The Vegetarian Option

As some, if not most, of you are aware, in recent months there has been widespread debate in the United States about “the public option,” referring to the possible introduction of universal publicly funded healthcare. While this is all well and good, and for the most part an important debate (if a little overheated at times), it has completely knocked from the public agenda a matter of much more significance: the vegetarian option.

For years, though it has become much more prevalent and offensive in the past several years, restaurants, cafes, cafeterias, and mothers have all been making efforts to provide American eaters with a vegetarian option, meaning at least one meal choice that doesn’t involve meat.

Many people think that this is fine and that those providing the vegetarian option are just catering to the particular dietary needs of a particular segment of the population. This is not the case, it is actually a rather serious problem for most tax-paying Americans. Every time a vegetarian option is introduced to a menu we noble eaters of animal flesh are provided with one less choice. Our degrees of freedom are limited. At times the changes are so oppressive that I find it hard to breathe. Such changes are wringing the life-blood from our restaurant industry just as our restaurant industry used to wring it out of a variety of tasty farm animals.

When this first started happening, presumably in association with the hippies in the 1970s. it didn’t really seem like a big deal. We all just shrugged it off. Occasionally a simple tofu burger would make its way onto the menu at a radical left-wing establishment (where they tended to serve such un-American dishes as well-done steak or scallops). Unfortunately, much to everyone’s surprise, these original cafes weren’t isolated incidents (as it was believed they would be at the time), rather, they were the beachhead from which the frontal assault was launched. And the idea of America, the terrestrial embodiment of freedom, came under fire.

Gradually young vegetarians, the pseudo-traitors that they are, started requesting that their parents cater to their dietary wants and needs. When this approach failed, they moved their siege to the late-night diners and the college-student oriented diners they frequented. Gradually, with little notice and next to no fanfare, each of these establishments began to introduce meat-free (is there anything more un-American?) dishes to their menus. Once a critical mass had been reached non-student/hippy restaurants felt obliged to include at least one vegetarian option.

More recently the onslaught has continued and some traditional restaurants have included as many as two or three vegetarian options (sorry, I had to step away from my computer to wipe a tear from my eye). As bad as this was, the real perversion was the introduction of the vegetarian restaurant (how ‘restaurant’ can be used in association with ‘vegetarian’ I will never understand).

At these new ‘vegetarian restaurants’ everything on the menu is vegetarian. Things have become so perverse and topsy-turvy that they can even manage to make money (something that really should be preserved for real Americans, for meat eating Americans). Moreover, these restaurants don’t even go so far as to include a single meat option for the stalwart meat-eaters among us (sadly an ever diminishing population).

If this divisive and, ultimately, ruinous trend is not halted there is no telling what might happen to this great country of ours. One thing is clear though, every day this continues or, worse, becomes more widespread the long cherished and hard fought for freedoms of the United State will disappear.

When I can no longer walk into any restaurant in the union and reasonably expect to be able to order a rare steak I know things have gone too far. The vegetarian option has taken away from the United States what it means to be American. We all need to lobby Congress and our state legislatures to get them to provide protection and financial assistance to our prized meat serving restaurants, but also to limit and regulate the use of vegetarian options (a waiting period and maybe an dietary education requirement would be good starting points).

Before it is too late make your opposition to the vegetarian option known!

Don’t let the vegetarians be afraid to be an American in America!