Vegetarians shouldn't have to buy meat?

[Whuut]

So a relative of mine is getting married next year and her and her partner went vegetarian a few years ago for many reasons, one being they didn't want to contribute to the meat industry. They have decided at the wedding to have the meal completely vegetarian. I think this is fine and for one meal people can deal without meat- I do get that some people struggle without it but I think for the sake of one meal at someone else's wedding, you'd just deal with it. What I think is harsh, a few other family members are constantly telling her they should have a meat option and making her feel bad about their decision.

Aibu to think they shouldn't have to have meat at their wedding when one of the main reasons they gave it up was to do with not wanting to contribute to the industry?

I’d be happy with a no meat roast as long as there was extra stuffing.

“ If anything I'd prefer more veggie weddings to yet another bone dry chicken breast wrapped in parma ham.”
“White meat in white sauce or brown meat in brown sauce, madam?”

but what if people don't like the texture or taste of 'one pot' meals, as most vegetarian meals tend to be?

You’re eating in the wrong places if you’re getting one pot meals with no texture.

It's silly. DP and I eat meat but not every day and for every meal. It's unnecessary and food doesn't need to be centred around it. I'd be perfectly happy with a veggie option and her family should be too.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable at all to do a whole veggie wedding as long as there’s plenty of variety. My DH and I are both veggie. We thought long and hard about whether to serve only veggie food at our wedding. I wouldn’t serve meat if I were cooking for someone at home, mostly because I’d not do a good job of cooking it and don’t like handling it. Meat isn’t banned from our house if a guest wants to bring their own, I’ve no problem with it.

But for our wedding we had a large number of very traditional guests who absolutely wouldn’t consider it a meal without meat and were very much of the meat and two veg school of thought. Vegetarianism was very unusual at the time. Although a buffet was also unusual we decided to serve a chicken, fish and beef dish alongside a lot of veggie dishes. Yes the veggie dishes went first (I barely got to eat any) but people were happy and they’d tried veggie dishes they wouldn’t have before and evidently liked them.

Several people complimented us on the veggie mains. I guess we decided it was hospitable to give people the choice and I was pleased that we’d changed some minds about some “vegetarian” food.

If I were getting married now in this country I’d probably just have a completely veggie meal and not mention it was veggie as tastes are generally more adventurous than where we got married at the time, but I think choice is important so I’d provide a lot of options and not just the goats cheese tart or mushroom risotto which seems to be the mass food catering default for veggies.

yes we are. We are also sufficiently versed in biology to know that there is a difference between a plant and an animal.

Both involve taking the life of a living organism for the purposes of prioritising your own continued survival over that of your 'victim'. Ethically speaking, it would be much kinder to eat a dead chicken that a fox has killed for sport than to rip living crops out of the ground. All but a very tiny minority of people would refuse to eat human flesh, but millions of people consider once-living animal flesh to be of lower importance than human flesh and so happily eat it. Similarly, most people consider once-living plant substance to be of lower importance than human or animal substance and so happily eat it.

If you want to prioritise your own survival, you have to choose your personal morals and decide what other living thing you're going to kill to facilitate that.

Plants aren’t sentient.

How do you define sentient? Plants very much actively respond to outside stimuli such as the sun or water. A venus fly-trap will suddenly close and snap around its victim when it senses its presence. Yes, even some plants are 'murderers'....

We're told that plants don't experience 'pain', but how can we possibly know what they experience or find traumatic, just because they don't have the same pain receptors as humans/animals? Our local National Trust property put up a sign asking people to stop poking pennies into the grooves of the bark of one of the trees where it had seemingly become a tradition, as it's apparently harmful for it (I think they used the word 'stressful'). Whilst we wouldn't use such animalistic terms as 'traumatic', I really don't see how we can all identify a living organism and be so arrogant as to assume we know exactly what its experiences of life are.

If we're all rightly disgusted at human males telling human females that periods 'can't really be all that painful', how can we presume to 'tell' another, very different, life form what it does or doesn't experience and how those experiences affect it?

Most vegetarians don't want to be given 'a roast/carvery meal but with no meat'

That is one of my favourite meals ever. Especially with bread sauce

A lot of people seem to have a theory now of their wedding gift covering their seat at about £50 per head.

If they aren’t paying for meat maybe it’s more like a £20 day.

Both involve taking the life of a living organism for the purposes of prioritising your own continued survival over that of your 'victim'

My own personal ethics mean I’m happy to be a plant murderer but not an animal one.

An invitation to a wedding is an invitation to a party being hosted by the Bride and Groom, to help them celebrate an important milestone in their lives.

It is the B&G's big day, not the guests.

And it is an invitation, not a summons.

So unless the person who is complaining is the person who is going to be planning AND cooking for all the guests and is daunted by vegetarian food in that context, then, absolutely they need to STFU!!

If they aren’t paying for meat maybe it’s more like a £20 day.

That's an interesting concept. No meat: Gift -£30 No alcohol: Gift -£20?

We're told that plants don't experience 'pain', but how can we possibly know what they experience or find traumatic, just because they don't have the same pain receptors as humans/animals?

When the scientific evidence shows that plants suffer pain in the same way as animals, I’ve no doubt some people will revise their diet accordingly, in the same way that people have changed their behaviour and lifestyles since time immemorial when new evidence comes to light.

Until that time, I’ll continue to eat plants.

Quid pro quo gifts are depressing.

If we get evidence that plants feel pain, and thus a decision is taken that we shouldn't eat plants any more either (as a collective decision seems to have been taken by many on our behalf regarding meat consumption!), then what on earth are we all supposed to eat to survive? Just drink water? Create chemicals that will do the job instead at even more damage to the planet and our own bodies?!

