Food Vampires One and the Same

 
Last summer I was watching a vampire movie, and it got me thinking about how vampires have been used for metaphors for everything.

That particular time, I was thinking about vegetarians vs meat eaters.  As the film was all about the ethics of eating human blood vs eating animal blood.  How is that any different from the ethics of eating just vegetables vs having a meat diet?  I blogged about this on my regular blog last summer posing the question and also asking if all this time,  at the core of vampire films could they be foodie films?

The connection between the two genres becomes more apparent with each vampire movie that I have come across in the last few years, mostly and obviously within the Twilight Saga films.
Here you have a series of movies and books where one of the main subplots is controlling their desire to hunt humans.
In the second film Twilight New Moon, the character of Jasper  nearly kills Bella after she gets a tiny paper cut on her hand, and is then forced to go outside until the mess is cleaned up.
They keep drawing attention to the fact he's only been on a "vegetarian diet" for a few years.

There is a line in the Roger Corman cult classic  To Sleep With A Vampire, where the vampire says "Do you talk to a hamburger or introduce yourself to a milkshake?"  drawing another comparison again. 

In Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire  the character of Louis has a growing hatred for taking human life but is settled to feed on chickens, dogs and rats for much of the film. Only when he does finally take a human life, he feels that he's lost his last bit of humanity. It's the ethics of the situation that seems to be his torture.

Vampires Anonymous, touches on this theme as well, having the lead character take a test to see what kind of animal blood is best suited for him after he freaks out from having killed his girlfriend, then sends him to a pig farm. Though this movie's main theme is addiction.

The theme of the vegetarian vampire seems to be a hot one in the last few years, but hasn't it always been one of the main core themes?