To veg or not to veg as a waiter...

[Guest guest]

In response to alot of discussion back and forth on whether

restaurants should hire vegan/vegetarian staff or even if it's ok to

discriminate...I personally stand by the belief, and the same belief

which causes me to be the vegetarian that I am, that all things

should be treated equally. If someone is a meat eater, I do not

believe they would make any less great of a waiter in a vegan

restaurant, as long as they respected vegan philosophy. It is not

good if they are a waiter in a vegan restaurant and walk around

telling all of the vegan guests that meat tastes so wonderful,

because they are not doing their job to the best of their ability.

I have plenty of friends who are meat eaters, who are still

incredibly wonderful people, and I would not like to see any of them

turned away from a job just because it is still legal to

discriminate against them as meat eaters. If you own a vegan

restaurant and want to hire only vegan staff, that is your

business. However, I do not believe that these people are

necessarily not good vegan waiters; and we should not judge them or

discriminate against them as an entire group of people unable to

wait on a vegan table. The idea of a non-vegan waiter in a vegan

restaurant is not any more ridiculous than a vegan's dog eating meat

based food, or a vegan driving a car or riding a bike, because even

tires contain animal based products. We all have to be tolerant,

otherwise we have nothing. We all have our own limits, and to start

discriminating against someone puts yourself in the same boat as all

the " others. "

 

Kim

[Guest guest]

Kim wrote: "to start discriminating against someone puts yourself in the same boat as all the "others."" "Discrimination" is a highly charged word. A veg restaurant owner may decide to try to find qualified veg wait staff for a number of reasons -- because the owner wants wait staff who can honestly speak about their eating choices, because the owner wants to create a work community of individuals who share veg values, or because the owner would simply rather give the opportunities he or she has to offer (work and money) to someone in the veg community. I'm not sure it's fair to label that sort of decision "discrimination." I haven't actually heard anyone advocate that veg restaurants should only hire veg staff (I earlier wrote that the issue was not so clear to me). This discussion began when a waiter at Cafe Gratitude -- a restaurant

that portrays itself as being about ideas, not just food -- told customers he feels more "connected" to animals when he eats them. A few of us have expressed the belief that we find statements like that troubling and that we think it's understandable that veg restaurant owners might want to hire only veg folk. No one has espoused the idea that veg restaurant owners should never hire anyone who eats meat. Peace, Thea

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