Over-looked ingredients

Despite all of the benefits of being a vegetarian, there are numerous downsides as well. One of the main downsides is quite obvious, and that would be the fact that eating anywhere like at home, and especially at a restaurant can be a challenge. The majority of restaurants only think about the person who can or do eat meat when they set up their menu, so it is extremely difficult at times to order something that is both completely meat-free and still appetizing for me. There have been times when I went somewhere to eat and the only things that I could possibly get are appetizers or salads, which is frustrating because why would I go out to eat to only end up ordering a salad when I could have just saved myself or my parents money and made one at my house?

            Another thing that some restaurants and companies do is that they cook foods that would have the potential for being suitable for a vegetarian in something like chicken broth or beef broth, so I sometimes may end up ordering and eating that particular food without being aware of it being cooked in something with meat until long after I finished eating it, which is extremely frustrating to me. That happens to me quite a lot.

When my parents or I go shopping for groceries for me, we always have to make sure to check all of the ingredients for something that contains meat and that is very annoying and not to mention, also very time consuming. I think people would be surprised to find out that even some dessert items contain something called ‘gelatin,’ which is basically exactly what pudding and of course, Jell-O is made out of. But, gelatin can also be found in most brands of fruit snacks and some other candies even. I actually eat kind of a lot of fruit snacks so I had to find a brand that does not ever have gelatin in it and stick to that brand only.

More recently, I discovered that one of the local Chinese food restaurants that I sometimes eat at cooks their vegetable lo mein (which is incredibly misleading because, if it has the word ‘vegetable’ in the name of the food, then why would they not cook it in vegetable oil instead?) in chicken broth. I was really sad to hear this because the vegetable lo mein that they sold was the best vegetable lo mein I have probably ever tasted from a Chinese restaurant. Plus, I have been eating the vegetable lo mein from there for as long as I can remember, not to mention all the times that I have eaten it since I have become a vegetarian. I guess now I will have to try to remember not to order that from there anymore.