On Fri, 15 Oct 2004 12:21:14 -0400, "magnulus" > wrote:
>"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.

No. it is not.

>Vegetarian comes from the Latin "vegetus"
>(vigorous, energetic), which doesn't mean "vegetable".

Then, to regard or announce oneself as a vegetarian,
all one need do is equivocate on the term and hope
no one realises they aren't trying to fool others when
inwardly referring to a definition of vegetarianism
normally associated with eating veg. Good luck with
that, but you won't fool everyone using that kind of
equivocation. Not unless you're only trying to fool
yourself, that is.


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.
>