Making Fun of Omnivores

      Well, I had wanted to write another post making fun of vegetarians but I thought that since I had already bashed on them once I should take the time to be fair and make fun of omnivores because everyone knows omnivores have it easy and no one makes fun of those idiots. A little objectivity never hurt anyone after all. I like to be an equal-opportunity jerk and poke fun at everyone, including myself. If you're a vegetarian you should enjoy this post. If you're an omnivore I hate to say it but you might enjoy this post just as much as the vegetarians.
      First of all we'll explain omnivores. I like to break down scientific words into Latin components for the sake of confusion when I begin to clarify and define things. Omne means all or everything. Vor comes from the verb meaning to eat or devour. Literally omnivore means to devour everything. Dirt, metal, vegetables, fruit, powdered bone slime, gasoline, meat, plastic, sexual organs, everything would be in the diet of an omnivore if it were translated literally. A quick Google search for "define: omnivore" will reveal that the general definition is much narrower and comes down to a person or animal that eats or can eat both meat and plants. The same quick Google search will reveal that, apparently the term was popularized by Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. This, as you should immediately realize, is a load of crap. Saying that Michael Pollan popularized the term "omnivore" is like saying that Stephanie Meyers popularized the term "twilight" with her Twilight Saga.
      Omnivores do not obviously live up to their clinically-defined name. You don't eat petroleum or rocks. You're not going to devour someone's cotton shirt. But if you consider the generally-accepted definition everyone is an omnivore. Vegetarians can eat meat just because they choose not to. Someone who lived on a strict diet of chicken nuggets and french fries could not be not considered an omnivore just because they never had anything else.
      Eating is as much evolution and availability as it is a choice. Our ancestors survived because of their ability to consume many different things instead of fitting into one very small niche which might have easily been wiped away. A socially-conscious person who doesn't have a lot of money, despite wanting to help out local farmers by buying their produce is trapped into continuing to go to the big boxes to get groceries because they don't have the means so that food is not available to them. People who are vegetarians (generally) have the ability to get and consume meat but choose not to for moral or physical reasons, it doesn't mean they don't have the physical capacity to digest meat (boctoe) so they are technically omnivores.
      Now let's make fun of the omnivores. If you are a human omnivore you have almost certainly at some point in your lifetime consumed: Bugs, feces, dirt, metal, plastic, petroleum, sexual organs, fish bladders and powdered bone slime. Sounds like the recipe for some kind of terrible witch's brew, doesn't it? And how have you eaten these things? Wouldn't you know if this was in your food? Shouldn't it be listed on the ingredients?
      You've probably consumed an insect either accidentally while sleeping or awake or possibly intentionally but it's basically unavoidable not to eat one on accident. If you've ever gone to the bathroom and not washed your hands before preparing your food or ever eaten food someone else prepared for you then you have eaten feces. If you've ever eaten a vegetable that was not well washed before you ate it you have probably eaten feces then as well as dirt. If you have ever eaten any kind of meat, any number of vegetables or taken a vitamin containing iron you have eaten metal. If you have ever eaten any kind of food packaged in plastic you have eaten both plastic and petroleum at the same time. If you have ever eaten food that was fertilized by a petrochemical fertilizer or eaten an animal that ate any plants that were fertilized with a petrochemical you have eaten petroleum. If you have ever eaten a clover or broccoli or any other kind of flower you have eaten sexual organs. If you have ever had a beer or wine made with "isinglass" you have had fish bladder. If you have ever eaten jello or anything else that contains gelatin then you have eaten powdered bone slime. If you have ever had anything containing High Fructose Corn Syrup you have eaten a product that comes from a wet mill and could not exist without human production.
      If you are an omnivore of any kind and you have the capacity to think about what you put in your mouth the only reason you haven't is because you thought you knew. If you're happy eating a processed food that has several ingredients on the list that you cannot comfortably sound out or you cannot say what they are or where they come from I challenge you to look up some of those words. You might think you're safe by not eating processed foods but that's not the case. What part of the word does the coffee you drink or the lettuce you eat come from? Are you comfortable with how it got into the country or how and by whom it was grown. Are you comfortable with the conditions under which the chicken you eat lived it's life? Or would you rather clear your mind and play dumb?
      Omnivores enjoy being in the majority and feeling very much that might makes right. Everyone else is doing it so it must be okay. Being in the majority is not a good argument for anything. If the majority of a town is christian but a devout Muslim moves to town it does not give their neighbors any right to suggest they should go to a christian church just because everyone else in town does it. If you're going to eat meat, and fruit and mystery ingredients in your crackers that is fine with me as long as you have a good reason to do this other than the fact that this is what you have always done.
      Omnivores also tend to be food addicts. If you choose to willfully ignore where your food comes from or what it contains because you cannot give up a certain type of food then you would be considered a food addict. There's nothing wrong with being a vegetarian but the reasons you do it for are important. Similarly there is nothing wrong with being an omnivore if you have good reason to do so.

