Everybody vegetarian or vegan?

I think it depends a lot on where you go
From personal experience:
It seems to me (but I may be wrong) that there are many more vegetarians and vegans in the UK than over here in France. There aren't as many vegetarian foods in the shops for instance in France, not as many organic and health foods shops either. And in restaurants, though in the last few years restaurants have made an effort to try and include vegetarian dishes, there aren't many to choose from (not as many as I have seen on menus in England).
In Israel, for kosher reasons (you can't mix meat with milk/cheese/cream/etc.), most restaurants will serve either meat or dairy but not both. So, if you're a vegetarian and want to have plenty of choice, all you have to do is go to a dairy restaurant and you can be sure there won't be any meat in there. I'm not vegetarian but when I lived there, I actually found myself going to dairy restaurants more often (because I love cheese haha) and the food is delicious. Proves you don't need meat to make a good meal. Also there seems to be many more vegetarians in Israel than in France... (French people love their meat haha)

I don't know that many veggies (or vegans), but I also think it depends where you live in the UK. There are no veggie/vegan places where I live, but my friend lives in Brighton (south coast) and you can't turn a corner without going into a veggie/vegan place (Food for Friends is excellent if anyone ever finds themselves down that way).

I think we're a bit more squeamish about the meat we serve here. For example, it's the norm to eat horse in France (approx. 70,000 yearly), but most wouldn't dream of that in the UK (it made the news when a Scottish restaurant started serving it) because we largely think of horses as pets (http://www.metro.co.uk/news/818449-edinburgh-restaurant-is-first-in-britain-to-serve-horse-meat look at the comments).

You'll struggle to find Fois Gras in a lot of restaurants as well because a lot of people n the UK take issue with stuffing corn feed down a duck's throat; same for veal.



Although a lot of people I know still eat meat, there seems to be a huge shift from any kind of meat (free-range, battery), to wanting to know the provenance of your meat/milk/cheese/eggs etc., and how it was fed, lived and killed, in recent years.

Oh yeah, I heard of Brighton as a big vegan/vegetarian place!
It probably depends a lot on where you live, besides I don't know that much about the UK yet but up to now more than half the people I've met were either vegetarian or vegan which is what made me believe that there are more there than in France. And also like I mentioned, the amount of vegetarian foods in shops is a lot more developed in England (well at least in the few shops I've been to) than in the shops in France, which is another reason that made me think there are more vegetarians there than here.

About the horse, I know that in France many people like it but it isn't really the meat you'd expect most people to eat every day (or even every week) -the price being one reason. I personally never tried it and I don't think I could (I just don't think horses are meant to be eaten).

Foie gras is delicious but it's true that thinking about all the geese being force fed makes me feel a bit guilty -but foie gras is not something I eat often really, it's usually around the holidays.

People here definitely have become more conscious about what they eat and where it comes from (like you said, it's a recent phenomenon though).

As for veal... I'm sorry, I'm cruel... but I like it

Meat eaters club? I'm in!

I actually own four horses and show two of them every weekend during the summer and people get freaked out when I say that if I ever went to someplace like France I wouldn't be totally opposed to trying horse meat. The way I see it, it's not like I could save the horse by not eating the meat, they're going to serve it whether I agree or not. People in India feel the same way about beef.

Secondly, people here in the U.S. feel they're doing the right thing by shutting down the horse slaughter plants. While I wish this was true, its actually worse because the same people who shut these places down can't afford to build the extra enclosures or buy the feed for the animals they are "saving", so these animals continue to be neglected and die slow deaths such as starvation. Don't get me wrong, I love all my horses and I would NEVER send any of them to slaughter for any reason, but what about the neglected horses? I actually did a report on this subject for school and later for the Iowa Horse Fair. I didn't do well at the fair because I took what people saw as the "bad" side. But what I tried to get through is that sometimes we're stuck between a rock and a hard place. We need to do what's best for the animals in question. And a little known fact that people STILL don't believe me about ( that would be my horse friends) is that legally, horses are considered livestock, not pets. So from a purely legal standpoint, a horse is closer to a cow than a dog.

Leather & Lace you do have a point there. I believe you are right in what you say and I do realise that some choices are hard to make. There is no good or bad side in this.

As a personal choice however, I do not think I could eat horse meat, just as I couldn't eat dog or cat meat. This is probably purely psychological and some people might think it doesn't make any sense. Because really, I don't mind eating veal, lamb or poussins, but I couldn't eat horse...

Also, I eat ostrich or kangaroo (when I see it on a restaurant menu I mean, it's not like you can buy this stuff anywhere and just cook it) but I wouldn't eat elephant or monkey. People ask me "what's the difference?" and I can't quite explain but I do feel there is a difference. I guess some things just can't be explained


But owning horses sounds great, I love riding
What do you do with your horses? do you teach kids how to ride or something?

Escargot wrote:

But owning horses sounds great, I love riding
What do you do with your horses? do you teach kids how to ride or something?

I actually show with two of them, Surge and Tori. I ride both Western and English, English is my favorite but where I live there really isn't any competition. English is derived from foxhunting, so it's meant for leaner, longer-legged horses, like Tori (she's half Thoroughbred), and it's meant to be faster-paced than Western Pleasure (the current Western style is extremely slow and with stockier Quarter horses, like Surge), but out here not many judges understand the English standards, so basically "English" is Western Pleasure in an English saddle. Surge is going to be trained in reining, which is in a Western saddle but is basically running large patterns with sliding stops, rollbacks, and circles, all at a lope.

I don't know if this is making any sense, I'm not sure how much you know about horse riding in general, so I don't know how much to describe

I don't give lessons, mostly because I don't believe I'm at the level that I can teach a kid to ride properly by myself, which is honestly saying something because out of the other kids of my age who I know, I am the best rider as far as form and knowledge goes. That may sound pretty conceited, but around here, kids teach themselves how to ride, more or less. Most of them believe that if you can stay on, you know how to ride. My mom got me lessons before she ever got me a horse, and I've had lessons from a variety of different people, so I know proper form, how to work a horse properly at all gaits, and how to understand my horse's buttons. My friends still don't believe me when I say I have never been bucked off a horse in the five years I've been riding, because to them being thrown is the riding "rite of passage". Most of them "break" their own horses, and mine have been trained, and because I've had lessons I tend to know what I'm doing when they don't. But I don't kid myself into thinking I'm a trainer because I'm still learning.

I learnt English riding. I'm not very advanced I'm afraid. When you learn, here, there are (if I remember well) 7 levels (or 9 I'm not sure). Well I passed the first one!! haha so... I guess I can ride a horse but that's about it. I can't do any fancy tricks
Well I also know how to brush and clean the horse before riding, you know the basic stuff, really.

In Israel (where I lived four years), people tend to ride Western but because I have been used to English all my life, I just can't do the western. I just don't understand how it works

Yeah, I learned Western first, but English is where my heart is . My cousin in Wisconsin does the same level thing, I guess in Iowa everyone's too much of a hillbilly for that! lol