Still blocked, so read this fantastic post by Bad News Hughes [via Sweetney]

Choice excerpts:

I was vegetarian for more than a decade. My crazy mom decreed us so when I was 11 or 12, and I just sort of eventually went along with it. As my mom no doubt knew, being vegetarian was a good way to get attention and act all self-righteous and morally superior. When you’re vegetarian, everyone has to fuss over you, make special plans. When they don't, it gives you an excuse to sulk, especially during Thanksgiving or Christmas, when the rest of the family as 11 different dishes they can eat and you only have two, corn and cranberry sauce, and you know this because you sat there and counted. And you can get even sulkier when nobody pays attention to you mewling out questions like, “Was this corn boiled in ham water?” Because they’re all too busy eating delicious regular food to care.

Also, when you’re vegetarian you always get to decide where to go eat, because the place all the normal people want to go, the place with “BBQ” in its name, “doesn’t have anything you can eat.” That’s a funny word, can.

Vegans do all that shit as well, and usually ramp it up threefold in the self-righteous category too. Vegans also spend 62% of their time imagining totally false but entertainingly nefarious origins for commonplace ingredients. “Don’t drink that Mountain Dew, dude,” they’ll tell each other. “It’s colored with Yellow #63, which is made from crushed bugs.” Or, “The sorbitol in your toothpaste comes from rendered bear fat, dude. Better ditch it.”

These sorts of lines are delivered with an air of disapproving gravity that suggests the recipient is ignorant, less of a vegan than the speaker. It implies they don’t have the commitment or discipline required to be really pure. Mastering this tone is important, because veganism is more than a diet, or even a cult — it’s a constant game of one-upmanship.

Unlike other vegetarians I knew whose “systems” had become too sensitive and pure to digest that poisonous interloper of succulence, meat, accidentally eating animal parts never made me feel sick. I’m not saying I didn’t play it up a bit, because what’s the fun of being a vegetarian if you don’t do that? But, much as with all you lying fuckers and your fake-ass Monday morning food poisoning, I never experienced any real distress. In fact, I just assumed it happened all the time when I didn't know it, because it probably did. You ever wonder why vegetarians only get sick that way when they know they accidentally ate meat? Well, don’t, at least not out loud in front of one, because you’ll be in for a bracing lecture.

Shit, you know, I didn’t even get sick the day I forswore veganism and vegetarianism forever, hitting a cheap Chinese food buffet to cram handfuls of every possible quasi-identifiable flesh nugget and MSG-laden gloop I could grab in my belly. Nope, on the contrary — that day I felt great! Not only was it psychologically liberating, it was probably the first time vitamin B12 hit my bloodstream in a decade.

Now, if I know you and you are either a vegetarian or vegan, that is fine and I don’t hold it against you. But I do think it is best for you to know that when you are talking to me about any aspect of your choice in diet, I’m not actually listening to you. I’m just thinking in italics.