What If I Don't Want to Be Completely Vegetarian?
Well, as one of us isn't even vegetarian, it wouldn't be our place to preach. Mika says, "While I would love to wake up one day and discover that most people who could adopt a vegetarian lifestyle had done so, I am realistic enough to realize that's just not going to happen." However, even if you are a meat-eater you can make a difference to animal suffering, your health or the environment by what and how you buy and cook. We're not going to preach here, just try to convince. Your lifestyle choice is your own and only you can know what works for you.
Anyone Can Be Compassionate
For instance, buying your food free-range (i.e. cage-free) and organic is a great way to lessen the shocking cruelty of overcrowded factory farms. It also means your food isn't pumped full of antibiotics and growth hormones. This is good for the animals' well-being and good for your own health. Organic, free-range meat is more expensive than mass-produced factory-farm meat or fast food, but friends who eat it assure me that it is worth it. It tastes much better and you aren't getting any of the water or chemicals injected into supermarket meat to plump it up visually or unhealthy additives to make it look or taste a certain way. You are also not getting colourants, some of which used for pre-sliced ham come from the cochineal beetle. (Yes, that is an insect, but since it is "natural colouring", the producers don't have to specify that on the label.)
Some meat products are produced in a way that is genuinely mean-spirited and cruel - like goose-live paté also known as foie gras. Or veal. You can simply avoid those products and eat something else just as delicious. You can be a meat-eater and still have a conscience!
A lot of non-meat food has animal derived ingredients and so do some cosmetics and household items. Cosmetics that are perfectly safe to use are still being tested cruelly on animals for no reason other than the fact that animal testing is a profitable industry. Educate yourself on whether your favourite brands test. It's very easy to buy a brand that doesn't. And it's easy to find alternatives to animal ingredients in products. For instance, pectin in yoghurt is fruit-derived, whereas gelatine in yoghurt is derived from boiled bones. Both are widely available and taste similar. Cutting down on buying animal ingredients in non-meat products and cutting out buying cosmetics tested on animals are two very powerful ways to ease animal suffering without giving up much in the way of your own lifestyle.
The easiest way of all to positively impact the environment and people (if you aren't into animals) with your food choices is to buy Fair Trade coffee and tea. As this is often sold in supermarkets there isn't much effort involved on your part, but it brings great benefits to the growers, the environment and even animals (see Shade-Grown varieties).
Why Vegetarian?
If you are interested in finding out more about how a vegetarian lifestyle can impact animals, the planet, your health and a lot of other things positively, go to this site for more information.
Warning
And if you are going to email Mika and tell her that being vegetarian "isn't natural", please be warned ahead of time that this will be the response: While it's true that human beings developed over the years as opportunistic omnivores, unless you live in a cave and hunt and grow your own food, please don't tell me what is "natural" and what isn't. Some other things that aren't natural include: living indoors, contact lenses, cars, airplane trips, electric guitars, phones, man-made fibres, carpeting, television, your iPod, movies, Playstation and XBox, fingernail polish, computers, bottled vitamins, the internet, surf boards, and anything else you can think of that isn't made with wood, stone or bone. We live in a time and a place in which we can choose our lifestyle and food instead of having to live "naturally" with spears and net-traps. If you still want to argue with me, please read this first.
Anyway, Mika and Lecky are the best of friends and one is vegetarian and one is not. Do we fight and castigate each other? No. This site is devoted to delicious food prepared easily. I think everyone can agree that that's a good thing.