Eat up: vegans, vegetarians, pescatarians discuss diets

When people decide to go vegan, vegetarian, or pescatarian, they have to change up their diet, and that can be hard for some people.

    According to Google, the definition of being vegan is a person who does not eat any food derived from animals and who typically does not use other animal products. Being a vegetarian is a little different, since these people do not eat meat, especially for moral, religious, or health reasons. Pescatarians are people who do not eat meat but do not eat fish.  

    Math teacher Mikayla Corday is a pescatarian, and she has been a pescatarian for her whole life. Her mom is also a pescatarian so when Corday was little, she would just eat whatever her mom gave her. 

“I just grew up never eating meat and only eating fish and seafood. It was no choice, this has been since birth, so I have never had chicken, I’ve never had poultry, I’ve never had red meat, pulled pork or any of that.” 

    Senior student Courtney Warns said she is “a little bit of both” [vegan and vegetarian] “mostly vegan, but I try to do dairy free, and I don’t eat eggs when I can.” but she said that if someone offered her ice cream, then of course she would say yes.  

     Warns says, “I’ve always been passionate about animals, animal rights, and diminishing animal cruelty. So being in the magnet program you either learn about being a vet or a farmer. You learn about being a farmer in a way that I don’t particularly like.”   

    Warns continues “I don’t like that a calf gets ripped away from its mother, and that cows are forced to get pregnant just for our consumption. I don’t like the fact that humans always have to take from something else.” 

    Corday says it isn’t hard to have dinner at home although her husband does eat meat. She says most of the time, they have a plant-based diet since “fish and seafood are mostly expensive.” But when her husband does cook meat, they will “usually have a vegetable side, and then he will have the meat as his main entrée, and I will have some other main entrée which could be beans or lentils or other vegetables.” 

    Warns said when she and her family have dinner, it is a little hard since her whole family does eat meat and she doesn’t. When it comes to dinner time at the Warns’ house, she says she will usually cook her own meal for dinner or she will cook a vegan “meat” for the entrée; for example“if they are making pasta and meatballs, I will make my own meatless meatballs and just eat those with the pasta.”