this odd (possibly Western?) model that people who eat meat are carnivores and people who don't are vegetarians, and there is no continuum between the two, and no complex reasons for why people eat what they eat, or anything.
I tend to think of it as partly economic - even within relatively prosperous countries the point has only recently been reached where people can afford to have meat with every meal. But even then, yes, I think it is (if not exclusively) a pretty Western thing to have the idea of a meal as some one thing built around meat ('and two veg') as opposed to lots of little dishes. Not something I've read huge amounts about, despite vegginess and foodiness, I have to admit...
I do agree to a certain extent with the point re: economics, and I was going to say "developed" rather than "Western" above, but then I thought, no, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, they're very different when it comes to food, and India will be a developed country some day but I doubt it will then "discover" vegetarianism. I think the notion of it is very culturally specific, and then reinforced by the economic aspect.
Yes; sorry, I'm not sure if I was entirely clear about it. Basically I think the false dichotomy is v obvious and widespread here now for economic reasons, buuut that partly comes from the preexisting idea that a Proper Meal has meat.
The flip-side of the economic factor is that while you need quite a high income to be able to eat lots of meat, I guess you also (unless you are somewhere, like areas with a lot of strict Hindu and Buddhist people, where not eating meat is relatively normal and catered for) need to have quite a high income to refuse available food? Which would exaggerate the difference further. Er, does that make sense/do you agree?
That makes a lot of sense to me, yes, and I do agree. Another point comes to mind - my cultural background equates food with love and with identity. Okay, it's more complicated than that, but, you know, that's the gist of it: Indians use food as offerings like prasad, and langar, and alcohol isn't as normalised, so food serves as a social lubricant in addition to playing such a major religious role (and then, as my cousin Sunny says, our parents are just one generation away from scarce food and tell us to eat constantly because they love us - because they were not students/young adults who had as much food as they wanted, and they want us to be).
So, refusing food - even for reasons which seem quite mundane, like vegetarianism - isn't something that can be done as easily as it could be here, I think. There isn't a mental background against which you can place vegetarianism in the Western sense, because an individual's food choices are so heavily intertwined with the cultural structure.
When you said "Pripyat is a town in Ukraine that isn't there," something in my head said "hubbawha?"
Looking at the wiki page, my confusion is explained easily: I must have watched my brother and his friends play the Pripyat level in Call of Duty a hundred times last summer. I knew I knew that name! xD And I'm surprised that I actually recognize that ferris wheel... the game designers did a good job.
I suspect a) it's the creepy factor, b) since ghost cities are usually ghost cities for some notable reason, there's plenty of photographic evidence for game designers to base their backgrounds on...
Funnily enough I only knew about Centralia through one of those awful disaster documentaries on National Geographic (it may have been Discovery or the History Channel).
i eat very little meat. i was vegetarian for a long time, and then went back to eating just chicken and fish.. i do consume red meat now, but not very often at all. in excess it's not good for you. lean protein is the way to go. i never did it for animal-rights reasons or anything like that, i just.. wanted to? i don't know. everyone has their different reasons. to say someone is 'vegetarian' to me carries the connotation that the person does not consume meat by choice. if it is the fact that someone cannot afford to eat meat, i don't know that i would call them vegetarian.
then again, there are a lot of examples like that. for instance, say, religious people who do not smoke, drink, or do drugs, are not labled as 'straightedge.'
Yeah, yeah, it does. It's basically another version of the same point I was making above, I think - that people's food choices are complicated, and trying to assert that "all people who eat X are X" is just misguided.
(Good call on straightedge, yes - there's somewhere where the context is considered.)
I simply Cannot Be Done with red meat; even the smell makes me feel quite sick, and has done so for as long as I can remember. Phrases like 'don't you miss bacon?' lead to a shrug from me, as I never liked it in the first place. I just genuinely prefer the taste of vegetables, and the odd bit of chicken is a result of pleading from my mother for a few years. I eat stuff with meat products in, sometimes (jelly, mostly) and I certainly don't object to other people eating meat either, I just... well, Cannot Be Done with it.
I feel like such a hypocrite from every angle, sometimes. And I don't know why, other people don't have to feel bad for not liking certain types of food - mine just tends to be meat.
(And coriander, but that is whole different argument indeed. Now that is a flavour that I feel passionately about RIDDING THE WORLD of.)
