Vegan, vegetarian, or Omnivore?

[gurok]

I'm an ovo-lacto vegetarian and have been for about seven years. That's no meat (biologically, not Biblically). As a side note, being Catholic, it makes Lent easier.

Pretty strange question. I know I'm going out on a limb here, but if you're secretly a billionaire doing catering research for a massive VGChartz get together where you plan to fly all of us (expenses paid) to an undisclosed tropical location and lavish food and great games upon us, I'd like to make a request.

No roast pork, beef lasagne, chicken burritos, or other varied menu items catering might have prepared for me please. I'd like the "vegetarian meal" that's on offer. Nothing sounds more appetising to me than that. Dogs eat dog food, vegetarians eat vegetarian food. You know, because I'm vegetarian ... and we all have similar taste buds, us vegetarians. I don't care what's in it, obviously. I mean, I choose not to eat meat, so obviously I've used up all of my choosiness there and I'm not choosy at all when it comes to vegetables. In fact, I'll happily gorge myself on whatever senseless combination of sun-dried tomatoes and vegetable sundries people can come up with.

^^^

One huge downside to being vegetarian is that the lack of demand for vegetarian dining, take-away or aeroplane food means your options in situations such as the catering proposition above can be very limited. Happily, a lot of restaurants will do almost any of the items on the menu without the meat if you ask. There are even some restaurants that have little Vs for vegetarian items on the menu. However, there are still restaurants out there with a single item under the heading "Vegetarian", or even caterers with the dreaded "vegetarian meal". Being a vegetarian has certainly changed my outlook on these things, and I do find myself judging an eatery partially on its allowances for vegetarians.

Oh, and realistically, I've eaten a few of the "vegetarian meal" options before. Most of the time they're something Italian with mushrooms, pumpkin, beans or eggplant directly in place of the meat. Then they'll go and throw olives in though. Yuck.

Pizza is a great vegetarian food when eating out. You can have whatever you want on a pizza. And most pizza places around here now do gourmet pizzas, which means like 2-3 very tasty additions to their vegetarian menu. And if you go to big cities, there's even weird vegan pizza, for those weird vegans ;).

Also, being vegetarian is a great way to save money. Meat's very expensive and I avoid the butcher entirely on a fortnightly shop. I'm also far less likely to get food poisoning. I think it's also a bit easier to cook vegetarian (for yourself). There are no cooking times to worry about for most things. It's really a question of how melted you want the cheese, or how crisp you want the broccoli, you know.

@monkeyman40210: I hope you enjoyed my crazy rant. Are you more bored or less bored after reading that?