Omnivore's Dilemma (or "I like to be pretentious and read Bestsellers")

      I thought of a third title: "In which I try to convince you to agree with my taste in books." Which, by the way, I am not trying to do at all so it wouldn't be a terribly accurate title. The second option isn't very accurate, either. Cheryl just likes to say that I'm trying to be pretentious when I read bestsellers and such. In fact, I read this for two reasons and two reasons only. Neither of which involve pretention or the fact that this fits in with my usual genre. My usual genre, just for reference, is science fiction and fantasy.
      The first reason I read this was because my friend had read it for one of his classes at Stanford (and yes, I do mean that Stanford) and recommended it to me, saying that I would enjoy it. I can't remember what I said to him at the time, possibly something non-committal because I didn't really read non-fiction much at all. I don't even watch the news. That probably would have been the end of it in all liklihood but the title stuck with me. Omnivore's Dilemma. And then the second thing happened. I figured that if I was going to break the rules of the store at which I work and read at the counter when I'd finished my other work I should read something intellectual and it just so happened that that day we'd gotten in a new copy of the Omnivore's Dilemma. And that's why I read it.
      At least. That's why I started to read it. I continued to read it because I was hooked from the very first page. Just like a good fantasy novel that I picked up and couldn't put down this book grabbed me almost from the moment I opened it and though I've long since finished reading it still hasn't let me go.
      Why should you read it, though? You want to know the answer to that question. And I'll answer, like many of the teachers you probably found annoying in school, with a question. Why do you eat? Do you eat because you have to? Is food just a fuel for your body? Do you eat because you enjoy it? Do you hate eating but do it anyway? Do you eat to comfort yourself? Whatever reason you have for eating you still have to do it and since you have to you should at least think about what it is you're putting into your body and where it comes from.
      Omnivore's Dilemma follows the course of not one but four unique meals back to their various sources. The book explores the golden sea of corn lurking in so many processed foods under mysterious names like maltodextrin and in things you wouldn't imagine contained corn at all. Like your steak dinner that was most likely raised on a giant Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation eating a diet of corn. He also talks about all of that organic food you see in supermarkets and what about your diet you should actually change if you want to reduce your carbon footprint.
      I could talk on and on about the subjects that the book covers. I could tell you how it made me feel and how it opened my eyes. I don't really want to do that. I just want to get you across the two biggest hurdles preventing you from reading this book. It's long. It's non-fiction. It looks like it's going to be hard to read. It's also not even out in massmarket print yet so it's expensive. In the store it's going to run you about sixteen dollars for a (as my father would call it) "big paperback" or that I have learned they are called in the industry "trade sized paperback". You can get it for less than six dollars used online. And it is definitely worth it no matter how much (or little) you pay for it.
      I will agree that it is long and it is non-fiction. It does contain some large words but none any longer than the ones on the back of your cereal box or the chicken nuggets you have in your freezer. The author also writes as though he's talking to you. The style is very easy to read and all the long words are typically explained immediately. For a book about food it has a surprising amount of action and the subject matter is so interesting and near and dear to all of us that you wont want to stop reading.
      So why not read it? It's interesting. It's pretty easy to read. It's a subject you are probably endlessly fascinated by if it comes in culinary form. You'll learn something. And you can go to Amazon right now and spend six dollars to get it. I even provided you with a link above so you have no excuses.

