Vegetarian Rage

Nice Slice
By The Pizza Review
Used Under Creative Commons

I attend a lot of community functions like technology user groups.  Most of the user groups that I attend will offer dinner at their meetings, because the meetings take place after work and they want to make sure that people are well fed.  Plus some of the members see “free pizza” as a perk to attend the meeting.  Sometimes I get tired of pizza, but I really appreciate the user group offering up the food and the sponsors that help the user group pay for the pizza.  But a couple of times it has led to Vegetarian Rage…

I was at a user group (and I will leave out the specifics of what group or where) and I went over to get a couple of slices of pizza.  I looked around and I saw pizza with sausage, pizza with pepperoni and even supreme pizza that had all manner of toppings, including pepperoni and sausage.  But I did not see any cheese pizza, mushroom pizza or veggie only pizza.  I asked the user group leader if they had any pizza without meat, because I was a vegetarian.  His response was:

Well just pick off the pepperonis

Normally I am a very accommodating vegetarian (nobody else in my family of 5 is a vegetarian, so I have to be).  If he had said something to the effect of:

Oh, we have never had a vegetarian at this user group, so we usually don’t order that kind of pizza

I would have been okay with it (as I mentioned, I am not really that into user group pizza).  But he was not very nice, so I decided to say the rudest thing that I could think of, which happened to be the first thing I thought of:

Well why don’t I pee all over your pizza and see how good of a job that you do picking that off

To most vegetarians, picking a pepperoni off of a pizza does not make it a vegetarian dish.  The fact that it was cooked with meat, pretty much makes it a meat dish, so it is kind of like trying to pick off the pee.  The user group leader did not quite know what to say to my statement, I think he was more shocked than angry.  I wound up not eating anything, but I could not leave, I was the person doing the presentation that night.

I understand that as a user group you should not be expected to jump through hoops to accommodate every special diet (that could get cost prohibitive).  But order 1 cheese or 1 veggie pizza if you are ordering 10 meat filled varieties.  And more than anything don’t ask a vegetarian to pick off pepperonis.  It does lead to rage……

Rage

As a vegetarian whose family is not, I often find myself at restaurants that don’t necessarily cater to vegetarians.  When we eat out we tend to go to family friendly chain restaurants.  I am talking about the “sit down” places that have a 17 year old hostess and a kids menu that comes with crayons.

As I flip thorough the menu it is hard to spot vegetarian dishes.  Some times a dish may look vegetarian, but turns out that it is not (more on that in future rage columns).  Even if I spot one or two dishes that could be vegetarian, I will generally ask the waiter or waitress if they can suggest some items for vegetarians.  Nothing makes me want to *snap* more than when I inevitably hear the words “We have salad”.

I wonder if it is a stereotype of vegetarians that everyone assumes that all we eat is salad?  I am 6 foot 2 inches tall and weigh over 200 pounds (or about 90 kilos for the metric based readers).  A salad usually does not cut it for me.  And I don’t know if the wait staff has looked at their menu, but most of the salads come with bacon, chicken, taco meat or dressing that contains animal products.  So even if it is a salad, it does not necessarily mean that it is a vegetarian dish.

I understand that the wait staff does not make the menu, especially at a chain restaurant.   It would be nice for them to be aware of the dishes that are vegetarian on the menu or could be prepared as vegetarian.  Also sometimes the kitchen can prepare special dishes for vegetarians that are not on the menu.  As a real bonus, they could ask the customer if they are a vegetarian or a vegan before they just start blindly suggesting items from the menu.