It's Just Too Much

A couple of months ago I wrote that a friend and I went to a new vegan restaurant in the neighborhood called Nutshell. In the post I jokingly referred to her as a "flexitarian," a word I'd run across that describes someone whose diet is mostly vegetarian but can also include chicken and fish.

It did get me thinking about the new words we're using to describe our eating habits, often in excruciating detail. I mean, we've had the term vegetarian for awhile now, and my mother is starting to understand what a vegan is (though it seems to confuse her that Dave's lactose intolerance precludes yogurt but not mayonnaise). And hopefully the people on raw diets will die from boredom before I have to explain that one to her.

It's understandable that omnivore is popping up thanks to the popularity of Michael Pollan's book but, really, did we need locavore (OED's word of the year last year)? And, please, don't even get me started on "retrovore."

Then this morning I'm reading a seemingly harmless Valentine's Day article in the NYT about couples who have different food preferences, and one woman says that she's been able to tolerate her husband's occasional need for animal flesh because she's not a "vegangelical." What?

Is this level of specificity just further proof that we're getting more and more narcissistic all the time (says the woman with the blog)? Do I really need to know that you only eat five-toed sloths in the month of January that have been pasture-raised by Zoroastrians within 100 feet of your house? All I can say is, "T...M...I!"

Cartoons from Toothpaste For Dinner.