Gah, sometimes I despair of modern "life" and the judgementalism that is going on....

If they aren’t paying for meat maybe it’s more like a £20 day.

Not if you are serving really good vegetarian food

@WeBuiltThisBuffetOnSausageRoll

I'm curious, by your logic that plants are as sentient as animals in their own way, does that mean that if it is ok to eat animals, it is also ok to eat people?

Surely, the difference between animals and people is just a different kind of consciousness and after all, we are only "taking the life of a living organism for the purposes of prioritising your own continued survival over that of your 'victim'"

Ethically, do you feel it is better to eat a person who has been hit by a car than to pull a plant out of the ground?

yes indeed, but the fruit analogy only works if the fruit aisle were closed for one day/ one trip to the supermarket (aka the one wedding meal) and on arriving at the fruitless aisles you also knew you were able to call past Fruit World quite easily on the way home

You're not wrong at all, but you likely wouldn't consider that it had been a satisfactory experience, when you'd been led to believe that you'd be able to get your whole weekly family food needs in one go. People are very quick to complain when their online grocery delivery is missing just one or two key ingredients and they end up having to go out to the shops anyway.

Of course, people can 'pre-load' on meat or stop off for a kebab afterwards. I've never said that it shouldn't be up to the bride and groom to decide what food is available - just not to expect that people might not leave disappointed at the end if something that they expected to be there was missing, whether meat, alcohol, cake, speeches or whatever.

That said, though, if the guests are close enough to the couple inviting them, you'd think they would be aware if they're vegetarian/vegan and expect that the food might be meat-free, in the same way as you wouldn't expect booze at a Muslim wedding.

Although, as PP have said, if a vegetarian/vegan guest knew that the couple were meat eaters, they would nevertheless expect there to be a proper vegetarian alternative provided for them and not be willing to 'just suck it up for one day'. People who are big meat fans and eat it at every main meal are expected to vary what they will eat whereas vegetarians who refuse to eat meat will not countenance varying their standard diet for one day.

I think a lot of it is down to semantics and understanding as both stances are valid preferences, but that is all they are; but veganism/vegetarianism is respected whereas expecting a fully omnivorous main meal is seen as being petty and ridiculous. Even though some people classify themselves as vegetarians simply because they do not like the taste of meat and others may strongly believe in eating plenty of meat as ardent supporters of British farming.

Crackerofdoom "yes we are. We are also sufficiently versed in biology to know that there is a difference between a plant and an animal."

I was going to reply, and as a molecular biologist I could have done it quite accurately, but WeBuiltThisCityOnSausageRoll took the words out of my mouth.

If you think plants are "not sentient" and "do not feel pain" then you definitely are the ignorant one. If you think killing plants is morally superior to killing animals because plants don't follow you around and get patted, then you are more selfish than people who eat meat, because you place the value of life on whether they are cute and cuddly, and/or whether they are subservient to humans. If you eat living beings, then you are a killer of living beings, full stop. Placing yourself in a morally higher position to people who eat meat because the beings you kill have a completely different body system than yours just shows your own arrogance, very typical from humans, I must say.

I wish humans did not need to kill to survive, full stop. But, as opposed to plants (those beings you kill to eat), humans are not able to be sustained on non-alive material, and are unable to use simpe nutrients plus the energy of the Sun in order to grow. So for me, killing an animal and killing a plant makes no difference. If you think that makes me ignorant, perhaps you have not looked at the mirror much lately. Or perhaps your reasoning is just simpler because you were not as "versed in biology" as you thought. But isn't it ironic that you voluntarily choose to kill and eat the only organisms on earth who survive without having to kill any other living organism? Think about that for a minute.

FizzyGreenWater "Waiting to hear whether aurynne keeps a carrot as a pet and takes it for walks."

I don't need to, because I don't automatically classify living beings as being on a higher level of importance just because they provide company or emotional support to humans, or because they are "cute", or because "they have eyes", all idiotic reasonings some people use in order to become vegetarian. A carrot is as alive as a cow, and there isn't a single reasoning you can give me to justify a carrot being any worthier of living than an animal. You just have decided that the life of an animal is more valuable and, as a result of your decision, have decided not to eat animals. Great, nothing wrong with that. However, the moment you start feeling smug because you think your choice is "morally better than others", then you need to accept that those "others" may actually have reasons as valid as yours to follow their own choices.

You don’t need meat with every single meal, I genuinely do not understand people who feel this way. Meat is destroying the planet, we all need to eat less of it. They can cope without it for one bloody meal.

Surely even the most keen meat eaters don’t eat meat at every meal.

@aurynne

So perhaps you can answer the question I put to @WeBuiltThisBuffetOnSausageRoll

I'm curious, by your logic that plants are as sentient as animals in their own way, does that mean that if it is ok to eat animals, it is also ok to eat people?

Surely, the difference between animals and people is just a different kind of consciousness and after all, we are only "taking the life of a living organism for the purposes of prioritising your own continued survival over that of your 'victim'"

Ethically, do you feel it is better to eat a person who has been hit by a car than to pull a plant out of the ground?

Most vegetarians don't want to be given 'a roast/carvery meal but with no meat

I love this!! So long as there are Yorkshire puddings!

It’s also easier to just replace he meat with a veggie tart or pie than cook a whole separate dish.

"Placing yourself in a morally higher position to people who eat meat because the beings you kill have a completely different body system than yours just shows your own arrogance, very typical from humans, I must say."

I don't put myself in a morally higher position, and neither do most vegetarians I know. We just make choices for ourselves based on our own ethical beliefs.

I don't believe that I am morally superior because I don't eat meat. That is your projection