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Comment by sremani | Hacker News Reader

The way the US society discourages vegetarianism (even for people who a traditionally vegetarian) is mind boggling. When you ask for a vegetarian option, one would be lucky if he does not get stared like a space alien, esp. in the country.

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Eh. Blame the FDR administration: the US's institutionalized focus on standardization, commoditization, and industrialized processing above all other facets of agriculture (like nutrition and taste) has left us with a glut of bland vegetables that no one really wants to eat.

Culturally people who are vegetarians in practice just ask for a salad or whatever and are good with it. The public self identifier of vegetarian has been stolen by folks who engage in intense proselytizing. So culturally people don't know how to react to people who self identify as vegetarians... are they "cool" in which case they can play it cool and friendly in response, or is the slogan shouting and poster waving about to start in which case they might have to contact security ... so it creates that awkwardness you mention. Some folks tolerate or support the proselytizing, maybe because they like watching the world burn, who knows.

By analogy, imagine if it was "normal" culturally if when a non-member is at a church for a friends wedding or whatever for that non-member to break out into a string of religious slurs about the members and attempt aggressive recruitment into the non-members religion. You can totally imagine in a society like that, if you're in a catholic church and tell people you're an evang, they'll recoil in horror and start worrying if security will need to evict you. Because most people act a little more civilized in church, most of the time no one freaks out when they discover a non-member attends.

This sounds like the South Park strawman of vegetarianism and its advocates.

Interestingly, I was listening to a vegan friend complaining about exactly that this week - that he finds the vegan community itself nearly insufferable due to smugness and proselytizing. He's vegan for religious reasons, but doesn't want to impose his faith on anyone else and doesn't feel it makes him superior. Sadly, not true of many vegans.

My daughter, a budding chef and foodie with many vegan friends, gets a lot of grief over it too. For her part, she's trying to get the vegans to eat decent food, as most of the ones she knows eat what she calls "vegan junk food" - factory products rather than actual cooking of fresh ingredients.

so vegans are smug and proselytizing, and your non-vegan daughter goes around calling what they eat junk food, trying to get them to switch diets.

interesting.

I don't think you understand. She tries to teach them to cook good vegan food. She totally respects their choice to be vegan. She worries that they're eating factory food from a box rather than something more natural and healthier. She would never, ever try to make a vegan break their veganism. She will make them food that is tastier and more nutritious than what they normally eat, but is still vegan.

I don't think you understand. She is trying to get them to eat something different (proselytizing), for reasons that she believes are important and true, even though they don't currently agree with her themselves (smug).

Sounds a lot like ethical vegans to me.

It's one thing to try to make people better at their own diet, and another thing to try to make them choose another diet. Not all help is proselytizing. There's a TREMENDOUS difference between "I understand you're a vegan, here's some homemade lentil stew that's better for you than the potato chips you're eating", and "You are a filthy murderer for eating that burger!", or "You're a stupid pansy who needs to eat a burger!"

If you can't understand that distinction...

That's not the difference between proselytizing and not proselytizing, that's a difference in how you go about it.

If you want to make the case that your daughter is a really nice proselytizer for healthy eating, and that vegetarians are really awful, we can just compare anecdata.

You went out of your way to quote second-hand sources for "filthy murderer" vegans, suggesting it hasn't been your experience. How many people who've called vegetarians pansies do you personally know?

Actually, I just made those quotes up.

As for "proselytizing"... rather than bickering over the word, bicker the intent. Do you think it's a bad thing for a non-vegan to cook vegan food for a vegan? To teach them about cooking and nutrition? To encourage them to make their own food rather than eating something put in a bag in a factory?

I don't see how what she's doing can be reasonably considered negative. So if it's proselytizing, then proselytizing is itself not a negative. If you think it's negative, I'd love to understand why.

Do you think it's bad for someone to persuade someone else to stop eating factory-farmed meat?

I don't see how that can be considered negative either. Can you?

The problem is when it stops being persuading, and starts being haranguing and elitism... using veganism as a way to feel and act superior to others. Which surely happens. As I said earlier, a vegan friend was complaining to me this week about exactly that, and he's not the first, nor will he be the last.

If my daughter was just getting on the vegans she knows for eating junk food, not good food like she does, it would be one thing. Instead, she leads by example, teaching them to be better and healthier vegans.

Something analogous would be a vegan making a beautiful, delicious vegan meal for a meat eater who thinks a vegetarian diet is dull and poor in nutrition. That's not proselytizing, imho.

I'm not sure you have an unbiased perspective on what constitutes elitist or haranguing. Progressives were called sanctimonious niggerlovers, butch (women) and effeminate (men) when they rallied for the progressive issues of their day, and all of this talk about them "acting superior" seems like a lazy coat of paint on top of not liking what they're preaching. Additionally, it seems to be all second-hand, as is usually the case. I've never ran into militant vegetarians, they honestly seem like a figment of the american imagination.

And at the very end you're trying to go back on admitting your daughter is proselytizing, by complimenting her cooking skills. I think you're quite confused about your principles.

Oh no! Exactly the point I was not trying to make! The problem being everyone has had a runoff with the small proportion of non-civilized advocates, leading to fear / awkwardness / uncomfortable feeling with the majority of civilized participants. And the culture doesn't self police strongly enough to keep the non-civilized fraction under control.

No one wants to sit thru a lecture of "my self denial makes me superior" "I'm morally superior" "meat is murder" "hey wanna see some slaughterhouse pixs" "hey look at me this is my special snowflake reason" "I'm saving the planet, all by myself".

