Oh, and this is not a rant against vegans, everyone is welcome at my house, if you are good anybody. I even have pots and pans that never touched meat. I will serve you any grilled vegetables, beans, salads and vinaigrettes, pesto's and bread, or baked patatoes and what not. I used to cook vegan for the homeless here in Amsterdam when I was mostly homeless and squatting myself in what we call squatting cafe’s.

that's why i hate religious restrictions

Why the forbidden potatoes and tomatoes?

I have no words, I'm sure you've heard it all. Thanks for sharing this story and sorry for your childhood. Hope you're healing.

I'm curious why fish was allowed and why tomatoes weren't, do you know what their reasoning was?

That's a diet that's avoiding nightshades not a vegan diet. Some people think nightshades can trigger inflammation or autoimmune diseases but there really isn't any evidence about it. Some people with irritable bowel disease fine nightshades trigger flare ups but that's about all I've heard of.

Hmm, does it count if the animal (human, in this case) could be omnivorous, but chooses not to be for whatever reason?

That's pretty fucked up. I love Texas de Brazil but I wouldn't bring a vegetarian friend there to watch me hurt myself on all you can eat meat.

I mean, that's fucked up and hilarious. I'm a dirty omnivore and those places are no more appetizing to me. Those cuts at the all you can eat Brazilian places SUCK.

But surprisingly, when I want a predictable vegetable side while I'm traveling, I go to a steakhouse. Every other place seems to serve either microwaved bag veggies, fried bullshit, or something sad smothered in sauce. Go to a steakhouse and I can get a rare well seasoned aged filet and two steamed fresh vegetable sides plus a salad. The only reliable vegan places I've found are Indian, which isn't bad, but is often not really to my taste. Obviously I'm no vegan, but I think it's fair to say I love plant based foods even more as long as they're not fake meat, fake cheese, or overly spiced mush. In a meat centric region that's a hard palette to satisfy sometimes.

I went to a private elementary school where I had the same teacher for 1st through 6th grade. Not only did the kids bully me, so did he. And he encouraged the other kids to do it, even my friends. I'm relatively certain, looking back on it, that it was in part because I'm Jewish.

He also once did something that would 100% have put him on a sex offender list today. Once I started crying because of how they were treating me and he put me on his lap and kissed me on the cheek and started calling me a little baby. But it was the 80s, so apparently that was okay.

I discovered he had an email address a while back and I sent him an email telling him that he fucked up my childhood and that he, as a professed Christian, now knows that he will go to his grave unforgiven because there is no possible way he could do enough to earn my forgiveness.

He replied, I deleted it without reading it. Fuck him.

The bigoted piece of shit also was in the Peace Corps in the Cameroon and because of that, thought it was totally appropriate to dress in the traditional clothing of Cameroonian people every Halloween. Unsurprisingly, the two Jewish kids and the two black kids in school were treated the worst by him. One of the two black kids was a girl who very definitely had dyslexia. Wow did he humiliate her over it constantly.

The funny thing is that he basically terrified me into not explaining what he was doing to my parents explicitly enough. They saw weird signs, but also always told me that I'd be treated worse in public school, which was proven untrue when I went to middle school, because as shitty as middle school kids are to each other, at least the teachers generally didn't take the side of the bullies and encourage them to bully harder. They only knew when my mom ran into one of the people I went to school with in a supermarket who told my mom that she felt so bad for me when we were in that hellhole.

And then they wonder about school shootings... oh well...

You just pick something obvious and over elaborate on it. Big glasses, bright blue hat, etc also kids are mean, so pick a flaw, same idea.