very little) cost to other lifeforms, would vegans eat it?

If it were grown in a vat instead of being taken from humans, would it be human flesh? Does its chemical composition determine its humanness, or its source?

cows need to calve to start producing milk. There's a 50% chance that they'll produce a bull calf which (as with any non-productive animal on a farm) will just about certainly be put down.

Huh what? A quick google got me this primer for basic bovine info.

Greg

"You city folk! You spend 50 weeks a year getting knots in your rope, then you think two weeks up here will straighten it out."

first four paragraphs, anyway...

The Words of Institution in the older Western and Eastern liturgies are not derived from the Gospel texts, but have independent traditions stretching back to the first century, so exact agreement between the words as given in the Synoptics or in I Corinthians will not be found. The relation is, in fact, the other way: the Synoptic versions are probably affected by the liturgical use of the institution narrative.

Some post-Reformation rites draw directly on one form or another of scriptural text. Thus the Anglican "Prayer of Consecration" is directly influenced by the form in Paul.

The Gregorian Canon, normative in the West, has only "Hoc est enim corpus meum" for the bread/body, with no expansion of the form "which is...". The form for the blood has "qui pro vobis et pro multis effundetur", "which is shed for you and for many".

The only proper way to eat chalk is with a very yellow cheese product the way god and Wal-Mart intended. It is completely moral if you are a dominant member of the carnivorous christian food chain. It's in the bible.

Sandy: My very favourite anthropologist in the wide wide world, Marie Francoise Guedon, once said flatly in class: "People are animals that share their food." [1]

Since she avoids cross-cultural generalisations like the plague usually, I sat up very straight and began to pay very close attention indeed.

[1] She wasn't restricting that to 'humans', I do not think. Some animals share their food. Oddly, we don't eat most of them. Unconscious recognition?

And I, too, twitch uncontrollably until my guests accept some form of food or drink. I shall remember about water.

Re. the taste of human flesh:

"It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal. It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have."

--William Bueller Seabrook, journalist. In 1931, after having been surreptitiously served mere ape by a group of suspicious Africans, he resolved the issue once and for all by obtaining a portion of fresh cadaver from a hospital near the Sorbonne in Paris.

Charlie Stross wrote:

Syllogism time:

A vegetarian is someone who eats vegetables.

I am a humanitarian.

...

... You eat humanitables?

Is it me, or is this a case where we could actually produce vat-grown chalk as an exact substitute for organic chalk?

Marna, who are the "we"? I worked for someone who had been a Navy spook, who said that there were restaurants in Spain he was certain served cat. I had a coworker from China who had grown up eating meat that included dog and considers it a tasty food.

There's a breed of dog in Korea bred as people food. Etc.

Clifton: I think you mean semi-sapient.

Animals are certainly sentient.

Plants are semi-sentient(as they react to stimuli).

Consecrated bread is not cannibalism because it's bread. No matter what some sects "believe" about it (ie. transubstantiation), it's still bread. Faith doesn't suspend chemistry. Symbolism isn't reality.

If I make a baby-shaped cookie and moan, "mmm, that's good baby!" while I eat it, even if I believe what I'm saying, it's still a cookie.

Anna: the bull calf will be sold to a cattle farmer, who will castrate it, and slaughter it for meat, so it won't be put down, out of hand (or at least not right away, depending on how one defines, "out of hand.").

(The things I learn being in a house with two large animal science students).

Marna: What about other legumes? India has lots of vegetarians who eat no peanuts.

Lentils (all the varities of dal) soy, mung, peas, pinto, kidney... the list of beans is huge.

On a different note, one of my favorite menu errors was in a Thai place in the San Fernando Valley, the Sanamluang Cafe. "Steamed Vegetarians over Rice."

Dairy cattle do make the best hamburger. The age (5-7 years) and (for those which get pasturage) extra excercise, make them far more flavorful.

