9 Foods That Are Not Vegetarian

sugar, a photo by Judy ** on Flickr.

Being a vegetarian is often like a journey down the yellow brick road. It's full of surprises, sometimes unpleasant ones. Take for instance when you're invited to dinner and after enjoying your scrumptious vegetarian green curry, the hostess proudly informs you that she only used prawn paste to flavour the curry.

By then it would be too late to enlighten your hosts that prawn is not vegetarian (especially if you're having dinner at your boss' house!). The lesson you take away from there is to always warn your hosts before hand what exactly vegetarians eat. Granted, things could go awry anyway but at least you know that you did all you could to prevent ingesting a dead animal.

One-Dish Meals For New Veggies

A slice of curried vegetable pie is the perfect comfort food on a rainy Sunday.
Photo: SG

Today's post was inspired by an episode of Jamie's Food Revolution, a TLC programme that chronicles renowned UK chef Jamie Oliver's journey to different parts of America, helping people cook and eat healthy. This morning's episode saw Oliver go head to head with a stubborn radio deejay intent on thwarting Oliver's mission in the latter's West Virginia town. Oliver made a bet with the deejay that he would get 1000 people to participate in his cook-a-thon and not only did he achieve that, the same deejay happened to be the 1000th person!

Of course it helped that Oliver got the townsfolk to cook a one-dish-meal: stir-fried noodles with plenty of vegetables, which is far less off-putting than a five-course dinner. In fact, it was this dish that got me thinking: many people harbour a secret desire to go vegetarian or vegan, but they are 'forced' out of it by naysayers who tell them how inconvenient a new diet would be.

Exotic Dining: Marigolds

Marigolds add some 'kick' to desserts and salads. Photo: SG

Just the other day, I was watching TLC when they ran a commercial for "Dining With Death", a new reality series on 'exotic dining' the channel is promoting locally. Needless to say I went a bit white about the lips at some of the things people were popping into their mouths. But the commercial got me thinking, why is it that 'exotic foods' almost always refers to the slaughtering of some kind of animal? Why should vegetarians be relegated to boring meals because their diet is less glamorous in the media's eyes? 

Dealing With Social Pressure: 5 Tips For New Vegetarians

It can be challenging to see eye-to-eye when your diets are different.
Photo source:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sausyn/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

When you live in a meat-obsessed society, becoming vegetarian is perceived as committing social suicide. I like to think of it as 'flock mentality'-- when one bird decides to break away from the flock, feathers will fly. Humans are no different.