Editor's Weekly Ramblings 11

Friday 23rd May 2003

The Reluctant Vegetarian

This week has been 'National Vegetarian Week' in the UK; and cooking programs have been regaling us with tales of such culinary masterpieces as, 'stuffed aubergines' and 'carrot pie'. Thoroughly delicious I'm sure. I myself have been a vegetarian now for about eleven years. For any 'normal' individual for whom cooking is enjoyable enough, but not necessarily their life's passion. I have to say that a vegetarian diet is not too great taste wise. There is none of the easy convenience of slapping a bit of bacon in the frying pan, or shoving half a dozen lamb chops under the grill. No gorgeously juicy pieces of steak, or roast beef await. None of that. Taste is instead replaced with the joys of the righteous deed, self-satisfaction and moral superiority. Which does, it has to be said, partly make up for the castration of ones taste buds. But even outdoing your fellow man in moral certainty becomes tiresome after a while. In practice I don't tend to mention the fact that I'm a vegetarian because I can't be bothered with the predictable questions that follow. Plastic surgery bores Michael Jackson. Vegetarianism bores me.

In truth the only reasons I can see that anyone would stick to a vegetarian diet is not because of a sainthood contest with your fellow man; but because ultimately you believe that less cruelty has been inflicted either on animals or our planet because of the choice you make not to eat meat.

I actually became a vegetarian at the age of 19 during the summer holidays after my first year at university, where I had lived chiefly off a diet of double-lamb chops (whose taste I still recall with loving fondness) and peas. It was a decision arrived at quickly, and not in all honesty one I laboured unduly about, because it felt right in my gut. I woke up one day and decided to become a vegetarian because it seemed to me that doing without meat would be playing my part in helping to stop the killing of millions of animals that are tortured and unceremoniously killed to feed humanity. Eleven years on I still strongly believe that. And it is not a decision I have ever regretted or a path from which I stray. Despite the fact that my diet; which had up to that point been gloriously single minded in pursuit of the flesh, doesn't now send too many tingles down my spine. Eat to live, not live to eat is unfortunately more the mantra. However, for all that, it hasn't been too hard to stick with it. A decision to cut something out completely is much easier to stick too then a decision to cut down on something, and really very little willpower is needed to stay a vegetarian. Cheese, eggs, pizza and pasta fill the void in a dependable but unspectacular kind of way.