By analogy, imagine if it was "normal" culturally if when a non-member is at a church for a friends wedding or whatever for that non-member to break out into a string of religious slurs about the members and attempt aggressive recruitment into the non-members religion. You can totally imagine in a society like that, if you're in a catholic church and tell people you're an evang, they'll recoil in horror and start worrying if security will need to evict you. Because most people act a little more civilized in church, most of the time no one freaks out when they discover a non-member attends.

My daughter, a budding chef and foodie with many vegan friends, gets a lot of grief over it too. For her part, she's trying to get the vegans to eat decent food, as most of the ones she knows eat what she calls "vegan junk food" - factory products rather than actual cooking of fresh ingredients.

interesting.

Sounds a lot like ethical vegans to me.

If you can't understand that distinction...

If you want to make the case that your daughter is a really nice proselytizer for healthy eating, and that vegetarians are really awful, we can just compare anecdata.

You went out of your way to quote second-hand sources for "filthy murderer" vegans, suggesting it hasn't been your experience. How many people who've called vegetarians pansies do you personally know?

As for "proselytizing"... rather than bickering over the word, bicker the intent. Do you think it's a bad thing for a non-vegan to cook vegan food for a vegan? To teach them about cooking and nutrition? To encourage them to make their own food rather than eating something put in a bag in a factory?

I don't see how what she's doing can be reasonably considered negative. So if it's proselytizing, then proselytizing is itself not a negative. If you think it's negative, I'd love to understand why.

I don't see how that can be considered negative either. Can you?

If my daughter was just getting on the vegans she knows for eating junk food, not good food like she does, it would be one thing. Instead, she leads by example, teaching them to be better and healthier vegans.

Something analogous would be a vegan making a beautiful, delicious vegan meal for a meat eater who thinks a vegetarian diet is dull and poor in nutrition. That's not proselytizing, imho.

And at the very end you're trying to go back on admitting your daughter is proselytizing, by complimenting her cooking skills. I think you're quite confused about your principles.

No one wants to sit thru a lecture of "my self denial makes me superior" "I'm morally superior" "meat is murder" "hey wanna see some slaughterhouse pixs" "hey look at me this is my special snowflake reason" "I'm saving the planet, all by myself".

OPs question of why vegetarians are looked at like space aliens is because its impossible to predict if the next couple minutes are going to be agony or fun. Probably gonna be all right, but...

(edited to add, come on guys, cut it out with the world doesn't exist stuff, my very own sister pulled the "hey look at me this is my special snowflake reason" for a couple months when she was about 14... now stand by for a round of "well I'm not sure sisters exist in the real world, after all I only have brothers and my buddy is an only child so citation needed...")

(And slayed0 is a better writer than I am...)

I've certainly seen way, way more people say "I'll eat two steaks for every sanctimonious vegetarian I engage with" than actual vegetarians, particularly after becoming an engineer.

Everyone, apparently, except for me. Yet despite the dearth of obnoxious advocates, I have run into dozens or more who complain about their existence.

I think the obnoxious advocate trope is just a trope, and I'm convinced the the vast majority of complainers are complaining about the idea of a reification of the trope or something they've seen on television, rather than any actual live instances of the trope they've had run-ins with.

I live in Minneapolis, one of the best places in the world to eat. Excellent vegetarian options are widely available here. Sure, there are restaurants where that's not good, but it's not like there aren't plenty of other restaurants.

We do live in a big city tho.

All protein on this planet was created by plants via photosynthesis.

There are many individual plant protein sources that are not complete proteins, and some of the ones that provide complete proteins provide a low ratio of protein to other macronutrients and may not, for that reason, be suitable alone as a primary protein source. But there are plants that individually supply complete protein without this problem, and more importantly there are well-known and combinations of plant protein sources that do this -- they are often the staple foods of various cultures, since in pre-modern times very most agriculture societies didn't produce meat in sufficient quantities for it to be the main protein source, so if adequate plant sources didn't exist, neither would civilization.

(That being said, the heavy focus on soy in the market means there aren't as many convenient options meat-avoiding, soy-allergic/intolerant people as for either meat eaters or soy-tolerant folks.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_protein

Many plants have "complete" amino acid profiles but one or more amino acids are too low to be completely adequate for humans. In this case, another protein source with a supplemental amino acid profile is required in order to balance out the deficiency in the first.

You don't need to eat meat to get your protein.

So protein quality and quantity can't likely be insured by eating any old vegetables. Its not as simple as 'don't eat meat'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amino_acid_synthesis

The great majority of energy in the biosphere is certainly captured by way of photosynthesis, but it is silly to complain about an oversimplification and then turn around and make one.

I guess you could twist that around and say that it is produced using photosynthesis that was captured in the natural gas that is used, but I don't think the poster meant readers to unpack all that out of 'created by plants'.

This isn't accurate. The grass that cows eat doesn't contain enough amino acids to support the cow's growth.

It's actually the bacteria the cow's gut that digests the grass (mostly carbohydrate) and converts some of it into amino acids that the cow absorbs.

That's not all amino acids, since the cow's body can create some of it's own (just like humans).