Strawmans ho! Honestly if my diet consisted of sustenance living (hermit or third world country) I wouldn't be vege. As it turns out I live in a first world society in which has a vast excess of food. Meat is a completely unrequired for me to reach my dietary requirements (even being vege I exceed what I require).
You really don't understand the philosophy behind veganism at all if you think it is fine for them to eat free range eggs - I suggest you read over the Macrumors threads and do some googling.
I didn't say it was fine for vegans to eat free range eggs. I said, by the reasoning people were using in this thread to not eat eggs, free range eggs should be exempt. As I said in my first paragraph, i think there are good reasons to be a vegan.
If it makes you miserable not to go to McDonalds (once a year) or have a hotdog that's fine. That's just how you weigh up your priorities. Understand that for some people foregoing fast-food is a small price to pay to relieve the suffering of animals from their consumption.
My point is that, what difference does it make if you lower the threshold a little. I believe it's much more reasonable for food activists (and I include myself in that category), to push people to reduce their meat consumption, reduce consumption. I didn't mean it as a personal affront, more as an appeal to people to not feel like, "well there's no freakin way I can give up meat, so i'm just gonna not think about the things that are important to vegans and vegetarians." Because it's not that simple. In fact, it's ridic to think that way. ANd it's the same level of ridic IMVVVHO, to say that, "well all people who eat meat are too heartless to see how crappy the meat industry in our country is." Why? Because your slamming the door in the face of people who truly cannot imagine not eating meat every day. And the difference between someone who is a vegan except for the fact that they eat their favorite brand of cookie, even though there are traces of dairy in it, and a person who is a 100% pure, saluting Member of the Vegan Party (not all vegans are, but many), is negligible. Practically nil. It's not us and them. It's people making the largest commitment they feel comfortable making.
My longwinded point here, and in my first post, is that the larger picture is general reduction of consumption of this stuff. I don't see a big difference between eating a little meat and eating no meat, but when you declare yourself vegan, you take up that philosophy, you make it into a dichotomy that really, in my head, makes the issue much more divisive than it has to be, and is counterproductive to the greater goal.
I'm also a bit surprised that someone who claims to have worked in a vegan supermarket doesn't know that gluten comes from wheat.
Meant gelatin, and as a vegan, I would hope you would be able to put that together.
Another strawman. Being a vege/vegan doesn't take over your life. I get all the food I need from the supermarket. No harder than when I ate meat.
Well, it kind of does. I dated a vegan for two years. You go to dinner at someone's place, you have to make sure that they have vegan food prepared. You go out to dinner, you are lucky if you have more than a few choices. You go to work, you better have taken the time in the morning to prepare some food. You go on a road trip, you become particularly limited, because yeah, you can go to a grocery store and pick up something, but you can't cook. It's fine if you're one of those insular vegans who only associates with other vegans, but it can be very difficult when all the people around you live a certain lifestyle, that is, eat a certain way, go eat places, live their lives without having to always have a food contingency plan. All these things sound small, but worst case scenarios occur more often than you might imagine, and when you get stuck in sitch where you can't get any real food for 12 hours or whatev, you get pretty irritated, your night sucks. Is it the end of the world? Can you adjust to it? Are vegans happy and healthy? Of course. But it requires a certain discipline and a great deal of commitment.
