View Full Version : Question for you Vegans
If you were doing the dishes after someone's birthday meal (and the main meal had salmon, but Vegan dishes were made for you), would you refuse to wash the broiler pan that had a few pieces of salmon skin/fat on it? Just curious what some of your answers might be.
Thanks.
loosechickens
3-17-11, 1:12pm
If I were a teenager, and thought I could get away with it, sure........... ;-)
although, in her defense, if she really IS a committed vegan, meat or fish residue might truly gross her out.....but if I had to guess, my thoughts would be "hey....if it gets me out of having to wash that yucky, sticky pan........"
Having a good memory for myself when a teenager, and also having raised some.....that's my best guess.
Hehehe...for LC's guess at teenager-hood...funny but true, more likely a reflection of adolescence than veganism....
Depends. I've been a vegetarian almost my whole life, so I do not feel comfortable dealing with meaty products. If DH cooked fish, he would clean the pan. I won't prepare anything for him other than eggs and that's only occasionally. Meaty stuff does gross me out. But if it was something that I had previously done (if I were a newer vegan) I think I'd be more comfortable with cleaning meat products. I do push the chicken bones into the garbage and occasionally pick chicken skin from the sink, but I'm an adult and can deal with gross stuff if I have too. It is probably more of an excuse for her, but I don't know if being forced to deal with meat products is worth it.
Thank you everyone,
She's 24 and has been a Vegan for a year. But she's never very helpful when she comes home, and I, too, was feeling like she was just trying to get out of washing a difficult pan. She's always been intense about all her feelings (whatever they happen to be at the time), and sometimes it gets a little much.
I do try to honor her feelings about being vegan, and didn't push her washing the pan. But......I just wasn't completely sure what her motives truly were. haha
I asked her if she'd like some eggs, since I raise my own chickens and treat them very, very well. But she's not even into that anymore.
I have to say, it double work when she comes home as far as meals. It would be great if she "turned" into a Vegetarian eventually. That would make cooking for her so much easier. We'll see. We were all something in our earlier years that we're not now.
But I do understand that this could be a life-long thing, which is fine if that's what she really believes.
She's living with someone who has a hard time tolerating meat/dairy-eaters, so I hope she doesn't become as intolerant.
At 24 she can do her own cooking.
She was just here for the day.
CathyA, perhaps you or she could make up a list of easy vegan meals for when she comes home, to make it easier next time? If it's just a day it should be fairly easy to not make double meals. In fact, even if it's more than a day - if you cook your meat separately as opposed to making a one-pot meal or casserole, she could just eat the "sides."
You know, as a nurse that deals with the grossest of stuff (don't ask me unless you really, really want to know) out of love...I have a hard time with someone that won't wash a pan with some animal residue on it.
Does she think that animals don't die? Does she wipe her own poop? There are humans living in terrible conditions right now in Japan, could she deal with a deceased human floating up on the shore?
Sorry, it's just seems like manufactured drama to me.
You know, as a nurse that deals with the grossest of stuff (don't ask me unless you really, really want to know) out of love...I have a hard time with someone that won't wash a pan with some animal residue on it.
Does she think that animals don't die? Does she wipe her own poop? There are humans living in terrible conditions right now in Japan, could she deal with a deceased human floating up on the shore?
Sorry, it's just seems like manufactured drama to me.
Does she have any idea how many insects, birds, and mammals are killed in the fields to produce her grains and vegetables? It took me longer than I care to admit to realize that I wasn't saving/hadn't saved a single life while eating my virtuous starch-heavy politically-correct diet, but that I had compromised my health. I agree about the drama, and with Loosechickens that her squeamishness is a handy excuse.
Bastelmutti
3-17-11, 9:57pm
My DD is vegetarian, and we made it a rule that no one is to call the other's food gross.
I think it's a personal thing. Yes, some vegans would be truly grossed out by any animal, uh, residue on a pan. Most, I suspect would not be. I'm vegan for health reasons so it wouldn't faze me at all. I'm not that easily grossed out at all, in fact. But as always - YVMMV (Your Vegan Mileage May Vary).
If you were doing the dishes after someone's birthday meal (and the main meal had salmon, but Vegan dishes were made for you), would you refuse to wash the broiler pan that had a few pieces of salmon skin/fat on it? Just curious what some of your answers might be.
Thanks.
No. But then I'm a vegan who'd be the first one to go all "Donner Party" on someone's behind if I were starving to death :-)! I think that once your DD got older she would probably come to understand that most people eat and use animal products and, while not accepting it and hopefully trying to change it, she will probably tolorate it to some degree.
Would she change the diapers of a breast-fed infant?
Does she have any idea how many insects, birds, and mammals are killed in the fields to produce her grains and vegetables? It took me longer than I care to admit to realize that I wasn't saving/hadn't saved a single life while eating my virtuous starch-heavy politically-correct diet, but that I had compromised my health. I agree about the drama, and with Loosechickens that her squeamishness is a handy excuse.
Every vegan and vegetarian is different. I think, however, that many understand that animals die accidentally all the time, whether it's as a result of harvesting vegetables or from traveling on a road. Yes, I realize some believe that all life must be saved even at great expense. I've often observed that they (activists and the like) give away their own life (peace) as a result.
Jane are you saying that for every vegetable you eat an animal dies?
