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magnulus
 
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"Digger" > wrote in message
...
>
> The ideal would be that vegetarians feed exclusively
> on vegetation while vegans do the same and abstain
> from animal derived products such as leather etc.


This is a false defenition. Vegetarian comes from the Latin "vegetus"
(vigorous, energetic), which doesn't mean "vegetable". It reffers instead
to the original intent of the vegetarian diet in the West, a "pure" diet
free of meat that would confer health properties (ancient vegetarians such
as Pythagoras or Ovid didn't call their diet/lifestyle "vegetarian"). Milk
products, honey, and eggs have been accepted as vegetarian food for a long
time, and vegetarians might even wear wool, a few leather... in India
vegetarians sometimes use leather derived from dead cows (ones that have
died of natural causes).

Chinese Buddhist "vegetarians" sometimes east bivalve molluscs if they
live near the ocean, though this would not be in accordance with the Western
idea of vegetarianism. The Chinese Buddhists eat the molluscs because of
tradition, they don't consider the bivalve molluscs to be feeling animals in
the usual sense. Of course, some Buddhists don't eat garlic, either.

Not everything vegetarians eat is "plant" based in the biological sense.
Fungi such as mushrooms, Quorn, miso (Aspergillus oryzae), nutritional
yeast, are definitely not plants in the biological sense. Most seaweeds
vegetarians/macriobitcs would eat are actually not plants, either- they
belong to an entirely different kingdom of eurkariotic life: Protista, and
they are actually far older than plants.