Meat Monologues Part 3: Hug a Vegetable

Lest it come across like I am vegan-bashing today, let me just get this part out. I'm an omnivore. I still eat meat. I'm going to have hot dogs in an hour, actually. I have cut back on my meat intake. Are vegans and vegetarians greener eaters than I? Yes, of course. Over and above, no question. I fully freely admit that. (I would question some of your items for their packaging, but that something else for another time.) I give it up to them. And generally my posts are not aimed at vegans because they are already doing good stuff for the species. If I lash out sometimes, it's against the militant ones, not the ones I personally know and like lots. And in these recent posts, I was just getting stuff out of my head that had been rumbling around in there.

But I do have one question that whispers when I look at vegan food. What's UP with all the imitation food??? Fake meat, fake bacon, fake cheese, fake burgers... if I didn't know better, I'd say you were envious of "our" food. Your magazine industry recently took a hit for using real meat products in their photos, to look all appetizing etc. The vegan I most respect is a raw food vegan, John McCabe. He has written several books on the topic (http://www.amazon.com/John-McCabe/e/B001K81LGI/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1306797776&sr=8-1), and they are good. He doesn't go for all that fake, processed, maybe-I'm-meat stuff. He goes for real actual food. If I did it, I think I would do it like that.

Why you gotta copy our stuff? Do you miss it that much? Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery... nuh-uh. If you don't want to eat bacon, why you gotta eat something that tries to taste like bacon? If you don't wanna eat cow, why you try so hard to make it seem like cow? Chicken? Whatever? If you are so into non-meat, why not just eat what isn't meat or near-meat or wannabe-meat?

I understand John. I don't understand the other part. He's the greenest eater I know, with the other raw food vegans. Will I do it? I don't know. Not now and not in the foreseeable future. But is that the way I would do it? I think so. If I'm gonna not eat meat, I'm not going to tease myself with not-meat-but-sure-trying-to-be processed FOODSTUFFS. I would be a consumer of fruits and vegetables and grains and nuts and whatever wasn't meat or anything like meat.

Just sayin'. Just another one of those things that makes me wonder. Now, where's that BBQ?