A man a sheep and a bowl of fruit are sitting on a deserted island waiting for the boat that will arrive in the morning. The man and the sheep have an absolute riot, making each other laugh, telling stories, playing games and dancing too. As the night is set to draw in they make a fire. Come 7pm the man is hungry so he eats the sheep.
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My wife and I went to a restaurant next to our house that appeared to offer some kind of hot-pot all-you-can-eat affair with masses of vegetables, mushrooms, meats and so on that could be mixed together. I'm vegetarian and my wife will only eat fish, no other meats. We went to be seated and we spoke to the friendly waiter about how we would just be eating from the veg selection and we checked with him that there would be sufficient choice there to get a good meal - it looked promising.
The waiter asked us to select from the "soups", the large boiling pots you have on your table that you mix your choice of ingredients into. We looked at the various choices of spicy, veggie, and so on and opted for a split pot of a watery and light veggie one side and a more spicy other side. The waiter said "ok so you are not strict vegetarian then as all our soups are lamb based" and we both used small sky-hooks to fetch our eyebrows back down from the ceiling.
My wife was able to negotiate actual veg soups in the end so that we could stay and try the food but it did take some doing to have the staff grasp the concept of no meat - no meat at all. As we ate, and it was very nice, I looked to other tables to see how we were supposed to eat the meal, what you dip where and which implements to use and when. In looking around I saw all of the people dropping large amounts of raw meats into their lamb based soups and I wondered if there really was any need to involve other beings in this meal at all.
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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao
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6 comments:
Other beings are always involved. What about the wild beings that should be occupying the land that was cleared to grow the vegetables? One of the biggest drivers of land clearing in the Amazon is for soya bean farms. Life feeds o life, it always has and always will.
It is a fully acceptable point that life feeds of life but it is not the complete argument.
As a fellow vegetarian, your experience is similar to many of mine. I can't tell you how many times a waiter has considered a soup made with beef or chicken broth to be vegetarian! But there's no meat in it, they protest.
I live in an area that bills itself as the oyster capital of the world. Most of the restaurants around here don't offer any vegetarian dishes aside from a lame salad (with one exception). So, I rarely eat out.
I even have to be careful at the grocery store. There are a lot of canned soups -- even organic ones -- that state on the front label that the soup is vegetarian, yet the first ingredient listed on the back label is chicken broth. Yuk!
Sorry, I didn't write my comment too well. The fact I took issue with the 'no beings involved' bit wasn't meant to reflect on your well written post as a whole.
Well, that's something that still happens a lot around the globe, unfortunately.
After so many years being veggie all this became laughable over the time.
Even vegetables have feelings and spiritual essence. Moving on to ingest pure prana energy is an another matter.
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