Six Years a Veggie

I don’t often do cross-overs because I’m in no way organised enough to do them. But Alice Roberts’ confession on "Ready, Steady, Cook" that she ate venison recently having been vegetarian for sixteen years made me think about things. Mostly how good Alice Roberts must look naked but not exclusively that. It reminded me of a story someone told me at work. She’d been vegetarian for years – the person who told me the story – and one day her mum casually asked her if she wanted a bacon sandwich from the hot dog van in the market. It was said as a joke but m’colleague absent mindedly said "Yeah ok". It was only when she’d taken her first bite that she realised what had just happened. But rather than toss it aside and chastise her mother for an ill thought out prank, she ate the sandwich and has been a meat eater ever since. Which strikes me as an extremely odd thing to do. It suggests that vegetarians are all repressed meat eaters in a constant battle to say no to flesh. Alice was apparently just waiting for the right opportunity and m’colleague’s subconscious was too. So am I the same?

I realised a few days ago that its six years since I became a vegetarian. That seems like a long time. Six years since I last had a cheese burger in Burger King. Six years since I last had a pepperoni pizza. Six years since I last had a sausage which didn’t taste horrible. Because, yes, vegetarian sausages are awful. Everything else is great but no one has yet mastered the veggie sausage. Not that I was a huge fan of the real thing but there was a way of grilling them almost to the point that they could only be identified by dental records which made them a pleasant enough way to pass a mouthful or two.

Because I’ve never liked vegetables and don’t exactly have a reputation as a rice eating health freak, most people reacted with surprise to the news. I avoided actually telling mother by leaving Linda McCartney boxes in the kitchen and waiting for her to notice them. I’m not brimming with bravery. No one expected it to last but in the course of six years I’ve genuinely never been tempted to stray. I’ve occasionally thought how much simpler a day out would be if I could just pop into McDonald’s and have a burger but I’ve never actually wanted to do it. Equally, the depressing choice in some supermarket pizza freezers makes me occasionally wish there was something more than just cheese (I tried roast vegetables once but they did not a pizza make). Surely it can’t be that hard for restaurants (and I include burger chains) to do vegetarian burgers – not bean burgers or any of that nonsense but Quorn burgers or something like that. Whether I’d trust a McDonald’s employee to get the right patty is another matter but it would be nice to have the choice.

The thing is, I’m not even an animal lover. On my rare sojourns into the country I do my best to avoid animals. They are big, stupid, smelly and don’t understand basic English phrases such as "go away" or "would you do that in your own lounge?" So it wasn’t concern for brer sheep or brer cow that made me do it. I simply realised how utterly disgusting eating animal flesh really is. Look at your arm for a moment – squeeze it – touch it (with the other hand unless you’re a freak) and then think about slicing bits off it and eating them. Not pleasant. Expand that upwards and downwards to include all flesh and that’s where I am. The idea of eating blood and tissue and fat turns my stomach and makes me want to hide. It is barbaric and nasty and gross.

I realise now – after the fact – that I’d always had an aversion to it. I’d eat meat that was heavily disguised – ground into burgers, burnt into blackness, covered with cheese or processed until it looked like nothing an animal would have (well, they do have something similar but lets not go there). Give me some steak and I’d pick at it and procrastinate and generally try to wish it off the plate. Occasionally, I’d manage to cut it finely enough, scoop it onto a fork and shovel it into my mouth. I’d then take a swig of water and let the whole messy business slip down unchewed. I literally couldn’t eat it any other way. We once went to a Chinese restaurant and they ordered ribs for me. They smelled nice, they looked fine. But try as I might (and I did) I couldn’t bite into them. I couldn’t actually force myself to bite into the meat. Heaven knows how I managed to miss the obvious signs but miss them I did. Mother could see it too, after the event. I think that’s why she was less surprised than most people were.

So it’s been six years since something clicked in my head and I realised what my problem was. Along the way there have been stuffed aubergines, roast vegetable pizzas and some of the most revolting sausages you’ve ever tasted. But it was the right thing to do and I can’t imagine I’ll ever feel otherwise. I know I bang on about it, I know I’m in a minority and I know it will never change but eating flesh is a barbaric throwback to mankind’s earliest civilisations. We’ve reached a point where it isn’t necessary any more. One day – when we’ve all got noisy food machines like the one in the Tardis – we’ll all eat cubes of tasty goodness and the flesh-time (if I may borrow from the classics) will be a thing of the past. In the meantime, there is no voice in my head or my subconscious waiting for the right moment to tempt me. I like the taste of faux-meat products, I’m happy to eat eggs and dairy products and most of my shoes are leather. Plenty of vegetarians (and especially those damned vegans from the planet Vega) would look down on me as being a rubbish fake-vegetarian but I don’t eat animals. That’s the long and short of it. It’s not political, sentimental or environmental and it doesn’t take huge amounts of ethically fuelled willpower.

I’ll leave you with the holy grail – it took ages to discover them and no where but Tesco seems to sell them but these are the veggie burgers which put all other burgers to shame. Quorn quarter-pounders tend to be rather dry and fake. But their "Sizzling burgers" are quite superb.