I had a discussion recently where someone accused me of not being a “real vegetarian” because I eat eggs. I know that’s kind of a grey area, and it differs for each person and their reason for being vegetarian (religious, texture, health, environmental, ethical, etc); but what do you personally eat?
For me, personally, I keep it simple. If it looks and tastes like meat, I don’t eat it (except special occasions like religious holidays). It makes me feel bad, and I dislike the texture anyway. Feels like an animal died specifically for me, and I didn’t even enjoy it. A waste of a perfectly good life. But I’m ok with “regenerative” animal products like eggs and cheese and honey and such, as long as the animals were treated with respect (hard to find dairy that meets this criteria).
Probably the most contentious is bones. Someone once gave me some ramen, and later told me they were surprised I ate it because the broth was made with chicken bones. I didn’t know, but also it didn’t really disturb me either. Those bones would have been thrown out if not put into soup; and the end result was soup, not a drumstick or something obviously meaty. If nobody told me, I wouldn’t even notice. For some reason, occasional bone broth is fine by my books. I’m not an extremely strict vegetarian in the first place though, and everyone I asked said that bones are not vegetarian.
It makes me think about Blood & Bone fertiliser. If you grow tomatoes with it, are those tomatoes not vegetarian…? Where is the line? Curious on others thoughts.
I think you are doing great, good on you for thinking about what you eat and doing your best to do it thoughtfully. I think you should feel comfortable calling yourself vegetarian because you are doing your best to eat as little meat as possible. People who ask questions are probably mostly curious how it works and sharing your experience might help them make similar choices. In my experience the only people policing these labels are too online or openly antagonistic to the entire premise I don’t pay either much mind.
Personally I don’t like eggs much, but I think getting then from a local farm you have a relationship with is the best possible scenario. I do try to avoid dairy as much as possible. You have to remember, in order to get animal milk you need to take it from the baby animals. At scale this involves a pretty horrible love for everyone involved. At small scale maybe it’s ok. If the mom is overproducing for example, and both the mom and child have a good life. But that doesn’t exist in the grocery store or even at most farms. So I just avoid it. It’s hard at first until you find good replacements but many cultures in the world got by fine without it for centuries so there’s plenty of great recipes to learn. I’m not interested in trying to get everyone off it, but most people I talk to have never given it a thought. They think cows just make milk no matter what and need you to milk them so we might as well. I think if you know the true cost of something you might at least have more respect for it.
But as far as things like bone broth, gelatin etc. I basically agree, these are waste products. I might not like the industry it’s coming from, but for God’s sake if you are going to kill an animal at least use every last bit of it.