Wow Mark. I was raised vegetarian but I buy and wear leather products. It never occurred to me that silk falls into the same category-an animal product. I look forward to reading more from your column and hope you'll include some vegan recipes!

I celebrate with you and all vegans. Love and peace, Razz

Hey yea Im vegetarian all my life and so too but like Olivia never realised bout the silk I always thought it was made from the strings that silk worms wove not from boiling them! Sounds very cruel! I dont use much silk as live in a hot place but will keep it in mind...I use leather stuff but only like I have one wallet say and will keep it for decades so I say in a sense it is contributing to sustainable development as oppose to buying several synthetic ones over that same period dunno...but boiling worms!

yea the smell of non-veg food makes me sick too...same here all my family are vege and born and brought up that way...i always try to explain to meat eaters that you dont feel tempted to eat it...of course you have to be more sensitive to telling them the truth is you are mortified to be around the sense of dead rotting flesh! I even get the smell when Im in a mart or something that might have a freezer that isnt very efficient...I just came back from a meeting in a small air conditioned room and the smell....although over my professional years I've grown more accustomed to it or become more tolerant of it. I always remember how a cousin of mines threw up after having to be in a very busy food court in the mall for too long....I get the smell too but can cope with it better...I often wonder how much of what we smell we are in a sense eating too...and I always recall the stuff that Deepak Chopra said on Oprah when he had first gone on....to me I can vaguely recall (i might have been 14) him then explaining bout how all the atoms we are made of are shared with the greater sense...like the oxygen we breathe in now was circulated through others blah blah....so no wonder just the smell can get you so upset!

I have been a vegetarian for seven years now and I just totally love it. Looking forward to reading more of posts in the future Mark! vegetarian dishes