Hummusgirl's Blog

vegetarianism.  When I think of vegetarians or vegans I think of artsy people.  Or at least people interested in the arts and who care about the world.  I wonder if there are more poor vegetarians or rich ones?  Is it harder to be a vegetarian than a meat eater?  That seems like a definite yes answer, but maybe you get used to it and vegetables really are much more fun.  I like to believe that the rich people who are vegetarian would rather be living like the poorer people and that the poor vegetarian person lifestyle is better than any wealthy person because maybe they’re into cooking more. 

Having said that, I wish I was vegetarian.  But I tried that a couple times, and ended up eating candy, which probably has meat byproducts in it anyway.  I do, however, cook a lot of vegetarian food which I think is more exciting than plain old meat. 

You see, vegetarianism in America started around 1960 and what I didn’t know is that the Greeks are more responsible for this trend.  I just thought that the Indians, were semi-responsible for this trend.  What if the Indians tried to make all Westerners vegetarian? There are more Indian vegetarians (400 million or so) than the rest of the world combined, according to wikipedia!  It seems to me that the Indian way of being vegetarian is a spiritual and religious thing while the Western world seems to be a trend against the government and our monoculture society in general.

I wonder if our American vegetarian cookbooks would be really different if Hindus had their way?  Would we have more vegetables that we’ve never even heard of?  Would we use these Asian veggies much more than we do otherwise?  Maybe they wouldn’t be that much different because vegetarian cooking really has come around big time in terms of what you can do with it.