Living a vegetarian's life: Many invite questions about their choice

The Marietta Times

Another pleasant find. It seems lately that I'm mainly posting stories meant to appeal to non-vegetarians, but which have a pro-vegetarian point of view. I'm stumbling across these from all over the U.S.:

A vegetarian or vegan may be your hair stylist, lawyer, mechanic, music teacher, dentist, newspaper carrier, optometrist — best friend.

Indeed! Just read through the various occupations held by members of VeggieBoards...

The paper goes on to highlight four veg stories as well, and those include some weird bits, like the vegan who occasionally steps away from it to increase her weight by consuming dairy or organic meat. Um, whatever. Calories, girl. Calories. These vegans who don't eat healthy are making it look impossible.

Back the original story for a moment. I'm not so sure about these numbers:

A Time/CNN published in July 2002 found that 4 percent of American adults consider themselves vegetarians and 5 percent of that group, consider themselves vegans.

I obviously don't know how many of the 300 million Americans are adults, but I'd imagine it's most of them. Let's be easy on ourselves and call it only 200 million (any population experts reading this?). If 4 percent of those are vegetarian, that comes out to 8 million vegetarian adults. 5 percent of that means only 400,000 consider themselves vegan. Can that be right? I suppose a large number of vegans are younger, say, in high school, and that might put the number up to half a million (then again, with numbers this small, my guess at a starting number create a huge margin of error). I just can't believe that this is anywhere near an accurate number. Anyone for 750,000? Do I hear a million?

Tags: vegan