By: Shiva Neupane

Food has been one of the interesting areas of reporting in these days. In country like Australia, the culinary gossips would take in almost all the towns and the cities. Anyone gets excited to talk about which cuisines they love the most and the like. 

I have been totally bamboozled at learning the various epicurean preferences and dietary choices that people make in the western society. In my early days, here in Australia it was really a challenging moment for me to understand the various dietary jargons such as keto –diet, flexitarianism, freeganism, reducetarianism, pescatarianism, and list goes on. 

In back home, I was accustomed with the terms such as vegetarianism, non-vegetarianism, and Veganism. As soon as I jetted off to Australia, I have scaled up my culinary vocabularies to the point where I could compile a food dictionary. 

In order to compile a food dictionary, I had a method to my madness to learn aforementioned things simultaneously when I had other things on my plate to do. 

For example, when I had to go to the supermarket to buy foods I used to take a photo of other exotic foods adjacent to them in order to research later on. Similarly, while attending various food festivals, I used to take the photos of those cuisines that I had never seen or heard of. I have been watching more food documentaries and reading food journal and a magazine for understanding the aesthetic beauty of food that it has to offer. Recently, I am intrigued by a word reducetarianism. I have decided to include this term in my food dictionary. This term was coined in 2015 by Brian Kateman. To promote a “reducetarian –diet” one has to reduce the consumption of meat and dairy products.  

A person needs to be a reducetarian before making an attempt to be a vegan because a meat eater can’t go one step further into becoming an ethical vegan. It really takes a substantial time to bring changes in one’s life in order for being a vegan of ethical sort. When we talk about an ethical vegan a person needs to abstain from wearing leather jackets or shoes because that are also the criteria that most of the vegans are not adequately ware of. 

Shiva Neupane, is the author of Falang English Dictionary, In the Pursuit of Utopian Life in Australia, Falang Food Dictionary, My waves, The Elixir of my Voice. His articles have been appeared in the Australian mainstream newspaper “The Age”, the national daily of Nepal “The Himalayan Times” and the scores of other media outlets. He can be contacted at falang_socialwelfare@yahoo.com