Vegetarian Dating Options?

It just occurred to me that Plenty of Fish doesn't has an option to categorize oneself as a vegan or vegetarian. There are plenty of other things to categorize oneself by like religion, body type, preference for children, your drinking/smoking habits and even if you have a car or not. All of these very clear lifestyle choices that one would certainly consider when looking for a potential relationship. Yet the one thing that isn't categorized is a person's eating habits.

Now maybe it's just me and I live in a large liberal city, Boston, with tons of mostly liberal college students with a pretty good chunk of them, from my observation, being vegetarians or vegans. I'm not sure why I'm relating liberalism with the propensity towards vegetarianism but it seems to be the case. Anyways, from this growing trend I think that it is apparent that more and more people will want to date and be in relationships with people of similar eating habits.

It makes sense to filter dates in this manner, particularly when on large dating sites like PlentyofFish.

For example, the last girl I dated was a vegetarian. Though I tend to lean towards a mostly vegetarian diet, I'm still an omnivore and consume meat on an occasional basis. This got pretty tricky when we'd go out to eat on dates. Sometimes I would forget that she was a vegetarian and take her to places with little options for that kind of diet... oopps! Luckily for me, she was pretty easy going with having to deal with restaurants filled with voracious carnivores, but I have heard some stories where the omnivore/vegan dates really butt heads.

There was a good New York Times article last year called, "I Love You, but You Love Meat," which nicely illustrated the potential dating conflicts that meat eaters and vegans can have.

"...many vegetarians say they cannot date anyone who eats meat. Vegans, who avoid eating not just animals but animal-derived products, take it further, shivering at the thought of kissing someone who has even sipped honey-sweetened tea."

Sometimes it probably goes a little too far but I certainly don't blame people for only wanting to date others with the same eating habits. After all, eating is a pretty big part of our lives, it ranks way up there on the needs scale, right next to stuff like... breathing. When you're eating three times a day, at least one of those meals is probably with your spouse, doesn't it make sense that the two should be on the same page diet wise?

As far as online dating sites go, there's one for every niche out there. Of course, this certainly means that there are vegetarian and vegan dating sites to cater to this crowd. Take the site VeggieDate for example which caters to people with all kinds of variations in veggie like diets from lacto ovo vegetarians, vegans and even macrobiotic diets... whatever that is.

So here's my thing, with the rise of preferences for a certain dietary lifestyle in a relationship, shouldn't this be a category choice added to the mainstream online dating sites like Plenty of Fish? Isn't one's choice in food just as important a quality in a date as their drinking habits? Perhaps I'm nitpicking a bit but I think I just might be on to something here.

A quick search in the PlentyofFish forums with the word "vegetarian" brings up a crap load of threads, over thirty, all with the same heated debates about dating vegetarians, vegans and the like.

What do you guys and gals think? How does ones dietary choice affect your online dating habits?