Never send this man to the shops to get the mince pies for christmas.

I’d be rather a lot more pleased with a mince beef pie than a mince meat one. There is a reason you only get them at Christmas, if they were good you’d get them all year round.

Mince pies originally contained meat – hence the name.

““We would want to protect traditional meat-based terms – so we would object to terms like meat-free mince,” says a spokesman.”

Never send this man to the shops to get the mince pies for christmas.

I, for one, would love to see that man’s reaction when confronted with that exact quote.

If the EU has its way regarding the labelling of sausages, would that mean we could no longer call dachshund’s ‘sausage dogs’?

Come sweet Beelzeburger©️™️; enshroud me in thy filthy buns.

Ooh, what are you para-quoting there? Only, I know this from the Art of Noise / Max Headroom single “Paranoimia” and always wondered where it came from.

I guess Rick Willes has a problem with the Franciscans, Trappists, Trappistines, Carthusians and Cistercians orders that can be vegetarian for faith based reasons.

The most obvious reasons is to combat the sin of gluttony, through abstinence. Given that people are starving on this planet and that a meat diet takes more land and energy than plant based diet, it could be argued that it would be Christian to abstain to ensure that all humans can share in what god has provided.

Old Testament style— God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so.

Given that people are starving on this planet and that a meat diet takes more land and energy than plant based diet,

Except there are plenty of aboriginal people who can only exist on a meat-based diet because their environment makes it almost impossible to grow any sort of crop, their animals can feed on what’s available, however, and the people are either nomadic, or coastal based, and eat marine creatures.
Also, in the U.K. animals like sheep and pigs can be kept and grazed on land that is unsuitable for crops, and cattle are largely left to graze on grass; in the US it’s different, their cattle are mostly kept in barns and fed on maize-based cattle feed.
I hope you’re not the sort of cultural imperialist who holds the opinion that aboriginal people should give up their natural lifestyle, just to make westerners feel better about how the environment is being used?

Don’t quote me but I think I read somewhere that samosas in the US have to have meat in them in order to legally carry the label ‘samosa’.

This must really be confusing for US Hindus who are vegetarians.

In other news, buffalos don’t have wings, turkeys dont carry bacon, mushrooms aren’t oysters and spicy beanburgers really aren’t that spicy.

(Dips wheat-based disc into a caffeinated hot-water beverage, drizzled with plant-spunk)

@countzero good points well made. My sweeping generalisations are just that and as ever it is to find exceptions. And no I don’t expect people that live in harmony with limited resources to make changes to respond to problems we caused. Yes I live in the north, a long way from the east country arable fields, where rank grassland and upland hill farming predominates.

But given you know all this, you also knew what I was clumsily referring to. Livestock supplemented on maize soya and other rich field crops that are energy intensive forms of production, all for out convenience or as a good monk might point out gluttony.

As for me I am a bad attempt at a vegetarian that eats meat when tempted, rides my bike a lot but drives a car a motor home and a motorcycle.

But given you know all this, you also knew what I was clumsily referring to. Livestock supplemented on maize soya and other rich field crops that are energy intensive forms of production, all for out convenience or as a good monk might point out gluttony.

Absolutely, that’s pretty much the default in North America, as is the regular use of antibiotics, because of the confined conditions the animals are kept in.
It certainly true that cattle are fed with cattle cake and maize here as well, but I believe that’s kept back for indoor feeding when weather conditions make it almost impossible for the herds to graze, it’s much cheaper for animals to eat a natural food source like grass, of which we have an abundance in most of the U.K.