Recently our local newspaper here in Salem, Oregon had a column by Carol McAlice Currie that resonated with my long-time experience of being a vegetarian.
Download Fast food offends religious woman
Since I've shunned meat and fish since 1970, and raised a daughter born in 1972 as a vegetarian, I know what it's like to ask servers in a restaurant to substitute something animal'ish for something vegetable'ish.
Many times I walked into a McDonald's with my daughter and said to the person behind the counter, "Could you make us a Big Mac without the hamburger?" Or at Taco Bell, "We'd like a taco with no meat, just cheese, lettuce, and tomatoes."
Almost always the restaurant would make the substitution. I'd think, Why not? Meat has to be more expensive than what we want instead.
However, we never felt entitled.
Meaning, when a restaurant employee resisted our vegetarian entreaties, we didn't feel discriminated against. My wife, daughter, and I realized that we were members of a distinct dietary minority. We didn't expect that McDonald's, or anybody else, was required to fulfil our unmeaty desires.
Kathy Duncan, the woman Currie writes about, had a different attitude.
Duncan said she was buzzing through the drive-through with her son, Matthew, now 6, when her Catholicism was insulted.
She ordered Matthew a Happy Meal (the McDonald’s children’s meal) and asked that the chain substitute a Filet-O-Fish sandwich for the hamburger, cheeseburger or chicken nuggets option because she and her family didn’t eat beef or chicken on Fridays during the 40-day Lenten season (this year from Feb. 22 through April 7).
Duncan said she was stunned when the McDonald’s employee told her that the substitution wasn’t “allowed.”
...Duncan said she tried to explain why her son couldn’t eat meat or chicken, but she said that her explanation was ignored and that the employee repeated it wasn’t going to happen.
Outraged, Duncan drove off without any food and said in a message to the newspaper that she was calling for a boycott of McDonald’s on Fridays.
Hey, Kathy: just because you're Catholic and possibly believe that you're a member of the One True Faith, you don't get to have the world revolve around you.
Being Christian, you're used to being part of a decisive majority of United States citizens. Everywhere you look, there are churches, Jesus figures, Bibles, preachers, politicians saying "God bless America" and "This is a Christian nation."
Imagine what it's like to be part of a tiny minority. Imagine what it's like to be some of the 3-4% of Americans who are strict vegetarians for moral, ethical, and/or health reasons. Imagine living in a culture awash in meatiness, while trying to stay dry.
Currie gets it right:
“I want to get the word out that McDonald’s doesn’t respect our religion and doesn’t deserve our business,” Duncan said. “We live with different cultures, and I think they should be more accommodating to other cultures and beliefs. I think it would be wonderful if they accommodated all beliefs.”
But part of this nation’s freedom of religion is the option to embrace any religion such as Judaism, Buddhism, Muslim, Hinduism, Unitarian, Native American faith (about 5 percent of the population) to name a few. There also is the freedom to be unaffiliated as evidenced by about 16 percent of the population that considers itself agnostic or atheist, according to the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
Corporations tend to operate secularly to avoid catering to any one religion. To use Duncan’s religious-accommodation logic, McDonald’s would not be serving hamburger at all in the U.S.
...In the United States, Americans of many descents love their beef. McDonald’s has fish on the menu. Should it also be expected to customize its menu further to accommodate all of the faiths that seek freedom under the U.S.’s equal-religious opportunity umbrella?
Julie Edwards, a local spokeswoman for McDonald’s, said Duncan could have ordered her son a hamburger without the patty in his Happy Meal, and he would have gotten a melted, processed cheese-food sandwich.
Hi Brian, nice article you wrote.
You know, I commonly eat meat, but in recent years for some reason I'm gradually developing aversion to the taste of chicken and fish, haven't happened with cow or pork. Now I don't understand that woman you mentioned, here in Mexico more than 80% of the population is catholic, now I myself inherited catholicism althought I don't practice it anymore and I respect the 40 day thing because here at my parent's home they do not cook meat those days, but as I said catholicism is not my own conviction anymore, that being said I can tell you that here in Mexico people that doesn't want to eat meat simply don't go to places that sell meat and that's it, as simple as that, I don't understand why that woman makes it that big, I mean couldn't she simply go anywhere else, when I was living in the USA I thought I heard that Jack in The Box is soy made, am I right?
Anyway thanks again for the opportunity to post comments here.
Posted by: Adrian Mendoza | April 04, 2012 at 08:25 PM