This is a great message Switter. If I had a word for my food choices it's avoid-animal-proteinarian. The only meat I absolutely refuse to eat is pork. But if my life allowed for it I would probably never eat any animal protein.
Love your quote: "It’s not what goes in one’s mouth that condemns a person, it’s what comes out, says an old book."
For vegans wanting to influence others would do better to say that any reduction of animal protein consumption helps the climate, decreases animal cruelty, etc.
In their teens, my kids worked as servers in local restaurants. Little irritated them more than the customers who asked the chef to completely alter a dish according to their vegoglutishpescannoying preferences only to then have them request more butter with their free bread.
Loved this. Loved these. I'm an equal opportunity eater, though I try to source judiciously. Judiciously, for me, might mean supporting a guy I know who sells barbecued pork ribs, chicken and pulled pork from a roadside stand.
“vegoglutishpescannoying.” Virtue signalers. My two rules of eating at restaurants: 1) if you don’t want what’s on the menu, go somewhere else, and 2) people who are rude and obnoxious to wait staff should be _____________ !!!
I can be a vegetarian. Until The Man gets home for 2 weeks. and then there I go again eating a 16 ounce prime rib cut. I order broccoli as a side to alleviate the guilt.
Brilliant. Love them all. I was vegetarian in the 80s and 90s for 14 years. This made my family absolutely nuts though I, like you, was very low key about it. I always said don’t worry, there is always something I can eat. What made me roll my eyes then was how many folks would say “oh Im a vegetarian too, but I eat chicken” or fish 🤦🏻♀️. OR others would become defensive and immediately ask why I wore leather shoes etc.
I always said that if I lived where I knew how the animals lived and died, then I might eat meat again. I just wasn’t interested in eating animals pumped with antibiotics or a life of pain. Then I moved to Idaho and the friends I made are hunters- clean shots. My neighbor for 10 years raised lamb. So alas, my eating habits changed.
My old guy is very tolerant of my dietary weirdness, but still thinks oysters are vegetarian, which I sort of understand. Raw oysters could easily be mistaken for okra that was made into a smoothie, which would make them a member of the vegetable snot group.
Anyone can eat fried okra, but okra smoothy drinkers are a special breed. I love okra smoothies. It’s like the good part of having a head cold or respiratory infection.
Admit to never having had an okra smoothie. I don't really do smoothies of any kind. Far prefer to eat my veggies than drink them. In the same vein, the okra on my menus is rarely fried. Raw or stewed with corn and tomatoes top the list for me. Next time I have a head cold, I'm going to try to channel the "good part" idea. Heretofore, that has been totally lost on me.
I love you madly. These were hysterical. I came face-to-face with general veggie ethos in Santa Cruz in the early 80s. One such friend managed to keep from screaming in terror when I drove us into the Burger King drive-thru. To my surprise, she ordered a Whopper. When she bit into it, she gasped, stunned. After a moment, she declared, "I've never taster anything so wonderful in my life." Alas, her testimony was strong and she never wavered again, but I keep trying.
My personal favorite is the biker. I really hate trail bikers ... so much so, I murdered one in my novel, Ghost in the Forest. That one really made me laugh as well as the carrot and Spoke and Kirk. I've stolen them for my FB feed, BTW, although I don't know if I have the courage to post the biker. Too much rage out there.
Hey, if they stroke out, that’s not your problem. People are wrapped way too tightly these days.
I was thinking about getting a biker outfit like that and wearing it to Cabella’s or a Second Amendment rally. The nice thing about that crowd is they always ask if you have good insurance coverage, especially good dental coverage, before they pulverize you.
There was a South African prankster called Leon Shuster who was equal opportunity by including all the SA racial groups with his schemes. He also got beat up a lot, but was very popular in the early 80’s. Search for him on YouTube and you’ll find several of his movies. It’s like a South African version of Candid Camera, except a little edgier.
don't know what "stroke out" means, but when they come up behind you and sneer at you after you've leapt off the trail, that's my problems. It's also my problem when I and my dog are walking up a hill on a trail and a biker is gaining speed to catch air at the top. Almost lost y head on that one. He was SO SURPRISED there was anyone else using his trail. Attended a meeting of the Truckee Bicycle Coalition and got a gutful of some really entitled bulshit, especially from one guy who was miffed because CalTrans doesn't clean up the bike lanes regularly. Of course, the CalTrans spent how many KK$ on signage just for that club's bike routes around Truckee and Tahoe. When I heard bikers were lobbying to use the PTC, my head exploded. Sorry, if this rant offends.