There are still (though small) herds of things like Ayreshire, and Dutch Belted, and Swiss Brown, etc., which are used more for cheese and ice cream (having a higher butterfat then the Holseins and Jersey which produce milk so copiusly).

On a different note again, I spent, That Tuesday, helping to milk the cows at the LA County Fair (which was closed) because what the hell did they care that people were blowing up buildings in New York.

Somewhere in Lynn Pan's Sons of the Yellow Emperor, there's a discussion of the Chinese coolies who were brought to Cuba to work the sugar plantations, as well as a quote from one man (via either the subsequent hearings or despairing graffiti from their barracks; I don't recall which at the mo) that after they were worked to death, their bones would be mixed with animals' to be burned into charcoal for refining sugar, and so no trace or memory could ever be returned to their home villages to show what had become of them.

On a happier(?) note, iirc it's been occasionally proposed that human placentas would be morally acceptable for vegetarians to eat. Whether they're culinarily acceptable is an entirely different question. Also, I've definitely seen "vegan silk" somewhere that's said to be harvested from cocoons that were allowed to hatch, though it looks a lot slubbier because of all the joins between short broken segments, which must be a pain to unwind.

Re: vegetarian diets

I'm always bewildered by those who must analyze another's diet and pass judgement. When it comes to food, I listen to my body. Sometimes, it says NO MEAT!!! and doesn't want it for weeks at a time. This was most extreme during weeks 8-16 of pregnancy: my body didn't just have no interest in meat, but I threw up foods that even just contained meat juices/flavoring. Luckily, it was quite happy with vegetarian sources of protein and I shifted to those until the revulsion passed (well, it still hasn't completely passed, although I've had some meat longings in the past two weeks). Though I had to ignore those all around me who were perfectly horrified that a pregnant woman would chose to give up meat.

When throwing larger parties, I always try to have a protein-heavy vegetarian dish prepared without any immediate cross-contamination (I don't have a separate set of knives/cutting boards/pots, but everything used to prepare the dish is well-washed beforehand and the preparation takes place in a separate area of the kitchen than any meat prep). Most meat-eaters will eat a vegetarian dish as a side dish without a complaint (or notice), and most vegetarians are happy that there's something that they can eat as a main dish. I just try to keep the dish carefully separated from any meat dishes so that spoons, etc don't accidently get used for both types.

Crosius, the question is whether Roman Catholics, who believe in literal transubstantiation as a matter of doctrine, necessarily have to believe they're being cannibals. I don't think they really ARE cannibals; the question is whether they believe it.

mayakda, I'm a low-carb vegetarian. Wanna talk about "how do you live" conversations?

Way, waaayy up the thread, someone said:

(I assume the real answer has something to do with that "a dog wouldn't eat it, therefore it's no longer food" rule.)

Having known a beagle that ate feces, plastic CDs, garden hoses, cardboard boxes, an entire garbage can, light bulbs, and big blobs of road tar -- with predictable effects on the fecal products the next morning -- this gives me real pause.

And I thought I'd add these guys to the pie, so to speak:
Breatharianism

The leader claims to have lived for 20 years on Prana, light and air alone. Unless she's green and leafy, I somehow doubt this.

Xopher :
Clearly, Catholics (and other sects that believe in transub.) do not consider themselves cannibals, because they condemn the practice of cannibalism, but not the eucharist.

Also, the rest of the world does not consider eating bread wafers cannibalism.

So everyone should be in agreement: hosts!=cannibalism.

Which happens to be correct, because bread!=human flesh.

If there are any Christians out there who do believe they are cannibals, they are crazy (or more crazy, depending on your view of christianity).

If there are any non-Christians out the who do believe Christians are cannibals, then they'd have to at least credit the "miracle" of transub. as a real phenomena - which would be tantamount to recognizing the power of the christian god, which is pretty irrational for a non-christian.

Faith doesn't suspend chemistry.

But it can move mountains...

Although I suppose that is not much more than mere manipulation of the Newtonian world. Now if it could change mountains into chocolate mousse, that really *would* be a faith worth having.

