Hardly anyone knows what vegan is even today nearly 40 years later. They’ve become familiar with the word, but not the meaning. They don’t get why vegans won’t eat a vegetarian burger made with egg whites, or that fish and chicken are animals. And what’s wrong with cheese? That’s not an animal. Well, real vegans don’t understand why vegetarians won’t eat a burger that contains no animal products. And you have to wonder why a person serving food wouldn’t know where what they serve comes from. Then there’s the added confusion of people calling themselves vegans who eat fish or chicken, or who are strictly animal-free sometimes.
Most restaurant and food service cooks don’t know the ingredients in the food they serve. Food companies/manufacturers aren’t required by law to label foods delivered to restaurants, especially bakeries. That needs to change. There’s a local bakery that doesn’t have a contact form on their company website, that packages various breads called OOPS!, meaning they made too much or maybe that they made a mistake in the ingredients or method. They sell it at a cheaper price than the other products and make one label that fits all, by including every ingredient in every bread product they make on all their OPS! breads. Now that is a rude maneuver, to think so little of the customer that they would lie about the ingredients in that classification of bread. What, because it’s cheaper, they don’t have to be truthful about the ingredients? Customers are doing them a favor by buying their over-runs and the company thinks they’re doing the customer a favor – a beggars can’t be choosers mentality is how they regard people who buy that bread.
The consumer has a right to know what ingredients are contained in the food products they purchase, whether at a grocery store, open-air market or restaurant. With so much food borne illness and people with allergies and food sensitivities and those with moral obligations to abstain from eating any part of the animal, it should be criminal to purposely not inform the buyer of the contents of what they put into their bodies. If the body is the temple of all temples isn’t it time to start treating it with more respect? Food is like medicine, it has side effects.
Anyway, back to the present. Here’s a list of current diet categories. Be the only one in your group who knows what these categories represent.
OMNIVORE eats plants and animals.
HERBIVORE eats plants only.
CARNIVORE eats flesh. Some occasionally supplement their diet with plants.
FLEXITARIAN eats mostly plants and some animals.
PESCETARIAN eats fish as their only source of animals food.
FREEGAN eats dumpstered food – all kinds. It’s okay to eat animals as long as it’s been discarded.
POLLOTARIAN eats any type of animal product except red flesh meat mammals.
LACTO-OVA VEGETARIAN eats dairy and eggs in addition to plants.
LACTO-VEGETARIAN eats only dairy in addition to plants. OVA-VEGETARIAN eats only eggs in addition to plants.
VEGAN eats foods containing no animal products along the chain from growing to processing.
ANIMAL-FREE eats foods containing no animal products.
PLANT-BASED eats foods derived from only plants and non-animal sources.
People in all categories occasionally veer from their preferred diet as a result of availability, mistake, misinformation or deception.
THE ANIMAL-FREE CHEF TEST KITCHEN 