First off, please pardon the terrible title to this post. Those who know me personally (that’s probably 100% of my readers) know I love stupid wordplay like that. Still, I think I scraped the bottom of the barrel a little too hard with that. Seriously, Veg-aganda? Is Vegeganda any better? I don’t think so… Anyhow, on with it.

There’s a blog I pretty frequently read called The Debate Link. It’s a guy from Carleton College who’s always impressed me with how well he thinks out arguments and issues, especially because he’s been a really high-quality political blogger since he was (at least) a freshman in college. I recommend checking him out, it’s always a good read, even when I disagree. I seldom link to him, both because I seldom blog and he seldom writes about indie rock and vegetarian cuisine. That changed last week when he wrote about his culinary experience on recent airline trip.

Here’s the post, and here’s a follow-up that he wrote.. A few pertinent quotes from each post (pardon the length of the quoted passages, but I want to try to distill it without losing his main points…

…I did have a rather peculiar experience flying home. Sun Country offers a hot sandwich as its “snack” on the flight. The way there, it was turkey pastrami. Coming back, it was a cheeseburger. Being a semi-kosher Jew, I can’t eat cheeseburgers. I asked if they had one without cheese, and the flight attendant told me, sorry, they don’t. So I told her they should have a few without cheese, because sometimes Jews fly too. And she looked at me and said, half-indulgently and half-patronizingly, “well, we can’t have everything.”

She didn’t say it mean, exactly, but the tone of voice made me feel as if I was making some wildly unreasonable demand of her company. And I resent being made to feel that way. I don’t like it when Judaism is treated as some strange and mysterious cult, and I don’t think its utter craziness to set aside a few hamburgers without cheese so that people who–because they keep kosher, or are lactose intolerant, or whatever–can’t have cheeseburgers still can eat.
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This experience really impressed upon me that, even though Jews are treated pretty well in America and are reasonably comfortable here, we’re still “strangers in a strange land.”
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There were really two themes I wanted to pursue in the prior post. The first is the one most folks latched onto: can I, as a member of a relatively small but prominent minority group, reasonably expect accommodations from organizations such as airlines?
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The second theme, which got less play, was a general reflection on how its tough being a minority, even in relatively hospitable climes.

So that’s his deal. He flew on a plane, but keeping “semi-kosher” made one of the meals impossible to eat. Should he expect to be accommodated? When I first read the post, I immediately empathized. Pretty much every time I fly, I expect to not eat anything. Back in the day when airlines were stuffing the pillows with cash and flying was a high-class adventure, you could order beforehand a vegetarian (or kosher, or vegan, or halal, probably) meal. Nowadays, you can still “order” a specialty meal, but airlines have pretty much skirted the issue by offering “snacks” in lieu of meals. With the “snacks”, everyone gets the same thing, and it often comes in a box. Even though the current snacks are often as substantial as the meals of yore, they have at least created a system whereby you don’t get any choices and you have no reason to complain.

I imagine that a big NYC-LA trip might still have a meal, but living in Chicago pretty much every flight is too short to deserve a full-fledged meal. I’ve always put up with it without thinking. I’ve surely been annoyed, but I don’t go on the plane to eat and I’m very used to eating (or not eating, more likely) at restaurants that don’t accommodate me. If I go out to dinner with friends, I’m always mentally prepared to not order food if there’s no viable option. Luckily, that rarely happens in Chicago, but it’s relatively common in Houston and whenever else I’m outside LA, Boston, or New York.

The post I’ve referred to got me thinking. Growing up in Houston an deciding to become a vegetarian, I’ve always recognized I was outside the norm and that my decision would require some minor hardships. It was something that was important enough to me that I was willing to put up with it, but it was something that I decided.

When I first read the post, my initial reaction was more or less “Deal with it.” It’s something I’ve dealt with for a long time, and it’s such a non-issue I’d never thought about it much. After my initial response, I wondered whether religiously-based decisions should trump other types of decisions. I came to vegetarianism through a vague morality and ecological consciousness. Is that different, or less worthwhile, than someone whose dietary restrictions are based on a thousand-year-old tradition that one is (most often) born into? Is it different because it’s easy to make something kosher (keep the cheese off of it), whereas having a seitan sandwich requires a lot more thinking and planning? Is it different because Jews are pretty systematically discriminated against throughout history, and pretty much nobody cares about vegetarians?

I haven’t come up with a satisfactory answer for any of those questions. Initially, I thought that there were a lot more Jews in the US than vegetarians, so they should be accommodated first, but that hunch proved to be less than true. I’ve heard that ~3% of the US is Jewish, of whom much less keep kosher. Stats on vegetarians are pretty vague, but I’ve found stats ranging from 2% to 10%. So we either outnumber Jews or we’re close. (I’m not even going to consider the implications of Jewish vegetarians, though I doubt those numbers affect the question at all.) Should we expect similar treatment? NYC public schools get Rosh Hashanah off from school. Should they also make sure to have substantial vegetarian options in school cafeterias? Or maybe just once a year?

The big difference, of course, is that being a vegetarian really only affects what you eat (or maybe what you wear), and then only three times a day or so. So the comparison is… well… not something deserving a dissertation. It did make me wonder though. In the end, I still kinda feel like he should just deal with it and, to be corny, use it as a tiny way to make his faith stronger. Every time I’m confronted with not eating because a lack of vegetarian option, it makes me reconsider the position and, again and again, it reconfirms my commitment.

In case it’s not clear, I want to firmly establish that I’m not comparing the plight of the vegetarian to Jews. Only in this particular instance: eating in planes. (Although, I’d be thrilled to be accused of antisemitism as a result of this post, just because it’d be so silly and so far from the issue I was curious about.)

I feel like I could go on and on, drawing and refuting comparisons, but I’m no longer interested. What I am interested in, however, is writing about something that has nothing to do with what I eat. Hopefully tomorrow. Maybe even later tonight. I do have something to say about Clinton’s health care plan, and I would like to use this bully pulpit to promote a few awesome things.