On a different note, one of my favorite menu errors was in a Thai place in the San Fernando Valley, the Sanamluang Cafe. "Steamed Vegetarians over Rice."

Cambridge, MA, 1980: "Human Baby Shrimp".

Way upthread:

I guess it really depends on how "far" the elements have to be from passing through an animal form. Anything you eat is going to contain atoms that at one time were part of an animal.

No kidding. Plants are not vegetarians.

Vegetarian silk is raw silk or silk noil, for which the silkworms are allowed to escape from the cocoons. It has a nice texture which I prefer to the smoother silks. It is readily available; lots of new silkworms will be needed, after all, I guess.

Faith does not suspend chemistry.

Nor does transubstantiation, which is the position that although the accidents of the bread and wine remain the same, the substance becomes the substance of the body and blood of Christ. The idea of the chemistry changing would be transaccidentation, which has been occasionally asserted as a miracle (mainly in the Middle Ages -- visions of the host changing into a little baby) but which is certainly not a normal theological position on the eucharist.

The substance/accident distinction is not one which applies to modern science, but a category distinction within Aristotelian and Scholastic philosophy (much as science restricts itself to efficient causation only, leaving formal, material, and final causes to the philosophers).

The mediaeval discussions of the real presence certainly push the idea of the eucharist fairly close to a specialized form of ritual cannibalism -- "the boody flesh our only food", as Eliot puts it in East Coker. I'm not sure that it shouldn't be considered a form of ritual cannibalism.

I describe myself as a ritual cannibal.

Part of this is for shock value, part of it is the rearing, in which there were great amounts of discussion (in catechism, and in bull sessions with fellow students; prior to first communion, and confirmation) about the nature of the transubstantiation.

My mother was told she couldn't chew the host, as that was defiling the body, and flesh of Christ. She had to let it dissolve on her tongue and swallow it.

I have heard people declaim (and some of them people I would think to know better, in that they were nuns, or catechists, charged with teaching the ignorant) that once the host/wine was in the stomach it was converted to actual flesh and blood, which could be revealed in an autopsy (though experimental bulemia was described as a sin, and a lack of faith/heretical testing of God).

I may not think of myself as an actual cannibal, but certainly as a ritual one.

And I don't think that makes me crazy (but then, I wouldn't).

TK

DonBoy, I'm soooo glad I didn't have a mouthful of fluid when I was reading down this thread. (even though just about everyone know i have a splashproof keyboard, my new laptop is fairly in range too...).And ghu knows I've seen worse. Especially in Chinese restaurants, for some strange reason.

"Dairy cattle do make the best hamburger. The age (5-7 years) and (for those which get pasturage) extra excercise, make them far more flavorful.

There are still (though small) herds of things like Ayreshire, and Dutch Belted, and Swiss Brown, etc., which are used more for cheese and ice cream (having a higher butterfat then the Holseins and Jersey which produce milk so copiously)."

My grandpa raised Ayreshires, and we used to be able to buy tubs of Ayreshire butter locally too. Best thing I've EVER had on bread.
And the best hamburger I ever had came from a dairy cow.

All this talk about the variation of milk by breed of cattle makes me wonder if this is why dairy products in Europe taste so much better. I've always thought it was pasture-feeding and less processing.

Not all vegetarians are "crunchy" hippie stereotypes. Seventh-Day Adventists are vegetarians. My father, who is Asian-American, grew up in a SDA family in California and attended SDA schools. Unfortunately, at this time (1950s) most of the SDAs in this area were white-bread Anglo-Saxons. He still tells horror stories of the food at his college. Meals were heavy on meat substitutes made from TVP (textured vegetable protein). He developed an aversion to "beige food" and couldn't wait to get home.

Since he also became an atheist (no, I don't think it was just because of the food; he is a biologist) I've had no opportunity to see if SDA food has improved.

the Holseins and Jersey which produce milk so copiously

Well, not to be picky, but the Jersey produces relatively small quantities of especially rich milk; the Guernsey used to be popular because it offered intermediate quantity and butterfat.

