YMMV / The Simpsons S7 E5 "Lisa the Vegetarian"

• Accidental Aesop: While the message of the story is "don't force your beliefs on others", the other message seems to be "if you have a certain lifestyle, seek out others who share it with you." Lisa is calmed by meeting people who share her belief in vegetarianism, namely Apu and the McCartneys.
• Accidental Innuendo: Homer offering Doctor Hibbert a hot beef injection.
• Alternative Joke Interpretation:
  • When Lisa made gazpacho at the barbecue, Barney tells her to "go back to Russia." Did he think gazpacho was a Russian food (mistaking it for borscht, which is a beet soup, not a tomato soup), or was he calling Lisa a Communist?
  • There's been a longstanding debate among fans over Ralph's line "Oh boy, sleep! That's where I'm a Viking!" Is "I'm a Viking" just Ralph saying he's really good at sleeping, using one of his typical Non Sequitur declarations? Or is he saying that he has recurring dreams about being a Viking?
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: The documentary about the food chain which Lisa watches at school briefly depicts a gorilla about to grab some bananas when suddenly a shark jumps from the river and devours the unwary ape. There are certain shark species which can thrive in freshwater, most notably the Bull shark, the Gangers shark, and the speartooth shark.
• Broken Base: Did this episode give Lisa Character Development, or did it kickstart her Flanderization?
• Fanon Discontinuity: Some fans treat the episode as this, not for being bad (it's considered genuinely funny), but that they feel this episode started Lisa's eventual Flanderization into a Soapbox Sadie.
• Franchise Original Sin: While this episode really kicks in Lisa's Soapbox Sadie antics, the episode makes clear she isn't in the right for shilling her own close-minded attitude, and she ends the episode still standing by her beliefs but knowing she doesn't have to force those down others' throats. This Grey-and-Gray Morality outlook is sometimes omitted from later episodes, where Lisa is treated as in the right for being an extremist Insufferable Genius and venting a lot of the writers' personal ethics.
• Fridge Horror: How many soy-allergic people has Apu put at risk through selling them tofu dogs he claimed were hot dogs?^note It has been stated that Homer is the only person ever to buy Kwik-E-Mart hot dogs, though this may or may not be true.
• Genius Bonus: Seeing a shark eating a gorilla in a river in a jungle environment is pretty outlandish at first, but sharks are so associated to the ocean it's pretty easy to forget certain species like the dangerous bull shark and the Ganges shark can live in freshwater. The Ganges shark and the speartooth shark in particular are fully adapted to swampy habitats like mangrove rivers. No attacks on gorillas have been recorded as of yet, however.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Homer sarcastically referring to pigs as "a wonderful, magical animal" is quite appropriate thanks to his obsession with Plopper the Pig in The Simpsons Movie.
  • The door to Apu's secret garden is hidden behind a fridge that supposedly has non-alcoholic beer in it. When Lisa questions what Apu would do if somebody wanted to buy one, he remarks that it's never come up in all the time he's been at the Kwik-E-Mart. This would be almost prophetic, given that when alcohol was (temporarily) banned in the following season, the head of Duff's attempt to keep the business alive with the non-alcoholic Duff Zero ended with it going bankrupt in just 30 minutes.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "It's just a little (x)! It's still good! It's still good!"
  • "You don't win friends with salad!"
  • Images of the "Independent Thought Alarm" button often appear on social networking sites whenever someone receives backlash for speaking out against societal norms or popular opinions.
  • Marge responding to Lisa hijacking Homer's BBQ with "Bart, no!", Bart looking confused, and Marge saying "Sorry, force of habit." is a popular reaction to any Real Life example of Not Me This Time.
  • The bit with the increasingly cuter sheep is often used to portray "flavor of the month" situations, where a popular thing is fleetingly replaced by something else in public consciousness.
• Values Dissonance:
  • The episode revolves around Lisa's family trying to dissuade her from being vegetarian while Lisa herself tries dissuading them from eating meat. Being vegetarian is slightly less of a big deal in modern America than it was back in 1995, though her parents' conservative attitude (combined with Homer's insatiable appetite for meat) still leave room for the plot to occur.
  • In more recent years, there's been more concern over whether a vegetarian lifestyle is healthy for children. In fact, a later episode, Penny Wiseguys, acknowledges this, where Lisa's eating habits have given her an iron deficiency, causing her to experiment with eating bugs.

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