Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!caip!topaz!uwvax!husc6!h-sc4!primer_2 From: primer_2@h-sc4.harvard.edu (jeremy primer) Newsgroups: net.veg Subject: Re: Questions About Vegetarianism Message-ID: <43@husc6.HARVARD.EDU> Date: Wed, 16-Jul-86 01:27:44 EDT Article-I.D.: husc6.43 Posted: Wed Jul 16 01:27:44 1986 Date-Received: Wed, 16-Jul-86 07:10:10 EDT References: <3175@jhunix.UUCP> Sender: news@husc6.HARVARD.EDU Reply-To: primer@harvma1.BITNET (jeremy primer) Distribution: net Organization: Harvard Mathematics Department Lines: 60 Keywords: vegetarian, kosher, hostility, cookbooks Summary: Responses ins_aset@jhunix.UUCP (Susanne E Trowbridge) asks these questions, and I offer what personal answers I can. This is not definitive, not complete, and not meant to exclude other answers to the same questions. >3. I have decided to continue to eat fish and seafood as well as >chicken very occasionally. Is this common, or do most vegetarians >shun all food that came from a living creature? Very common. Many Americans now are turning to a diet of fish and some chicken, most wishing to improve their health. And then many of these people find they don't even like the chicken or seafood all that much, and they wind up eating as you have now begun to do. Rather than trying to decide where vegetarianism begins and ends in a doctrinaire way, I prefer to recognize a spectrum with the steak-and-potato fans at one end and Adam and Eve at the other, with minute cultural distinctions speckling the middle range. >4. Have you encountered any hostility due to your decision to >become a vegetarian? I'm not exactly a vegetarian . . . more precisely I keep kosher to some degree and virtually never eat meat except when visiting my parents. Because of the religious issue here, I have met with hostility from some of my secular Jewish friends, who wonder why I follow a patriarchal religion without following the patriarchy, and see only hypocrisy [the smarter ones: only neurosis] in this. With or without religion, though, vegetarianism is an ethical stance which evokes latent hostility in many a meat-eater. >5. What are some foods which may have "hidden" animal content >(i.e. beef broth in some soups, foods which use animal fat)? Find any orthodox Jewish guide to keeping kosher (the laws of *kashrut*) which has been written in the last ten years. The best of them will tell you that "mono- and di-glycerides" may come from animal or vegetable sources, that "baguettes non-moulees" in Paris have no animal fat, that small quantities of some ingredients may be added to or substituted in various foods without appearing on the label, and generally a USENET-like quantity of information. Unfortunately I don't know the names or authors of any of these books, but any Jewish bookstore which carries English-language books should have them. Some specific examples to answer this question: baked goods, many soups, Chinese or Mexican (or . . .) food, gelatin and frozen deserts, yeah . . . >6. What are the best vegetarian cookbooks? I use and enjoy Mollie Katzen's *Moosewood Cookbook*, which is an agglomeration of recipes used at the Moosewood restaurant. I am told that it's selling like mad in Boston-area bookstores. Check it out. Jeremy Primer primer@h-ma1.harvard.EDU Department of Mathematics primer%h-ma1@harvard.ARPA 1 Oxford Street primer@harvma1.BITNET Cambridge, MA 02138 ...!harvard!h-ma1!primer (Avoid e-mailing to me at h-sc4.)