My wife is a vegetarian. She has never eaten any kind of meat but she is okay with eggs. My East Indian friend calls himself a pure vegetarian but eats fish. My grandma was vegetarian too but I was told (by my mom) that she once fainted at the sight of eggs in our fridge. My South Indian friend is a staunch vegetarian but he doesn’t even eat ginger & onion let alone egg or fish or meat.
So now having come from such a diverse (?) culture anything that I see or hear shouldn’t really surprise me, right? That’s what I thought too but reality was going to be different.
Several years ago; I used to take my son to McDonalds on every Sunday morning while my wife used to stay home. She never liked the smell there and had nothing other than fries to eat there. She is a diet freak. In a way, I am very blessed (?) that everyone around me is some kind of freak. (My wife is a diet freak, my best friend is a green-earth freak, my brother is a ritual freak, my boss (then) was a process freak, my company is a metrics freak…. I am “Friends- The TV sitcom” freak.) Anyways, coming back on track. My son and I would die to eat at McDonalds. In those days of course. Lucky for us we didn’t continue that else I really would have died. That’s a different story though.
On that Sunday, at McDonalds, we decided to take the food home and eat. I don’t remember what the occasion was. So, I thought maybe my wife would enjoy something too, meaning in addition to smelling (not eating) fries. I looked at the list and saw cheese burger. I called my wife and told her not to cook anything that we were getting MacFood and plan was to eat while watching a movie. I ordered cheese burger for her, my son I & got our usual crispy chicken & chicken nuggets and went home. Once settled down, my wife opened her pack & she cried out loud. First, I thought; I must have kept the lights in bathroom on. Well, that’s what I get to hear when I do that. But soon we found out that her cheese burger had beef in it. You can imagine how the rest of my married bachelor day would have gone. My son & I tried to explain that we seriously didn’t know or think that it contained beef but she thought we pulled a prank on her. I tried to tell her my logic. You order Chicken burger and you get a Chicken in it. So, you order cheese burger, shouldn’t you expect to have cheese in it? She was beyond understanding any logic that day. Well unfortunately I couldn’t disappoint the food, so I had to eat it. (By the way not that I eat beef but I liked the cheese burger that day. That was of course my first & last cheese burger).
It is a profound question for me that what is veg and what is non-veg! Isn’t it simple that what is a plant-based food should be veg and what is an animal product should be non-veg but then how come milk & yogurt is veg? And how come for my South Indian friend onion & ginger are non-veg?
I decided to explore this well-traveled path and well-debated time less question of ages once again. I decided to interview people. Well that turned out to be not so good for me at all. I asked my wife, “you are a vegetarian so how come you can eat eggs but not chicken?” She gave a cruel look and said, “Do you see flesh & blood when you see egg?” Huh! her definition for non-veg was anything that has flesh and blood in it. Fair enough. I asked my East Indian friend, his answer was simple, have you heard a fish making sound? (Glad that at least dolphins would survive his voracious desire to eat any fish. He would even eat tadpoles. And of course he will say Dolphin is not a fish, it’s a mammal. This seemingly dumb friend becomes a great scientist when it comes to defending his food preference. Then I talked to my South Indian friend. He didn’t disappoint me either with his fallacy. According to him anything that causes a life to begin is a non-veg. Unfortunately, he forgot the seeds that we eat. He is a civil engineer so how would he understand vegetative reproduction? His biology in college was limited to human anatomy only. And that to only specific good-looking humans.
During my first year being a North Dakotan, I went Deer hunting (it was just Deer pushing for me) with a colleague of mine. My friend and his family met me at a remote town in North Dakota. My wife had made lunch rolls with Indian flat breads enough for 4 of us. After we got our first kill, a nice grown up buck, we took a break. We all were hungry after 3-4 hours of walk thru’ snow, dirt and grass. I took the vegi-rolls out of my sack and handed it to my friend, his brother & his dad. They all loved the mildly spicy rolls as they ate them with Deer blood on their hands.
I thought it was kind of barbaric. But that’s when it occurred to me, wouldn’t my wife be thinking the same way when I am eating chicken or my Granny who fainted at the sight of eggs in my mom’s fridge?
Well, I had a whole 2 hour to drive back home & ponder over this question. As I got home, a nice smell of fresh bread and spicy curry welcomed me. It was great to eat the home cooked meal after a day’s worth of hard labor.
When you have the food you like and get to eat it with someone you love, does it really matter what veg or non-veg is?
(Original Pictures’ Credit: newvitruvian.com)