to think parents shouldn't bring their child up vegetarian?

[Picante]

Unless for religious reasons.

Yes this is a thread about a thread but I think I was annoying too many people over there so I've started my very own for people to get annoyed with me here!

I just think it's mean. Meat is such a huge part of our culture and fair enough if you're old enough to decide that you don't want to kill animals... but children should be given all sorts of food in the early years, including meat, until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves!

I can't believe people are still arguing about this! Why is it anyone elses business whether you feed you child veggie food or not? That is your decision as a parent and as long as you are ensuring that it gives the child all the nutrients they need whose business is it?! feeding a child a vegetarian diet is being made to sound like the height of child cruelty which is blatant rubbish....

Picesmoon, I totally agree with you! I was also not allowed sweets or chocolate or junk food etc and as a result I have a truly terrible sweet-tooth as an adult (at 13 my entire paperround money was spent on sweets as soon as I was paid)! I think I give my children a healthy and balanced diet and so don't feel guilty at all when I give them sweets and treats (including the odd fruit shoot), they don't have junk every day but like you say, denying them it will make them want it more.

I addressed that point earlier Pisces, that imho that the regular consumption of meat is probably a bigger Western luxury, than the choice to consume a vegetable based diet is.

Yes, but most of the world eats very little meat - many people in countries like India ARE vegetarian and most of the rest regard meat as a luxury. It's regular meat-eating that is unusual, historically and geographical, not vegetarianism.

People in developing countries start to suffer the same rates of ill-health associated with diet as their GDP increases and their diet becomes more Western - particularly noticeable in terms of heart disease.

Oh god I'm going to have 4 raging carnivores on my hands when they're older then. I can't see that being veggie is the same as not letting a child have sweets. And yes I do check the back of sweet packets if I'm buying them, but if they buy gelatine sweets I make no comment.

I wish my parent's approach had been more like yours schilke - their's was quite extreme I think and quite damaging to me, you sound very balanced and how I imagine I would be was my DH a veggie too.

(Diabetes as well as heart disease, btw.)

chaya may have been thinking about B12 but you can get it from yeast products such as Marmite, no need for tablets let alone injections!

If anyone has to have vitamin injections there is something wrong with their diet!

If we go back long enough historically, then meat eating would be the norm when we were hunter/gatherers- one animal killed would be much more filling than a whole day of collecting berries!

However OP is quite wrong-if someone is a vegetarian (for any reason)they are going to bring up the DC in a similar way-they just have to bear in mind that the DC is a free spirit and they might follow or they might not. It is never wise to make food a big issue IMO-just set your own example and a little deviation here or there doesn't matter. Life is too short to explain to a 3 yr old why they can have piece of chocolate but not a jelly baby-and does it matter?!

in germany a lot of prgnant women seem to be getting VitB12 injections intra muscular...shudder....
not that is neither here nor there in this discussion...just remembered (and gosh, another reason I was mostly pg over here, I can tell ya...as those injections are meant to be rather och )

YABU of course you are .However i dont think anyone should eat meat they wouldnt be willing to kill themselves if push came to shove. Mind you i am on day three of giving up the fags so i would probably kill oragutan if someone told me it tasted like chicken

'If I ate meat it would have to be properly raised and organic. Proper meat.'

Mine is-I like to know where it came from.

If someone is starving I think you would kill something and eat it raw! Hopefully we will never find out, but any books about people in that position find that they eat all sorts of utterly disgusting things -the push for survival is so strong. It isn't possible to theorise about what we would do.

YABU.

Agree with bumpsoon. Eat it if you're prepared to kill it. I have many friends who keep chickens and kill them for eating, and this is the most honest kind of meat-eating from mini 'farming', IMHO.

As for some veggies eating fish but not meat, there are a couple of decent reasons some people choose to do this:

(1) Meat is arguably unnecessary - it doesn't provide any nutrients you can't get elsewhere. Some fish contains omega 3 oils, in particular, complete DHA (which some people can't make from the omega 3 oils in nuts and seeds). It does provide a necessary nutrient that is difficult to source elsewhere.

(2) Some people are against the principle of farming of livestock, some/many farming practices, the environmental impact of widescale farming, etc. So for them, eating wild salmon wouldn't go against their values in the way that eating a steak from Tesco might, IYSWIM.

Fairlady - seems to be a cultural thing, when taking medicines generally the Brits prefer pills, the French go for suppositories and the Germans injections. Dunno why. (All seems very Freudian.)

Scrumplet - but that doesn't answer the question of WHY they call themselves vegetarians rather than explain what they actually are! Which is my beef with the whole 'I'm a vegetarian who eats fish' thing.

Sorry, I did mean B12. But the baby needed a B12 injection because it was so malnourished that simply giving it marmite would have done nothing - it was way too late for that. Anyway, both mothers were convicted of manslaughter. I would post a link to the court case (it wasn't in the UK) but really can't be bothered.

Just to clarify, I am not saying that all vegan parents are killing their babies. Not at all. What I was saying was that it is much harder to give your children a balanced diet if you cut out major food groups.

I am not a big meat-eater at all (far from it) and would advocate veggies and pulses etc over meat.

Wow, it is scary how quickly people can get aggressive on this forum and misrepresent people's position.

Two nutty Christian scientists failing to feed their babies properly do not represent vegans generally though. Your first post sounded as if you thought they might. (Am not a vegan btw.)

There are plenty of meat eaters who feed their children very poor diets, hence Type 2 diabetes suddenly cropping up in children.

Don't they? Surely a vegan is a vegan no matter what their religion is?

OK, so your claim is the two women who were Christian scientists and vegans and whose poor baby was so malnourished it died represent the average vegan?

And you call other posters aggressive? Sheesh.

I guess what I mean is that they followed the a general vegan diet - no dairy products, no fish etc. The babies illness was caused by this and their failure to get the necessary vitamin from another source. To be sure, the reason the baby died was because they refused the B12 injection for their baby but his malnutricien was due to their strict diet applied in an uneducated way.

And I agree that there are terrible diets amongst meat-eaters, for sure.

But my general point is that is much harder (not impossible) to have a balanced diet if you cut out major food groups and if you are going to do that you better be pretty bloody sure you know how to replace essential vitamins in other ways.

edam, I agree. Sorry, didn't have time to read all posts and last one was a bit rushed. I eat fish, but not meat, and do not call myself a vegetarian. I am not one. I eat fish maybe one day a week. But still, I'm not vegetarian. The Vegetarian Society defines being vegetarian as eating no flesh, fish nor fowl. I think there are some terms bandied about for fish-eating 'vegetarians' - pesco-vegetarian and pescatarian. But no one knows what these mean in everyday conversation.

Liked your 'my beef' comment.