Secret meat - not so sweet for vegetarians
By Stacey McLachlan
The Peak (Simon Fraser University)
September 16, 2009
 VANCOUVER (CUP) – There are many reasons you may have become a vegetarian. Perhaps you simply love animals and wouldn’t want to subject them to your stomach acids. Perhaps you are an altruistic show-off. Perhaps you’ve realized that you yourself are made of meat. Whatever the reason, you may have noticed that choosing to live this vaguely alternative lifestyle isn’t always simple.
Sure, it’s easy enough to stock your cupboard with beans and other, different coloured beans, or to bring your own Tofurky in an embarrassing little Ziplock bag to your grandma’s for Thanksgiving dinner and then patiently explain to all your relatives that no, you don’t want to spice it up with a little gravy, thank you. The real veg-test, however, begins where hamburgers end: sometimes the meat department isn’t the only place animal bits are hiding.
Fear not, fellow herbivores, for with upwards of two years of soy-based imitation meat under my belt (not literally, thankfully) and the Internet at my carrot-stained fingertips, I am most certainly the right person to advise you of what seemingly innocuous household products to avoid.
I feel slightly ridiculous admitting this, but I didn’t know until way too recently that bone china is made of bones.
No one is even hiding this fact from you: it’s right in the name. I discovered this via an alarmingly boring experimental film viewed in an art history class.
Ideally, I should have been considering the plight of Canada’s Aboriginals as plates were smashed and buffaloes stampeded (as they are wont to do) in 35mm, but instead I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that eating off of animal skeletons is considered classy.
Pretty much anything squishy and fun
Oh gelatin, you meat-enriched devil in disguise. Why must you tease and torture us so?
You make our Jell-O Jigglers wiggle, and our Jell-O Wigglers jiggle; you hold both our s’mores and lives together. You are the gummy in our bear! And yet, we cannot (well, should not, if we’re doing this thing right) accept your loving, nutritionally-void embrace.
Gelatin – of pigs and cows and ponies too, of skin and bones and an intestine or two. This love affair with marshmallows and the like has to end if we are to be true to our quest.
But be wary, my heartbroken comrades, for gelatin does not hide in delicious things alone, oh no.
It’s used to produce the shell of pharmaceutical capsules and is used in stabilizing photo paper.
There may be no use in hiding – it’s even used to coat playing cards.
Rub-a-dub-dub
The year: 1996. The book: Fight Club. Another year followed by a colon: 1999. A movie produced in this aforementioned year: also Fight Club.
The happy-go-lucky ‘90s screech to a halt as author Chuck Palahniuk and then some director guy share with the world a terrible secret — soap may contain traces of fat.
Although there are some soaps out there containing fat from veggie or olive oil, rendered beef fat (or Sodium Tallowate, if you‘re feeling fancy) sneaks into many, if not most, big commercial brands, including Lever, Irish Springs, and The Beef Fat Soap Company.
If you’re serious about this vegetarian thing, you should take a careful look at the ingredients list the next time you’re shopping for soap, and try to pick a brand that will get you clean without requiring you to rub dead animal lard all over your bare skin.
And in the near future, apples?
Scientists, those wacky dudes, are at it again.
Bored with the same old genetic modifications, rumours are swirling that there has been some dabbling in adding fish or bovine hormones to apples.
While it’s all just in the name of fun these days – we have no business in the bedrooms of scientists – we’ve all seen enough episodes of Degrassi to know how social experimentation can spiral drastically downward.
Sure, they’re just adding animal hormones to fruit at parties on the weekend right now, but soon, they’ll be adjusting some apple DNA every night, staying out late and hanging out with seedy (unintentional but highly awesome pun!) characters.
They’ll ignore their responsibilities, turn on their families, and resort to a life of crime to support this filthy habit.
And where does that leave us, your average student apple aficionados? Eating cow-infused Golden Deliciouses, that’s where.
So while it may seem pointless to bother trying to keep animals alive, we’ve got to hang in there, tiger(s).
Without us, there would be several dozen more animals killed yearly. Even if you can’t help eating Peeps off your mom’s fanciest dinnerware, simply choosing chick peas over chicken is a big step toward doing something to help the planet, standing up for creatures great and small, and gently inflating our tiny-yet-smug sense of superiority.
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