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Comment by pharke | Hacker News Reader

That doesn't seem to be a pure invalidation. Food that is not vegetarian is not the only food served to non-vegetarians since most people prefer a variety of meat and non-meat options when dining. Add to that the way food is prepared and served as separate dishes and that most vegetarians don't have a hard rule about not eating food that was near meat or slightly in contact with meat. It's easy enough to provide options for everyone when serving dinner or stocking a store so it is not necessary to make special affordances for vegetarians.

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His argument is not that minorities are also provided options suitable to them when it is economical to do so. He makes a much stronger claim -- that minority preferences will "win".

He supports this by using the anecdotes about how airlines don't serve peanuts and how he had a social encounter where only kosher food was served. And from these two incidents, he jumps to the claim that "Europe will eat halal."

Notice he doesn't make the claim that Europe will increasingly offer halal food as an option. That would be a plausible result of having more Muslims in Europe and would in fact be equivalent to the Indian scenario where people are given a choice of vegetarian as well as meat options. But he says Europe will eat halal! If that were true, we should've seen India eat only vegetarian food given we have way more vegetarians than Europe has Muslims and yet that has not happened. Is this because Indian vegetarians -- of which I am one -- are uniquely tolerant, or is it because he is absurdly overstating his case? I think it's the latter.

Neither halal-approved meat nor kosher-approved lemonade fundamentally change the taste and appearance the consumed product. The only costs to providing those options are an extra non-governmental "tax" in how the food is processed, regulated, and approved, and that cost is much less than the cost of not selling to those will only consume kosher/halal, or providing a second set of approved options to them.

There's no such thing as kosher/halal pork, and no such thing as vegetarian-approved filet mignon steak. People who can will still eat their pork and beef, rather than succumbing to the no-pork, no-meat practices of the minorities.

I think we're both saying the same things.

I said in my response to abiro that "easily accommodated minority preferences are often accommodated". Which is obviously true.

But that is a very inane and obvious claim, and not at all what NNT is saying. He claims the minority will "win" and that is not a claim he's able to support in any meaningful way. Unless we're redefining the the word "win" to mean something totally new and different, I think he's overstating his case.

A meat eater can’t tell the difference between halal and non halal.

They can tell the difference between a veggie burger and meat burger.

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