You're not the only one who forgets about the nights coming in, no. I keep being stunned when I come out of class and its dark.
Meat-in-every-meal always seems to me to be a very Northern European/points-North-in-general kind of thing. I suppose because you have the kind of land that supports it and for most of the year, climatic necessity for lots of good heavy fat and stodge to keep you warm. And I know in Ireland at least, preferably you were feeding everyone out of the one pot, because its less fuel to cook one thing than many, so you have more fuel and more heat for everything else, and you can have something that's always hot on the go - my great aunt used to have a pot of stew ready to go for dinner one side of the range and a pot of soup keeping simmering on the other, all winter, so the farm hands could come in and get something hot if they needed it.
Its also why rural families always kept pigs. You can feed the family all winter off two pigs and they're really cheap to raise.
That's a good point. It substantiates the idea of it all being culture, doesn't it - that cultural attitudes towards meat are really very ingrained, even if the reasons for them aren't so relevant any more.
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I tend to think of it as partly economic - even within relatively prosperous countries the point has only recently been reached where people can afford to have meat with every meal. But even then, yes, I think it is (if not exclusively) a pretty Western thing to have the idea of a meal as some one thing built around meat ('and two veg') as opposed to lots of little dishes. Not something I've read huge amounts about, despite vegginess and foodiness, I have to admit...
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The flip-side of the economic factor is that while you need quite a high income to be able to eat lots of meat, I guess you also (unless you are somewhere, like areas with a lot of strict Hindu and Buddhist people, where not eating meat is relatively normal and catered for) need to have quite a high income to refuse available food? Which would exaggerate the difference further. Er, does that make sense/do you agree?
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Another point comes to mind - my cultural background equates food with love and with identity. Okay, it's more complicated than that, but, you know, that's the gist of it: Indians use food as offerings like prasad, and langar, and alcohol isn't as normalised, so food serves as a social lubricant in addition to playing such a major religious role (and then, as my cousin Sunny says, our parents are just one generation away from scarce food and tell us to eat constantly because they love us - because they were not students/young adults who had as much food as they wanted, and they want us to be).
So, refusing food - even for reasons which seem quite mundane, like vegetarianism - isn't something that can be done as easily as it could be here, I think. There isn't a mental background against which you can place vegetarianism in the Western sense, because an individual's food choices are so heavily intertwined with the cultural structure.
omg tl;dr. sorry.
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Looking at the wiki page, my confusion is explained easily: I must have watched my brother and his friends play the Pripyat level in Call of Duty a hundred times last summer. I knew I knew that name! xD And I'm surprised that I actually recognize that ferris wheel... the game designers did a good job.
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(What is it with game designers and ghost cities? I seem to remember reading that Silent Hill was based on Centralia...)
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Funnily enough I only knew about Centralia through one of those awful disaster documentaries on National Geographic (it may have been Discovery or the History Channel).
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then again, there are a lot of examples like that. for instance, say, religious people who do not smoke, drink, or do drugs, are not labled as 'straightedge.'
... i think that makes sense.
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(Good call on straightedge, yes - there's somewhere where the context is considered.)
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(And I am a Fake Vegetarian so that article was... odd. I've been a Fake Vegetarian for ten years now, so clearly I am ahead of the crowd.)
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You don't eat red meat, is that right? It's what I have always assumed...
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I feel like such a hypocrite from every angle, sometimes. And I don't know why, other people don't have to feel bad for not liking certain types of food - mine just tends to be meat.
(And coriander, but that is whole different argument indeed. Now that is a flavour that I feel passionately about RIDDING THE WORLD of.)
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Meat-in-every-meal always seems to me to be a very Northern European/points-North-in-general kind of thing. I suppose because you have the kind of land that supports it and for most of the year, climatic necessity for lots of good heavy fat and stodge to keep you warm. And I know in Ireland at least, preferably you were feeding everyone out of the one pot, because its less fuel to cook one thing than many, so you have more fuel and more heat for everything else, and you can have something that's always hot on the go - my great aunt used to have a pot of stew ready to go for dinner one side of the range and a pot of soup keeping simmering on the other, all winter, so the farm hands could come in and get something hot if they needed it.
Its also why rural families always kept pigs. You can feed the family all winter off two pigs and they're really cheap to raise.
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