I was driving through Boise last Thursday and was driving on a street where they took two of the four lanes to make bike lanes which I’ve never seen a bike rider use. In fact, they’ve made special bike lanes throughout Boise that I’ve never seen bikes on. Maybe they are planning for the day when only EVs are allowed in town and the rest of us will be forced to ride our identical black iron peoples’ bikes from the Peoples’ Glorious Bicycle Factory #34.
There is a similar culture clash on our whitewater rivers between kayakers and rafters versus the jet boat crowd. The jet boaters pay registration fees, invasive species inspection fees, parking fees, and have voluntarily built several boat landings that the kayakers (known as water hippies around here) freely use. There is currently a detente’ between the two groups, in which the jet boats are only on the river on Thursdays. (For some spectacular footage, Google jet boat Southfork Payette River).
The fly in the ointment came in the form of jet skis. Like jet boats, jet ski riders can go uphill through whitewater and decided they have as much right as anyone else to use the river whenever they want, which seems fair enough. They pay registration fees, invasive species fees and parking fees the same as a jet boat. I don’t think they are wrong.
But the vast majority of the users are kayakers and whitewater rafting companies with their flotillas of brightly colored rafts and kayaks that plug up our once peaceful river, especially on weekends. There’s a sense of entitlement and moral superiority that I find off putting, even though their plastic, neoprene, and nylon equipment comes from the same oil well as the jet boat fuel. A few drown every year, but the rest know it will never happen to them.
Back when our county received a portion of the funding from Forest Service timber sales in lieu of property taxes on the three quarters or so of the land in the county that is state and federally owned, the money was used for schools and road maintenance. Now that timber sales are almost impossible because of regulations and environmental legal challenges, the money has almost dried up, but we were assured that tourism dollars would make up the difference.
So now we have the high top Mercedes van driving water hippie crowd sitting in front of the coffee shops using the free Wi-Fi by the hour, and when they decide it’s time to victual up, I’ve watched them buy half a dozen packs of thirty-nine cent Top Ramen at the grocery store. So much for school funding and road maintenance.
Sadly, tourism has turned into a garbage-eating monster. Truckee would swell on weekends from its full-time 45000 to 85-125K population of really entitled .... visitors. As with Moab and any other small town turned touristy, the local can no longer work and live in the same town. But this is old news. sigh I'm looking forward to visiting Boise in July. Last time was when I was eight to visit cousins and we all grabbed inner tubes and floated down the Boise River. Looking at photos of it now, I can see why you hate the flotillas of rafts. That's what it's become. And Boise looks like it's huge. We'll try not to become "those" tourists, but after all, it will be our turn to be stupid.
Funny but my Shihtzu and what we thought we were getting was a Shihtzu turned into a weiner dog....they tend to be vegan with a little protein thrown in. They love green beans, carrots, squash of any kind, yams, sweet potatoes, beans of any kind (however - BIL Switter and I both suffer from them eating beans) corn, oatmeal which I have to make and it takes me back to childhood when all we ate was oatmeal and Cream Of Lumps..... But to be honest I was a closet meat eater although raised a vegetarian. My grandma, bless her heart - thought me to be scrawny and underfed so when I went to stay with her she would throw bacon, a pork chop, spaghetti with meat, beans with meat, meat with meat at me and she made me promise never to tell my mom. The secret went to her grave along with she let me drink coffee with canned milk. So - I am a sort of carnivore/vegan kind of gal depending on the day. Some habits are hard to break.
Being part vegan is like being part pregnant. And that same grandma fried me up some bear meat one morning. It was the last time I ever ate bear, but also the first time. I remember that it was kind of greasy. They say dog is better tasting than bear.
I respect that you're vegan and even MORE that you don't parade it nor shove it in everyone's face. Perhaps most that you accept with love and grace when you're offered a meal by someone being hospitable. I don't know how but somewhere we became so "righteous" that we lost our ability for such grace...
Reena, I’ve eaten many meals of unknown origin and hygiene because they were offered in kindness and generosity, and often the best they had to offer, I ate it with gratitude and occasionally, Pepto Bismal.
