“What’s in your sandwich?”

“What are you having?” “Well, let see what’s on the menu that’s vegetarian and doesn’t have any fish, egg, garlic, onions, mushrooms … yeah I think that’s about it.” “Oh!” in surprise and confusion, followed by a look of pity.

As Vegetarians or “Krsnatarians” I’m sure many of us have been in this situation where people don’t understand why we are so strict in what we eat and often feel sorry for us that we, in their eyes, have to eat like rabbits. Of course they’ve never seen what it looks like in a Hare Krishna kitchen :o)

This youth group we discussed how we react to people when we are in this situation. How do we try to make them understand our eating habits and what makes us so almost fanatical in choosing our food. Are we being fanatical? What about when we are offered something, do we insult the person by declining? What do we do? What should we do?

Many interesting points came up and interesting ways of dealing with situations. I found the important point is to have compassion for these souls who are too covered by ignorance to realise what they are eating. One way to try to change their perspectives is by giving them prasadam. This often works better than trying to explain the violent act of meat eating. However most often there is someone willing to listen to our explanations and depending on their mentality we can either appeal to their scientific mind or their merciful nature.

Scientifically: It is unnatural for the human body to eat meat. Our bodies are not made like that of the carnivores but rather it is more like the herbivore.

Merciful: every living entity has the ability to feel pleasure and pain. Just because the human intelligence is greater than the animals we should not exploit them by conducting mass slaughter just to fill our bellies.

There is much to be said about abstaining from eating meat – health, religious consideration, karmic reaction, animal violation, etc, etc but there is a difference between the average vegetarian and a Hare Krishna devotee.

The devotee of Krishna only eats the remnants of the Lord and thus we eat only what Krishna is willing to accept. And it is this that makes us hesitant to accept even vegetarian food offer to us by those who are not followers of Krishna. While we can be choosy in what we eat we can not offend people as this will drive them away from Krishna and this is also an offence.

It’s a tough situation; we have to learn how to respond most appropriately in each situation. The important point is that we keep Krishna in the forefront of our minds, if we are going to accept the offering from someone than we must make sure that we try our best to bring that person closer to Krishna.

Please post your comments or questions. This is a vast topic that we only touched upon at youth group.