How vegetarian eggs are?

Do you know what's in this picture?

It's a lamb in an artificial womb.

These wombs are supposed to be developed for use in providing premature babies more natural environment, which will help in decreasing the ratio of premature children's death.

It is being speculated that these wombs, in future, might actually evolve into artificial wombs that would help prevent the risks associated with pregnancy.

Suppose I gave the company making those artificial wombs a contract to deliver a thousand of them. And for the sake of this answer, I bought a hammer on my way to home to turn those delicate systems delivered to me last day into pieces.

I “unboxed” them and broke them. All of them.

Did I just kill a thousand lambs/babies?

I guess not. They were empty. And no matter how long I sat staring at them or pampering them, they were not going to produce babies.

That's how the eggs sold commercially work. They won't produce chicks. They aren't fertilized eggs. Even if you will “keep them warm” by putting them under Donald (Duck), they aren't going to turn into a chicken.

While, on contrary, the production of milk requires that the cow be in lactation, which is a result of the cow having given birth to a calf. So, the milk you just gulped was actually induced by the calf.

Therefore, unfertilized eggs are less “non-vegetarian” than the milk. I won't exactly say yes or no to this question, because that might (read will) burn some asses here. And I care about people’s comfort in sitting.

This must be noted that vegetarian is a wide and subjective term which is often (read always) bent by people to justify their comfort zone on this topic. There are two possible poles of being vegan or non-vegetarian. Everything else lies in between these two extremities of the spectrum. Again, if you will consider subdivisions in non-veg, there are many points and extreme would be the one who eats every kind of non-veg item (cannibal?).

I have found that defining our food habits is useful when you want to convey it to others, but is stupid to turn them into ego-inflating boundaries. Hence, this answer is written with no intention of pelting stones at one group or the other.

This post was originally published by Zircoz on Quora that can be read here.