I was once on an internal BabyFlot flight seated next to a window and trying to ignore the flies buzzing me. While I was staring out the window, my seatmates settled in and I received several sharp elbow blows to my ribs. I turned to see why and saw a grinning, toothless babushka offering me a mutton wrapped in lavash sandwich, which I accented and enjoyed, not necessarily the sandwich, but the generosity and kindness I saw in her happy, wrinkled face.
I can always be a vegan again tomorrow and I will probably smile about how silly it can seem to other people. 🤪
I have actually had to go back and read your writings as life got in the way and could not keep up. Your little switter sister sat in a tree stand for 4 hours and shot, gutted and 4-wheeled home her first and only bear while her husband was sitting in a bar. Probs will never do that again - the bear and the husband - but as someone that grew up eating Cream Of Lumps every morning and oatmeal like fake meat patties turns out that my grandma slipping me bacon every morning off the old cookstove because she thought me to be scrawny - her words - I tuned out to not be vegan. Or vegetarian. But it appears my 2 foot long wiener dog loves all veggies as does the Shihtzunot. So here I am back to cooking at and eating veggies. They have no clue they are not eating meat. sigh.
I see a bumper sticker from time to time that really makes me question my vegan choices:
“If God didn’t intend for us to eat animals, why did He make them out of meat?”
I added two more memes at the end that I missed the first time around. The last one is my all time favorite.
This is a great message Switter. If I had a word for my food choices it's avoid-animal-proteinarian. The only meat I absolutely refuse to eat is pork. But if my life allowed for it I would probably never eat any animal protein.
Love your quote: "It’s not what goes in one’s mouth that condemns a person, it’s what comes out, says an old book."
For vegans wanting to influence others would do better to say that any reduction of animal protein consumption helps the climate, decreases animal cruelty, etc.
😻
No one came to burn my house down lost night, so I must have navigated safely through this little minefield, so far.
If I’m honest, I must admit that I enjoy cat beef once in a while, if no one’s looking. It’s the other white meat.
Nooooo! Ha ha ha! The kitty Zen masters are for looking and, if you're lucky, petting. 😻
In their teens, my kids worked as servers in local restaurants. Little irritated them more than the customers who asked the chef to completely alter a dish according to their vegoglutishpescannoying preferences only to then have them request more butter with their free bread.
Loved this. Loved these. I'm an equal opportunity eater, though I try to source judiciously. Judiciously, for me, might mean supporting a guy I know who sells barbecued pork ribs, chicken and pulled pork from a roadside stand.
“vegoglutishpescannoying.” Virtue signalers. My two rules of eating at restaurants: 1) if you don’t want what’s on the menu, go somewhere else, and 2) people who are rude and obnoxious to wait staff should be _____________ !!!
I can be a vegetarian. Until The Man gets home for 2 weeks. and then there I go again eating a 16 ounce prime rib cut. I order broccoli as a side to alleviate the guilt.
Brilliant. Love them all. I was vegetarian in the 80s and 90s for 14 years. This made my family absolutely nuts though I, like you, was very low key about it. I always said don’t worry, there is always something I can eat. What made me roll my eyes then was how many folks would say “oh Im a vegetarian too, but I eat chicken” or fish 🤦🏻♀️. OR others would become defensive and immediately ask why I wore leather shoes etc.
I always said that if I lived where I knew how the animals lived and died, then I might eat meat again. I just wasn’t interested in eating animals pumped with antibiotics or a life of pain. Then I moved to Idaho and the friends I made are hunters- clean shots. My neighbor for 10 years raised lamb. So alas, my eating habits changed.
My old guy is very tolerant of my dietary weirdness, but still thinks oysters are vegetarian, which I sort of understand. Raw oysters could easily be mistaken for okra that was made into a smoothie, which would make them a member of the vegetable snot group.
😆😂😂
Hey now. I can accept your plant-based preferences. But don't come after my okra.
Anyone can eat fried okra, but okra smoothy drinkers are a special breed. I love okra smoothies. It’s like the good part of having a head cold or respiratory infection.
Admit to never having had an okra smoothie. I don't really do smoothies of any kind. Far prefer to eat my veggies than drink them. In the same vein, the okra on my menus is rarely fried. Raw or stewed with corn and tomatoes top the list for me. Next time I have a head cold, I'm going to try to channel the "good part" idea. Heretofore, that has been totally lost on me.
