h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

(I nearly asked whether vegans are allowed to eat pigeon shit, but I was afraid of PC giving me a black eye. )

There's a strange misconception that there's a rigidly policed list of things that vegans are 'allowed' to eat. But what people choose to eat is a matter of personal choice.

Vegans can eat pigeon shit - if they choose.

I very much doubt she sampled the delicacy as "a matter of personal choice".

This vegan could theoretically eat poo if so inclined. I'm seldom that hungry, though.

I try to avoid all animal protein. I try not to be preachy about it, but am always happy to share, when asked out of legitimate curiosity and not thinly-veiled aggression, what I will or won't consume.

I also avoid products containing animal by-product, or tested on animals (unless there is no other alternative, in which case I make do and hope for a day when there is one). And I avoid purchasing leather, wool, silk, etc. However I have and will accept hand-me-downs, as it's less wasteful to me of a life to keep using something than to let someone send it to a landfill. I don't *think* that makes me a hypocrite.

Hope I didn't spoil the fun by answering a question asked in jest.

And I'd never give a black eye, regardless. If I thought someone was being weird about it, I just wouldn't answer at all.

Re: the "allowed" thing, I think I know what most people mean when they use that term with respect to dietary restrictions/ preferences/ whatever-you-want-to-call-them. I don't think that they think we hold a caucus every year to decide what is and isn't "allowed", but rather they mean "do you allow yourself to have that?". I think. Or something to that effect, anyway.

I would never buy fur new, but have used a bedraggled fox stole I bought for €1 at a flea market to line my scabbard, because it needed fur to work properly.

I didn't mention fur but figured y'all would take that for granted.

I don't actually have anything with real fur on it... my uncle gave me a coat my grandma bought and never wore, dark charcoal wool with faux fur trim around the neck.

That's the only thing resembling fur I have. But K's late grandma gave me leather gloves with fur lining for the first Xmas I came with for. We'd been dating six months, I took the gift in the spirit intended. K advised his mom, I gave the gloves to charity. No harm, no foul.

The journalist Auberon Waugh, who was as right-wing huntin'-shootin'-fishin' as they come. once launched a diatribe against people who, for example, call themselves vegetarians while eating eggs of fish whatever:

'What people choose to eat is their own damned business!'

Just remembered a line from Regina Spektor...

'...steak for your eye/ But I'm a pizzatarian so it's a frozen pizza pie.'

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM5Zp7nv4gM (not Your Kind Of Thing)