There’s no accounting for the anti-vegetarian sentiment that sometimes rears its ugly, carnivorous head. Perhaps such feelings are stoked by the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, the organization that took Oprah to court for allegedly defaming their flagship product during the mid-90s Mad Cow scare (she won). Or perhaps its some vestigial
The Urban Dictionary, a crowd-sourced parody reference site has numerous entries under “Vegetarian,” the first of which presently defines a vegetarian as “A bad hunter. Someone who survives by consuming not food, but the stuff that food eats” and supplements the entry with the usage example “The vegetarian was forced to subsist on slower prey, such as the broccoli and carrot.” Admittedly, the gag is a bit humorous if a tad tedious for its stereotyping of vegetarians as ineffectual weaklings. What the humorist failed to recognize is that choosing a diet and lifestyle predicated on a healthy appreciation of vegetation over, say, the mechanized slaughter of animals in the face of agricultural industrial complex that all but force feeds America meat products through a variety of public shaming policies is more an act of bravery than merely plucking one’s quarry, wrapped in plastic and Styrofoam from a supermarket meat department. Nothing like the hunt, eh?