Im pretty clearly talking about the United States. I cant believe people reacted so emotionally to my comment when i wasnt even passing a value judgment and just stating a fact. Only 5 percent of Americans identify as vegetarian and of that 5% most are liberal. If you can give me a good argument for why those liberal people should be evenly distributed around the US I am all ears.
This entire thread is about a question that refers to the US so to be able to misinterpret my response so significantly is strange.
> I cant believe people reacted so emotionally to my comment
I do not believe it is linguistically possible for me to have been more dispassionate than when I wrote There are roughly half a billion vegetarians in India.
Comments like moate's, "Data or it didn't happen," do not strike me as overly emotional either. You might want to just lighten up.
> Only 5 percent of Americans identify as vegetarian and of that 5% most are liberal. If you can give me a good argument for why those liberal people should be evenly distributed around the US I am all ears.
Interesting thought. I have no data as to whether this is true but if fast food is more of a city thing (I believe it), what you're saying would seem to make rolling out something like a good veggie burger a lot more attractive in terms of marketing demographics than the simple "5%" figure alone would indicate, which speaks to the question you were originally responding to.
> This entire thread is about a question that refers to the US so to be able to misinterpret my response so significantly is strange.
The comment you were responding to literally begins "I lived in England..." I don't think a little misunderstanding is a big deal. Fair enough, you were talking about the United States.
>> I cant believe people reacted so emotionally to my comment when i wasnt even passing a value judgment and just stating a fact.
This is why I'm so emotional. This isn't a fact. This is an assumption, and a really weird one at best. Here's what we have for facts:
About 5% of the US population identify as Vegetarian or vegan.
"Most" vegetarians are liberal.
Liberals are not evenly distributed among the general population.
Putting this together, your assumption is highly flawed at best. There's no logical reason we can't assume that while liberals aren't equally distributed, vegetarians are. Being a vegetarian means you're likely inclined to be liberal, it's a correlation not causation. There's nothing I've seen that shows anything about expected distribution of vegetarians based on where they live. The best thing anyone has come up with is the thanksgiving gallup poll below.
Also, your OG statement was that they aren't common outside of meto areas. This is so vague and meaningless. What's common? That 1/100 people are a vegetarian? That people know someone anecdotally that is a vegetarian?
My point is that your asserting that you know that vegetarians are uncommon in the Rural US. I posit that it's impossible to know that. That's not to say you're wrong or not (I'm not claiming I know either) but that making a statement of that type is problematic in a fact based discussion.
There are roughly half a billion vegetarians in India.