Anorexic, Vegan, Vegetarian or Omnivore?

This one is a minefield and I can see some of you rolling up those sleeves even as I put down a few random and ticklish thoughts.

I was brought up as a meat and fish eater by my parents. A few incidents moulded my eating habits as I grew up. One day someone came to our home with a gift of freshly caught fish. I was probably 13 or 14 years old and quite the mommy's helper. Mommy wasn't home. I decided to keep the live fish 'fresh' by letting it swim around in a bucket of water. A couple of hours later, I was wondering if it would be a nice surprise to cook lunch before my mother got home. Only then did I realize that 'lunch' was merrily swimming circles in the bucket. I have no recollection of lunch but I certainly did not kill, much less eat the unfortunate creature! But the incident did trigger off a subconscious chain of thoughts. Disturbing.

If live and let live is a maxim, then eat and let eat is a corollary. To those of you who are horrified at meat eating cultures, all I can say as plants are living, breathing, reproducing,God's creatures too. They are different from us. So are hens, pigs, snails and frogs. I remember a girl from college who regularly used raw egg in her hair for conditioning every Sunday. The slime would gross me out everytime, not to mention the stench. She was very very righteously vegetarian, never passing up a chance to tell us that our food habits made us no better than beasts.

For those of you who tell me to give up my dead birds in favor of dairy produce, ha ha, I have a vivid visual. Imagine milk, fresh,creamy frothy and steaming. Coming out of the cow(unless you have more exotic sources :-)). Certainly not the carton or bottle you pour it out of. Now, as a rational vegetarian, you do realize that it a different cow each time, maybe multiple cows. I rest my case here. The option then, is to turn vegan.

Finding something to eat at a restaurant is difficult enough if one cannot have meat,poultry, seafood, fish, egg and other animal products like shortening. Now imagine taking dairy off your list too. I have visions of crunchy leaves and dandelion greens. Gourmand's nightmare!