A vegetable is a rose…

A friend of mine (a raw vegan, which means he’s vegan and not naked but into living foods) was telling me about this new dish he created. He called it a saffron muesli analogue.

As he is a good person with a good sense of humor, I emailed him back, jesting how vegetarians create analogues that taste like meat and the living foods people create analogues that taste like cooked vegetarian foods.

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet.”
–From Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2) by William Shakespeare

We agreed it was simply best to call a dish what it is, than what it may be. For example, some folks who became vegetarian for ethical reasons often transition to veganism because the dairy industry is one of the cruelest industries to animals. So, missing dairy products, notably cheese, they often try the faux cheeses (often spelled cheeze to denote it’s an imitation product).

Sometimes the imitation food products can taste like the foods they are trying to mimic. But sometimes it’s not even close. I think it can do a disservice to the imitation product to saddle it with the reputation of the animal-based food. Perhaps it helps people assimilate what it is, but perhaps it would be simpler to let the new food stand on its own and be appreciated in its own right.

Oh, and why do I think the dairy industry as one of the cruelest to animals… Well, this is the type of cruelty where the animal suffers a long time, repeatedly, whereas at least animals who are killed for their flesh die and their suffering ends. Oddly enough, Bay Area Backroads featured a snippet of a man whose job it was to drive around to local dairies and impregnate the cows. They didn’t really explain the life of a cow, or how she is treated like a milk machine, they just showed the guy putting on a arm-length plastic glove and then used his hand/arm to manually inseminate the cow. (Use your imagination here)

For more details, check out this website

KTVU Channel 2 just showed a snippet of some community folks upset by mega dairies moving into their neighborhood… about how bad the stench was, how the mounds of poop causing the flesh attracted a lot of flies, and even though their house was a few miles away, they still got a lot of the smell and the flies covering their windows. So much for peaceful country living!