I would suggest a Slow Food site as a start for sources on detailed treatment of the interaction between breed and environment, but the underlying notion is that terroir is just as real for other foodstuffs as it is for wine.

There was also a Japanese ascetic tradition of an entirely tree-based diet; I can't find my book refs at the mo, but there's an overview here. In the mildest (and long-term sustainable) form, cultivated grains and vegetables were eliminated, allowing only foraged leaves and nuts/seeds. In the more intensive form, as part of a process of literal, intentional self-mummification, this would narrow down to pine needles and bark, culminating with drinking toxic sap.

Strangely, this gives me a craving for maple syrup.

cmk - Perhaps terroir plays a role, but in the US, most milk is produced locally yet it tastes the same from Maine to San Deigo and from Seattle to Miami. Even organic milk.

Julie L - I'm reminded of the old jokes about Euell Gibbons (sp?) and the eating of bark, twigs and leaves.

I think you have to break the chalk before you eat it, too.

Even organic milk.

Well, for an extreme example, back in the day, cattle used to graze on wild onions in the spring, with unfortunate consequences for the milk. Carotene was low in winter feed, and butter would be pale. Nowadays rations are pretty much uniform, even if organic, and despite the California cheese commercials, few commercial dairy cows have access to pasture. Local and seasonal variation are ironed out.

But I did invoke the interaction of breed with environment--not suggesting that it doesn't exist.

I'm not a Catholic, but if I was I think I'd take comfort in the knowledge that Jesus freely offered his body and blood, and moreover instructed his disciples to continue in rememberance of him. This is not true of most animals.

To continue the discussion about how cranky people get about other people questioning their diet, I've heard that particular one many, many times, and I've noticed a difference in the questioners' tone.

Some people are genuinely curious or fascinated, and I can understand that. I feel the same way about kosher cooking. But some other people very clearly seem to be asking the question with the intention of catching one out, and that's really annoying.

I don't try to convert people to veganism, so what's it to them if my diet's inconsistent or even outright hypocritical? It suits me, and I'm the one eating it.

candle said: "And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me.

I've always heard variants of that in Catholic masses as well, and I think it must be in the standard Eucharistic portion of the service (as I used to follow along as a kid, and I reckon I would have noticed). But I don't know what the Greek says."

That's a reasonable translation, though the Greek doesn't take as many words to say it. The verb that's being translated as "break" is eklasen, and it's really the only appropriate meaning in this context. It can mean a few other things in different contexts, but "give" is not one of them.

Turtledove may have been inspired by the brief flurry of stories some years ago about the babirusa, an wild pig from ~Indonesia that has a multi-chamber stomach (brief Googling finds claims of both 2 and 3 chambers, not as many as cows (4) but more than standard pigs). One conclusion at the time was that they might be kosher in a few million years, but the current version doesn't actually chew the cud.

While digging for this, I found a page on Zootorah which contradicts above comments on giraffes, saying that we know exactly how to slaughter them but they're too expensive.

Going back to the original topic, a story some years ago about a large local gelatin plant (owned by General Foods, so it was a major supplier for Jell-o(tm)) said that their product had been declared kosher regardless of the original source of the protein or process of getting it because it had been so heavily processed as to remove any treyf taint. IANAR, but it seems to me the same could apply to chalk.

"Vegetarian silk" is sometimes used for rayon, aka "art silk." Raw silk is silk that hasn't had the sericin washed off. The silk thread made from cocoons that have been killed (i.e. boiled) is called "filament silk," and I'm pretty sure it's mostly used in embroidery--it certainly costs more than other kinds of thread. Thread made from hatched cocoons is called "spun silk." Finally, "tussah silk" or "wild silk" is made from a different breed of worms, and it's a different color and texture. Or so I've heard; I've never stitched with it, and I've only seen it in knitting catalogues. (Here endeth the pedantry.)