A Vegan Woman Was Fined $1,000 For Threatening To Kill Her Italian Mom For Making Meat Sauce

A vegan woman has been fined a total of €900 (about $1,027) for threatening to kill her Italian mother for making meat sauce, The Telegraph is reporting.

We all know that one vegan who is enthusiastic about their diet to the point of being borderline militant, but an unnamed 48-year-old woman, who for the sake of simplicity will be referred to as “Ms. V” for the remainder of this article, might have taken things too far.

Ms. V recently moved into a small apartment with her elderly mother in an unnamed Italian town in the Emilia Romagna region, and almost right away problems started developing. Ms. V apparently demanded “no sensory nor olfactory contact” with animal products; in other words, she didn’t want to touch or even smell anything involving meat or animal products.

You can already see the potential problem here. Stereotypically, older Italian women love to cook. Italian cuisine as we know it goes back 2,400 years, and for every last day of those two and a half millennia, it has been based on meat, butter, cream, and other animal products.

And that’s especially true in the region where Ms. V and her mom lived. Specifically, Ms. V’s mother cooked in the rezdore(“housewife”) tradition, which relies heavily on Bolognese sauce, which can include Prosciutto ham, ground beef, and sometimes chicken livers. In other words: it couldn’t have been more non-vegan if the pig was still alive when the mother carved off meat and put it in the pan.

Ms. V and her mother had gone back-and-forth over the older woman’s cooking before, often getting into fights – sometimes violent ones – over the mother’s cooking choices.

After two years of fighting, things came to a head in March 2016, according to a criminal court. Ms. V once again smelled meat cooking, and this time she’d had enough. She grabbed a knife, the criminal complaint said, and threatened to stab her mother, according to Fox News.

“If you won’t stop on your own then I’ll make you stop. Quit making [meat sauce], or I’ll stab you in the stomach.”

A judge ruled that Ms. V had violated her mother’s rights and ordered her to pay up. Specifically, she was ordered to pay €500 (about $569) in compensation to her 69-year-old mother, plus €400 (about $455) in court costs.

It is unclear, as of this writing, if Ms. V and her mother are still living together in the same apartment.