Being a vegetarian in the US

So far, its been easy. Well, almost.

I guess a lot depends on where you are. Here in California, I haven’t faced much of a problem. So long as you’re eating at home, it doesn’t really matter where you are for you can procure the raw materials pretty much anywhere. Its when you go out to eat (which you end up doing quite often after living for a while in the States) that things might get difficult.

In most cosmopolitan places there’s usually a variety of cuisines to choose from when dining out, and most of them—like Greek, Thai, Mexican—offer a pretty good selection of vegetarian dishes. However, my friends tell me that in the interior areas (like Kansas, the Dakotas) it might be difficult to find readily available vegetarian dishes. In that case, you usually have to like ask them to “vegify” some dish for you.

Now I don’t know why these people make such a fuss over vegetarianism. First off, they’ll have [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarian|so many categorizations]] of vegetarians that you wouldn’t even have heard of them. They’ll ask you if you’re a [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegan|vegan]], if you can have dairy stuff or not and so on. And some places, like [[http://www.jasminebistro.com/|Jasmine]] that are just shockingly veggie-unfriendly. In their entire menu they have like two vegetarian dishes, and I wouldn’t even call them edible! (okay, maybe I’m being too fussy here, but seriously, those dishes don’t look veggie, don’t smell veggie, let alone taste veggie!)

Bottomline—its not hard being a veggie here, but sometimes I wish these people treat vegetarianism as something more than just a diet fad.