Nothing goes down smoother than a green okra smoothie. It’s like raw eggs through a funnel.
I can - will - only imagine.
The Star Trek ones are my favorites!
I love you madly. These were hysterical. I came face-to-face with general veggie ethos in Santa Cruz in the early 80s. One such friend managed to keep from screaming in terror when I drove us into the Burger King drive-thru. To my surprise, she ordered a Whopper. When she bit into it, she gasped, stunned. After a moment, she declared, "I've never taster anything so wonderful in my life." Alas, her testimony was strong and she never wavered again, but I keep trying.
Looking a carrot in the eye before I kill it is just another day ending in Y for Switter.
My personal favorite is the biker. I really hate trail bikers ... so much so, I murdered one in my novel, Ghost in the Forest. That one really made me laugh as well as the carrot and Spoke and Kirk. I've stolen them for my FB feed, BTW, although I don't know if I have the courage to post the biker. Too much rage out there.
Hey, if they stroke out, that’s not your problem. People are wrapped way too tightly these days.
I was thinking about getting a biker outfit like that and wearing it to Cabella’s or a Second Amendment rally. The nice thing about that crowd is they always ask if you have good insurance coverage, especially good dental coverage, before they pulverize you.
There was a South African prankster called Leon Shuster who was equal opportunity by including all the SA racial groups with his schemes. He also got beat up a lot, but was very popular in the early 80’s. Search for him on YouTube and you’ll find several of his movies. It’s like a South African version of Candid Camera, except a little edgier.
don't know what "stroke out" means, but when they come up behind you and sneer at you after you've leapt off the trail, that's my problems. It's also my problem when I and my dog are walking up a hill on a trail and a biker is gaining speed to catch air at the top. Almost lost y head on that one. He was SO SURPRISED there was anyone else using his trail. Attended a meeting of the Truckee Bicycle Coalition and got a gutful of some really entitled bulshit, especially from one guy who was miffed because CalTrans doesn't clean up the bike lanes regularly. Of course, the CalTrans spent how many KK$ on signage just for that club's bike routes around Truckee and Tahoe. When I heard bikers were lobbying to use the PTC, my head exploded. Sorry, if this rant offends.
I was driving through Boise last Thursday and was driving on a street where they took two of the four lanes to make bike lanes which I’ve never seen a bike rider use. In fact, they’ve made special bike lanes throughout Boise that I’ve never seen bikes on. Maybe they are planning for the day when only EVs are allowed in town and the rest of us will be forced to ride our identical black iron peoples’ bikes from the Peoples’ Glorious Bicycle Factory #34.
There is a similar culture clash on our whitewater rivers between kayakers and rafters versus the jet boat crowd. The jet boaters pay registration fees, invasive species inspection fees, parking fees, and have voluntarily built several boat landings that the kayakers (known as water hippies around here) freely use. There is currently a detente’ between the two groups, in which the jet boats are only on the river on Thursdays. (For some spectacular footage, Google jet boat Southfork Payette River).
The fly in the ointment came in the form of jet skis. Like jet boats, jet ski riders can go uphill through whitewater and decided they have as much right as anyone else to use the river whenever they want, which seems fair enough. They pay registration fees, invasive species fees and parking fees the same as a jet boat. I don’t think they are wrong.
But the vast majority of the users are kayakers and whitewater rafting companies with their flotillas of brightly colored rafts and kayaks that plug up our once peaceful river, especially on weekends. There’s a sense of entitlement and moral superiority that I find off putting, even though their plastic, neoprene, and nylon equipment comes from the same oil well as the jet boat fuel. A few drown every year, but the rest know it will never happen to them.
Back when our county received a portion of the funding from Forest Service timber sales in lieu of property taxes on the three quarters or so of the land in the county that is state and federally owned, the money was used for schools and road maintenance. Now that timber sales are almost impossible because of regulations and environmental legal challenges, the money has almost dried up, but we were assured that tourism dollars would make up the difference.
So now we have the high top Mercedes van driving water hippie crowd sitting in front of the coffee shops using the free Wi-Fi by the hour, and when they decide it’s time to victual up, I’ve watched them buy half a dozen packs of thirty-nine cent Top Ramen at the grocery store. So much for school funding and road maintenance.
