WRITE WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW

This column is nothing special - I'm just highlighting it to stand in for the overall trope that turns up more and more every year as the existence of vegetarians at Thanksgiving causes meat-eaters to get nervous.

I have to say at the outset that I don't know if the writer is a "humor" columnist or not, as there seem to be a couple sad attempts to be "wry," but in whatever case, this contains the "Tofurky trifecta" of non-vegetarians writing about vegetarians at Thanksgiving. That is, they've heard of Tofurky and decide to write a column centered around it.

* "Tofurky" misspelled as "Tofurkey"? Check.
* Seitan-based product identified as "soy-based" or "tofu-based"? Check.
* Complaint about vegetarians mimicking turkey-eaters by having a protein-based centerpiece? Check - and for bonus points, compounded by the central error of believing it is "shaped like a bird" (the headline for the whole column, in fact) instead of shaped like, well, a bag.
* Additional bonus points: Columnist describing self and rest of mainstream as "carnivores"

So to summarize, what makes this mind-numbingly typical is that the columnist blithely writes about something he clearly has absolutely no experience with and about which he can't be bothered to even fact-check, arguing from the perspective of clear ignorance about vegetarian (if not human) diets and traditions to tell us what we should do.

Not to single this one guy out - I just happened across this and found it to be a perfectly typical specimen of the genre (of which another signal aspect is that each participant seems to think he's invented the genre). So there you have it.