Advanced Apathy

When most (if not all) of you hear the word “dairitarian”, not a whole lot of images come to mind. A good amount of you would immediately claim that such a word is made up. These people would be correct.

But to those who would criticize, I ask where any of the words that we currently have came from. The English language, at its very core, is one of necessity. Words are created out of the need to name something. Its funny when an imaginary word like “Google” is brought up in conversation it is not judged as being made up, but when something that inherently makes sense like dairitarian is said, everyone calls it made-up. Interesting…

Now that I have given my word rant, I will continue on to what I’m sure all of you are wanting to ask: what exactly is a dairitarian? To be clear about this, I am one of the few people to have ever uttered the word itself. As of April 6th 2009, if you do a google search for “dairitarian” you will get a grand total of 6 times it is said on the internet (with other search engines giving fewer). All of these are submitted in forums, and there is no official source of information on the subject.

Now that I have said that, let me tell you what it is. By my definition, a dairitarian is a person who’s chosen diet consists either primarily, or entirely of dairy products. In case you are not completely sure of what that includes, dairy consists, in part, of:

Milk, cream, cheeses, butter, whipped cream, yogurt, and a billion others. A good list of them is here: http://recipes.wikia.com/wiki/Dairy_Products

So, we have the definition down. Now we get to the purpose of this article. The fact is, dairitarian is not a recognized form of diet. Vegetarians are seen, but only because of the fact that a large amount of people acknowledge it. Without a doubt, many people are actually dairitarians that don’t even know it. Picky eaters (such as me) have very often been seen as weird and abnormal, when all they are, are dairitarians.

I have also heard that the dairitarian diet is not good health wise. To this, I would point out that neither is vegetarian or carnivorous. The fact is that if you eat entirely one thing, you will be losing out on essential elements of another. If you were to eat entirely veggies, you would miss out on needed proteins. If you ate only meat, you would lose out on roughage and many vitamins. Just like anything else, dairitarians need either to eat from other food groups, or take supplemental vitamins to get what they are missing. I personally eat grains, fruits, and nuts along with dairy.

So unless I am missing something, there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of reason for this diet to not be put alongside vegetarians and the like. If you believe that I am mistaken, or think that maybe you may be a dairitarian, please leave a comment below.

-Trenton Stahl

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.