How Many Vegetarians Does It Take to Screw in a Lightbulb?

I really like the fisherman who had this sign hanging in his booth. (He has Native American ancestry, so it's not nearly as politically incorrect as it looks, at least not in that respect.)

1. Although I'm not completely vegetarian myself, I eat a largely vegetarian diet, with plenty of meals that are completely vegan. But I'm still amused and fascinated by the ubiquity of jokes poking fun at vegetarianism. I enjoyed the Jack in the Box commercials a few years back showing carnivores playing football against vegans. (Guess who won.) Another Jack in the Box ad showed pointy headed Jack feeling mortified at his son's graduation as his son gave a speech about how he wanted to be a vegetarian, until he realized that the boy was confusing the word "vegetarian" with "veterinarian". I also remember a reader board outside of a gas station I used to pass that read, "If vegetarians eat vegetables, what do humanitarians eat?"

I suppose what amuses me (apart from the humor) is this need that some die hard meat eaters have to poke fun at vegetarians. There's nothing new about this: people have been writing diatribes against vegetarianism since Pythagorean times. This long history brings home the fact that we have an old and complex relationship with meat-eating, and if we are ever going to make a large-scale change to a diet made up of mostly plant based foods, we will also have to find some way of honoring our meat-eating traditions.