• TranscendentalEmpire@lemmy.today
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    3 days ago

    He’s vegetarian not vegan. It’s incredibly hard to be a vegan in korea, but it’s very easy to be a vegetarian. The vast majority of halmeoni cooking your food over there basically equivocate vegetarianism and vegan to be the same thing. A lot of traditional foods have hidden animal products in it like shrimp paste for seasoning.

    I once tried talking to my like 85 year old Korean granny about it and she strongly explained to me that things like krill were more like plants than animals, which in some ways is kinda true.

    • TWeaK@lemmy.today
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      2 days ago

      It’s incredibly hard to be a vegan in korea, but it’s very easy to be a vegetarian.

      A lot of traditional foods have hidden animal products in it like shrimp paste for seasoning.

      Sounds like it’s easy to be a pescatarian, but not actually a vegetarian.

      • Rachelhazideas@lemmy.world
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        22 hours ago

        Restrictive Asian diets don’t sort neatly into western buckets.

        By your definition, most practicing ‘vegetarian’ Buddhists are omnivores because of oyster sauce, yet they eat far less animal products than the average western vegetarian due to the low prevalence of dairy products.

        Jains, for example, can drink milk and eat butter and ghee, but cannot eat root vegetables, fungi, and fermented foods, while the opposite is true for veganism.

        So what do you call people who are vegetarian except for 1% of their diet? I would find it disengenuous to equate that to a regular omnivore diet.

      • TranscendentalEmpire@lemmy.today
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        2 days ago

        Again, it’s kinda weird. I would say it’s fairly easy to be vegetarian since there’s a cultural understanding of vegetarians due to the cultural/religious practices of Buddhist monks.

        For one, they typically have more bland foods, and typically live in the mountainous regions where there’s less access to sea food. And again, what a lot of east Asian people consider meat varies from the western nomenclature.

        Where instead of basing the ethical delineation on a scientific taxonomy, it’s based more on whether something possesses a soul/conscious. If we examine the issue through that lens it can make sense that an invertebrate like a krill or even coral are closer to plants than mammals.

      • boomzilla@programming.dev
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        1 day ago

        To be used in omega 3 supplements and fish farming. At the same time one can cut both by using omega 3 DHA & EPA supplements based on algae. Doing it for 7 years now. Also the less krill, the less whales and the less whales, the less flourishing ocean eco systems, because of the whale poop loop and whale falls.

      • TranscendentalEmpire@lemmy.today
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        2 days ago

        May have been the article if it was originally from a Korean source. Like I said they tend to use vegan and vegetarian interchangeably a lot.