OPs question of why vegetarians are looked at like space aliens is because its impossible to predict if the next couple minutes are going to be agony or fun. Probably gonna be all right, but...

(edited to add, come on guys, cut it out with the world doesn't exist stuff, my very own sister pulled the "hey look at me this is my special snowflake reason" for a couple months when she was about 14... now stand by for a round of "well I'm not sure sisters exist in the real world, after all I only have brothers and my buddy is an only child so citation needed...")

(And slayed0 is a better writer than I am...)

Have they really? In my experience prying into people retelling this story, the whole vegetarian zealot thing is one of those moral panic things that everyone claims to have had run-ins with but really most people are just citing the one main caricature.

I've certainly seen way, way more people say "I'll eat two steaks for every sanctimonious vegetarian I engage with" than actual vegetarians, particularly after becoming an engineer.

> The problem being everyone has had a runoff with the small proportion of non-civilized advocates

Everyone, apparently, except for me. Yet despite the dearth of obnoxious advocates, I have run into dozens or more who complain about their existence.

I think the obnoxious advocate trope is just a trope, and I'm convinced the the vast majority of complainers are complaining about the idea of a reification of the trope or something they've seen on television, rather than any actual live instances of the trope they've had run-ins with.

Are you trolling man? Trolling's not cool, you know.

His/her point is that the strawman is self inflicted. There is a silent majority that inherits the stigma of the crazed minority. Of course not all vegetarians are like this, but the few who are give a bad name to the rest.

It depends on where you live, what the food culture is like.

I live in Minneapolis, one of the best places in the world to eat. Excellent vegetarian options are widely available here. Sure, there are restaurants where that's not good, but it's not like there aren't plenty of other restaurants.

My gf is a vegetarian and she has never had that problem...?

We do live in a big city tho.

Try veganism, it's life on Hard Mode.

Oh, it's not that bad :) I would call it "very deliberate mode".

Tried travelling in a third-world country where you don't speak the language?

As someone who lives near the coast in Southern California we have lots of vegetarian and vegan options.

This is starting to change but yeah, it is saddening how many people think you need meat to survive and grow. Bill Gates left his intelligence behind on this one.

All protein on this planet was created by plants via photosynthesis.

Yes, (most) protein on this planet was created by plants, but not all protein is equal. Most proteins from plants are not complete proteins and cannot sustain a human being. This is not true of animal protein. Yes you can combine various plant proteins together to form complete proteins, but the answer is not as simple as: just eat plants.

> Most proteins from plants are not complete proteins and cannot sustain a human being.

There are many individual plant protein sources that are not complete proteins, and some of the ones that provide complete proteins provide a low ratio of protein to other macronutrients and may not, for that reason, be suitable alone as a primary protein source. But there are plants that individually supply complete protein without this problem, and more importantly there are well-known and combinations of plant protein sources that do this -- they are often the staple foods of various cultures, since in pre-modern times very most agriculture societies didn't produce meat in sufficient quantities for it to be the main protein source, so if adequate plant sources didn't exist, neither would civilization.

(That being said, the heavy focus on soy in the market means there aren't as many convenient options meat-avoiding, soy-allergic/intolerant people as for either meat eaters or soy-tolerant folks.)

This is incorrect. What, pray tell, is a "complete protein?" There are no amino acids in animals that are not found in plants. You appear to be wholly misinformed on this subject.

"A complete protein (or whole protein) is a source of protein that contains an adequate proportion of all nine of the essential amino acids necessary for the dietary needs of humans or other animals"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_protein

Many plants have "complete" amino acid profiles but one or more amino acids are too low to be completely adequate for humans. In this case, another protein source with a supplemental amino acid profile is required in order to balance out the deficiency in the first.

Quoting from your own source: >Nearly all foods contain all twenty amino acids in some quantity, and nearly all of them contain the essential amino acids in sufficient quantity.

You don't need to eat meat to get your protein.

But traditional foods in America included beans, corn, squash. Presumably to get a reliable source of protein. The natives weren't dieticians; they ate that because villages with that tradition thrived.

So protein quality and quantity can't likely be insured by eating any old vegetables. Its not as simple as 'don't eat meat'.

You are leaving off exotic bacteria (extremophiles) and ignoring or papering over the fact that animals can synthesize amino acids:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amino_acid_synthesis

The great majority of energy in the biosphere is certainly captured by way of photosynthesis, but it is silly to complain about an oversimplification and then turn around and make one.

Amino acid "synthesis" in animals works by ripping apart existing amino acids and sticking on new side chains. Animals cannot create an amino acid from nothing. To do this requires fixing nitrogen, which can only be done by certain bacteria, plants that have a symbiotic relationship with them, or the industrial Haber process for making ammonia.

Yeah, I wish I had thought to mention how much industrial nitrogen ends up in our food.

I guess you could twist that around and say that it is produced using photosynthesis that was captured in the natural gas that is used, but I don't think the poster meant readers to unpack all that out of 'created by plants'.

All protein on this planet was created by plants via photosynthesis.

This isn't accurate. The grass that cows eat doesn't contain enough amino acids to support the cow's growth.

It's actually the bacteria the cow's gut that digests the grass (mostly carbohydrate) and converts some of it into amino acids that the cow absorbs.

That's not all amino acids, since the cow's body can create some of it's own (just like humans).

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