stupid but quick question

[kaigou]

vegetarian = no eggs = no bread ... correct?

is this generally a hard-and-fast rule, enough to consider it a pretty safe assumption?


ETA: apparently the unclear part above is my expectation that bread contains eggs. Yes, as a matter of fact, bread can contain eggs -- pretty much my entire repertoire of bread-recipes all contain at least one egg. (Some of them contain two eggs, even, and some even have milk.) This is not to say I've never made bread without eggs -- I have -- but I don't much care for the texture or the reluctant timbre of the bread when working with it. With eggs, the bread is considerably silkier/smoother, and just more pleasant and easy to work with; thus it's not a headache to let it rise six times and really become amazingly-melty. Or shorter version: bread can contain eggs.

ETA the 2nd: I suppose it might've been less confusing if I'd asked about, say, angel food cake... for which my grandmother's recipe uses the whites of like a dozen eggs. I rarely make it, though, because I hate wasting a dozen egg yolks, but I'm never quite sure what to do with them...

Comments

[kaigou]

I think the honeybee example is probably working off the same logic as the diary issue -- that to take a cow's (or goat's) milk is to exploit the animal. My issue with that is mostly pragmatic, that cows/goats (and even horses) will produce milk if nursed/milked, long after their actual offspring have stopped needing it. Same way chickens will produce copious amounts of eggs if the eggs are taken, compared to how they'd stop producing if those eggs hatched. It just seems like... if done with any forethought (which is not to say the US food-production system currently has even an iota of that), it's more like using the leftovers. The milk the baby's stopped drinking, the eggs that wouldn't have hatched, the spare honey.

Although when it comes to bees, I recall my mother's justification for eating shrimp and crab -- she'd cry at the thought of veal (baby lambs! baby cows!) but baby shrimp? As she put it, she refused to feel guilty for eating "anything that could grow up to eat YOU". And if you've ever been crabbing and had a crab take a swipe at your toes... that eating-thing isn't too far of a stretch. Heh.

[raletha]

Right. Mostly I have issues with industrialized corporatized agriculture, not the individual foods. Meat is still off limits for me personally, but I am generally okay with arguments for ethical omnivores.

Honey bees are a little different as an issue because of the way they are used for pollination of crops, it's also about food security. Short version is this: over exploitation of honey bees -> honey bees die en masse -> crops don't get pollinated. This, to me, is actually an argument not to eschew honey, but to actively support small scale, local, organic apiarists.

Oh, food politics, why so hairy?