Sadly, tourism has turned into a garbage-eating monster. Truckee would swell on weekends from its full-time 45000 to 85-125K population of really entitled .... visitors. As with Moab and any other small town turned touristy, the local can no longer work and live in the same town. But this is old news. sigh I'm looking forward to visiting Boise in July. Last time was when I was eight to visit cousins and we all grabbed inner tubes and floated down the Boise River. Looking at photos of it now, I can see why you hate the flotillas of rafts. That's what it's become. And Boise looks like it's huge. We'll try not to become "those" tourists, but after all, it will be our turn to be stupid.
Haha these are great !
Any time you and your wife want some away time, I’ll babysit Myles for you. I have a lot of things to teach him! 🤪
My wife isn’t a vegan, so I still have to buy lawn equipment. She’s only a vegetarian.
Funny but my Shihtzu and what we thought we were getting was a Shihtzu turned into a weiner dog....they tend to be vegan with a little protein thrown in. They love green beans, carrots, squash of any kind, yams, sweet potatoes, beans of any kind (however - BIL Switter and I both suffer from them eating beans) corn, oatmeal which I have to make and it takes me back to childhood when all we ate was oatmeal and Cream Of Lumps..... But to be honest I was a closet meat eater although raised a vegetarian. My grandma, bless her heart - thought me to be scrawny and underfed so when I went to stay with her she would throw bacon, a pork chop, spaghetti with meat, beans with meat, meat with meat at me and she made me promise never to tell my mom. The secret went to her grave along with she let me drink coffee with canned milk. So - I am a sort of carnivore/vegan kind of gal depending on the day. Some habits are hard to break.
Being part vegan is like being part pregnant. And that same grandma fried me up some bear meat one morning. It was the last time I ever ate bear, but also the first time. I remember that it was kind of greasy. They say dog is better tasting than bear.
The last one and the Venus fly traps. 😂
All of them actually.
I liked the funeral and the bike rider best.
Too funny with memes. 😂
Bravo, Randy!!!
🤪
I'll have to remember to buy the family bucket of chicken in future. 😂
I looked at the picture of the guy who wrote that and immediately liked him.
I added two more just now, and the last one is my all-time favorite.
How did he explain that???
I discovered an absolutely neutral, no-politics reason to cut down on red meat:
It seems to make my big toe hurt (gout, I guess).
I hate that, but there you are.
Good to know. Now when I do a vegan meme dump, at keast one vegan won’t dump me.
Didn’t say I was vegan, though: eggs, cheese, butter, chicken, pork all still fine.
LOL! Enjoyed reading this. SO funny.
I respect that you're vegan and even MORE that you don't parade it nor shove it in everyone's face. Perhaps most that you accept with love and grace when you're offered a meal by someone being hospitable. I don't know how but somewhere we became so "righteous" that we lost our ability for such grace...
Reena, I’ve eaten many meals of unknown origin and hygiene because they were offered in kindness and generosity, and often the best they had to offer, I ate it with gratitude and occasionally, Pepto Bismal.
I was once on an internal BabyFlot flight seated next to a window and trying to ignore the flies buzzing me. While I was staring out the window, my seatmates settled in and I received several sharp elbow blows to my ribs. I turned to see why and saw a grinning, toothless babushka offering me a mutton wrapped in lavash sandwich, which I accented and enjoyed, not necessarily the sandwich, but the generosity and kindness I saw in her happy, wrinkled face.
I can always be a vegan again tomorrow and I will probably smile about how silly it can seem to other people. 🤪
I have actually had to go back and read your writings as life got in the way and could not keep up. Your little switter sister sat in a tree stand for 4 hours and shot, gutted and 4-wheeled home her first and only bear while her husband was sitting in a bar. Probs will never do that again - the bear and the husband - but as someone that grew up eating Cream Of Lumps every morning and oatmeal like fake meat patties turns out that my grandma slipping me bacon every morning off the old cookstove because she thought me to be scrawny - her words - I tuned out to not be vegan. Or vegetarian. But it appears my 2 foot long wiener dog loves all veggies as does the Shihtzunot. So here I am back to cooking at and eating veggies. They have no clue they are not eating meat. sigh.