CathyA, if you had let her bring her own food would you have had the expectation that she should help clean?
loosechickens
3-19-11, 7:05pm
"But then I'm a vegan who'd be the first one to go all "Donner Party" on someone's behind if I were starving to death :-)!" (Spartana)
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Ah, a woman after my own heart....pragmatist to the core.... ;-)
"But then I'm a vegan who'd be the first one to go all "Donner Party" on someone's behind if I were starving to death :-)!" (Spartana)
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Ah, a woman after my own heart....pragmatist to the core.... ;-)
Yeah...exactly.
It occurs to me that a little bit of what young people like is drama, centered around themselves. If it is a lot of work to cook for her when she comes home, then buy ingredients that she will eat and let her make her own dishes. Do it politely, of course, but it would cut down on her drama.
Yes, I am sooooooo tired of drama! :(
"Jane are you saying that for every vegetable you eat an animal dies?"
That's impossible to quantify.
The death toll involved in tilling, biocide delivery, and harvest in factory farming--and probably most large "organic" operations--is huge.
I'm with Jane; it's virtually impossible to produce food for humans without the deaths of non-human animals being involved. Some of these deaths are accidental - like ground-nesting birds, snakes, and rabbits macerated by tillage machinery- and some are purposeful. Animals are deliberately killed because they ravage our food crops. The animals range from aphids on broccoli or codling moths on apples, or Jerusalem crickets hollowing out potatoes, to skunks - their little paws can do a lot of damage if they start feeling for grubs in a seedbed!, raccoons - a raccoon family can strip a fruit orchard in a couple of nights; gophers; fruit bats; wild pigs - those guys can really plough up a field, their appetites are huge, and they eat just about anything (remember the big E. coli in the ; squirrels harvesting nut trees; deer - they love grain crops at all growth stages; birds (fruit and grains), mice (omnivorous, pee and poop on what they don't eat, whether in the field, in storage, in factories)... As Lierre Keith said, after her failed foray into growing her own food and losing all her seedlings to slugs, she went into a supermarket and picked up a lettuce with her "nice, clean, vegan hands" - and was hit by a shockwave because she could no longer fool herself that her food didn't kill any animals.
Speaking of birds, I grow seedlings for a biology lab at my school, and I get quite avicidal when crows beak up all my young peas in a matter of seconds. There's a limit to what can be done about prevention; it simply isn't affordable to grow all human food crops inside protective cages, and invertebrates can invade almost any cage.
Habitat destruction, fragmentation, monocropping, and conversion of water supplies to human needs also kills a lot of animals through starvation, dehydration, inability to reach possible mates, and other factors.
Neither vegan nor omnivore can be complacent about their food sources. Certainly a well-managed ecoculture (Joel Salatin, Bill Mollison, Jenna Woginrich) producing multiple foods, including animal source foods, does less harm and kills fewer creatures than monocropping, say, potatoes for fries and chips. Tons of potato peels and cull potatoes go to waste from the human food stream; these would make excellent fodder for pigs and chickens!
We should also all be aware of the impact of our food choices/crazes on people, who are also animals. For example, the Western passion for quinoa has priced it out of reach for local people. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/21/quinoa-bolivia-consequences_n_838408.html. Acai berry fever catalyzes felling of rain forest so more acai trees can be grown; one tree produces only 8kg fruit/year. A farmer can't make much of a living off just the wild trees in his patch; being human, he's going to maximise acai regardless of the cost to biodiversity, and for darned certain he's going to take a machete to any critter with designs on his cashflow! Simon Fairlie speaks of the dark irony of veganism on a farm in England; the group was importing its protein (legumes), carbohydrates (rice, other grains) and fat (seed oils) from third-world countries where local people were literally starving, while producing more than enough protein and fat through feeding crop wastes to pigs. As the group was vegan, the pigs were sold to pay for the imported foods. http://tinyurl.com/39wv2uj. Fairlie spent considerable time researching the facts of meat production, and discovered basic mistakes in the figures so widely disseminated on vegan sites. One example: the notorious one-pound-of-beef-takes-enough-water-to-float-a-battleship myth. The way this figure ("embodied water") was calculated was decidedly odd: every single drop of rain that falls on the range an animal might graze over the entire length of its life was assumed to be taken up by the animal, at a rate of about 25,000 liters per day, and assumed that every single water molecule stays in the animal's body until its death. There seems to be a biological problem here! Having kept cows, I know that a grazing cow pees enormous volumes of urine, which lands on the ground and passes back into the water cycle.
"But then I'm a vegan who'd be the first one to go all "Donner Party" on someone's behind if I were starving to death :-)!" (Spartana)
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Ah, a woman after my own heart....pragmatist to the core.... ;-)
Yep - and if I had some fava beans and a nice chianti I'd be all set :-)!
As for the OP: I think your daughter was actually trying to make a statement rather than avoiding cleaning the dishes out of laziness or being grossed out by the "remains". As far a cooking for her, you might want to do what my Mom did when she cooked for me. She'd do something easy like spaggetti and just seperate the sauce - meat for her and my sis and non-meat for me. I will admit that I do sometimes (too often) eat dairy foods. Mostly ice cream. But have been more pro active about doing fruit sorbets lately.
Her age is a good time to learn that if she wants to eat differently, she's the one responsible for getting her food ready. I'm an on and off vegan and expect no one to cook for me, nor anyone else to eat like me. I would wash the dish, by the way, no question.
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