Pseudo-Vegetarian

      Vegetarianism is a tough subject. Being Vegan is even worse of a subject to talk about. There are only two sides to this debate. There are the vegetarians and vegans and there are the people who think vegetarians are stupid. I know exactly what you are thinking at this moment. You are either thinking that you agree with me because you are very obviously in one of the above groups or you are in denial that you are in one of the two groups and would like to claim that you support vegetarians but don't want to be a vegetarian yourself. There is no such thing. Vegetarianism is a moral argument. It's either moral in the sense that you care for animals and don't want them abused on CAFOs or it's moral in the sense that you think it's healthier for people to not eat meat. You are not allowed to be a vegetarian solely for the sake of the environment or to claim you would like to be a vegetarian in order to help the environment or to claim that you support vegetarians because they help the environment but you drive a prius so you've already done your part. That is not acceptable. Either you really do support vegetarians and actually want to be one but just don't have the willpower or you secretly mock vegetarians for not eating meat but no not admit this outloud probably because one of your deceptively strong vegetarian friends wold hit you if you did.
      Now that we've established that there are no other options you can either abandon this as boring or continue to read under the premise that this will be interesting as I continue to discuss the strange levels of being vegetarian. This post is mostly digression and not a lot of funny. It is a lot more funny if you live through the digression. You can be vegan or vegetarian, pretty much everyone knows that there is some kind of difference between the two even if they were not certain precisely what. But there are actually different levels of being vegan. By definition a vegan does not eat any meat or animal products such as eggs or milk. But many vegans also do not use animals products such as leather also. Some vegans take the term "animal products" to go as far as avoiding eating honey because it is produced by bees, certain vitamins because they are derived from animal products and even certain brands of wine and beer as they contain something called isinglass.
      And here we have an important digression. My first encounter with isinglass was in Phillip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" series where it was a kind of glass that was used. My mother told me it was mica, which is a mineral formation that can be broken into thin, transparent sheets. The kind of isinglass they put in your beer isn't the same innocent mica kind, it's a tasty (and when I say tasty in this context you should be reading it with a 'n' instead of a 't') and obviously unnecessary ingredient derived from fish bladders.
      Other vegans are happy to simply not eat meat, eggs or dairy and, like the rest of you beer and wine drinkers, presumably concentrate very hard on not thinking about what their beer contains. Then, after the extremist vegans versus the laxer vegans you have vegetarians. Vegetarian is an all-encompassing term for people who do not eat meat so people who are vegetarian but not vegan are often called lacto-ovo to indicate that they consume eggs and dairy products and possibly use leather and eat honey and such. But even those are a fairly decent distinction. But after that it becomes the kind of debate in which Warren G. Harding becomes the Republican candidate for president because they couldn't differentiate between the first two options and ended up going for the guy who looked like a president.
      Yes, I'm talking about Pescatarians or Pesca-vegetarians. Pesca-vegetarians eat fish. Most people would agree that fish are, in fact, meat but because the only meat they eat is fish and typically not a lot of that pesca-vegetarians become vegetarians in the minds of most of society who, frankly, aren't particularly intelligent because we've got them so busy trying to remember the difference between a vegan and a vegetarian that they see anything that appears to be a vegetarian to hold all of the morals of a vegetarian.
      And, I couldn't tell you the lines that pescatarians use when explaining to real vegetarians why they don't feel morally obligated to not eat fish but I think it has a lot to do with the fact that fish are ugly. It's hard to empathize with something slimy and cold that doesn't even breathe air. Fish aren't cute and they don't make noises or display intelligence and so they're okay to eat. That's what I figure, anyway.
      Then you have flexitarians. I don't even want to talk about them. They're some kind of absurdity. From what I understand as I have never bothered to look up a so-called definition for this term is that, basically, flexitarians are vegetarians who sometimes eat meat. In other words they get up in the morning (or maybe in the afternoon like everyone sane and internet-using) and say to themselves: "Today I will be a vegetarian. I will have cereal for breakfast, a salad for lunch and a nice vegetarian soup for dinner. I will eat potato chips for a snack because potatoes are, after all, a vegetable." Potatoes are not a vegetable. Technically, yes, but nutritionally, no. They are a starch and your doctor will tell you starches are bad. Except possibly in different terms unless you are under the age of twelve. Or a flexitarian wakes up in the morning and thinks: "I think I'm going to scarf down a hamburger today because I'm a flexitarian." And outloud I (having read their mind, of course) finish with: "By which I really mean I am an omnivore because flexitarian is one of the most moronic terms ever described."
      I am a flexitarian by all definitions I can discern. And by that I mean I am an omnivore. I am, at the very best, a lacto-ovo vegetarian but I'm not that pretentious, either. I do eat meat about once a week but I could forsee giving up meat entirely as I continue to do a worse job at deluding myself about the world and my body continues to function at less than peak capacity without one of my memorable organs.
      Out of my desire to distance myself from any real defining term and labels I didn't invent in general if my dietary habits come up I introduce myself as a pseudo-vegetarian. Ideally I would be saying this to someone who isn't totally sure what pseudo means and has enough knowledge of vegetarians to understand that there are several levels because they would then ask me what kind of vegetarian that was and I could respond: "Not a very good one." This is funny because pseudo means "fake" so a fake vegetarian would not be a very good vegetarian. No one has ever laughed at this joke. It's because this scenario has yet to happen. It's one of my advance-comebacks. I have still used this term to describe myself upon occasion and I have also used the phrase: "I don't really eat meat." The latter phrase comes up a lot more often.
      I have never claimed to be an actual vegetarian but on multiple occasions members of the general public who are, for the most part, (as you may recall) not particularly intelligent, have made what Malcolm Gladwell calls in his book Blink the "Harding Error" and referred to even me as a vegetarian. I remember a couple of days ago distinctly when we got a new book in at work and someone began to gush to me: "I know you're a vegetarian but you should see this book, Seduced by Bacon." And now, not only am I a vegetarian but for some reason vegetarians are apparently still supposed to be interested in cookbooks that focus solely on meat.
      So I've come up with a new comeback. If someone asks me if I am a vegetarian I will explain to them that of course I'm a flexipescalactoovovegetarian. I will make every attempt to say this with a straight face. If anyone asks me what this means I'll say I'm an omnivore, just like everyone else regardless of what my actual current eating habits include because being a vegetarian (and I don't mean not eating meat here, that's easy) is way too complicated.