Meatlessness

Next year I will have been a vegetarian for 50 years. Right through my childhood and most of my twenties I happily ate meat, and then overnight I rejected it.

What happened was that I stayed for a week with a couple of gay friends in their Welsh cottage. I discovered they were both vegetarians and I thought it would be absurd for me to insist on making meat dishes for myself. So I decided to eschew (what a lovely word!) meat for the week.

When I returned home I realised I hadn't missed meat for a second and as vegetarianism was supposedly a healthier diet - and meant not killing animals - I thought I might as well continue to avoid meat.

When I met Jenny, who was a meat eater, and told her I was a vegetarian, she decided to join me. And the rest, as they say, is history. We were (and are) both fit and healthy and never saw any reason for going back to meat.

I'm glad to say I've never faced any active hostility from meat-eaters. In general people accept my meatlessness quite matter-of-factly. The only person who seemed totally bemused by it was my mother. I had to keep reminding her I was a vegetarian as she kept "forgetting". No, mum, I don't eat pork sausages.

So I have Ron and Paul to thank for my conversion 49 years ago.

PS: Researchers at Loma Linda University in the States have shown vegetarian men live on average 10 years longer than non-vegetarian men - 83 years compared to 73 years. For women, being vegetarian added an extra 6 years to their lives, reaching 85 years on average.

The Canadian Maritimes

And now all can be revealed. Jenny and I have been on a 10 day guided tour of the Canadian Maritimes (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Cape Breton Island). After that we spent a few days in Montreal, as Jenny wanted me to see what she thinks is a wonderful city.

One defining feature of the Maritimes is seafood - muscles, oysters, scallops and lobster in particular. Vegetarians are still unusual and Bernadette, our tour manager, worked hard to provide adequate veggie meals wherever we went.

There's pretty spectacular scenery too, especially on the Cabot Trail in Cape Breton Island and on the Fundy Trail in New Brunswick. The trees were sporting their amazing autumn colours - yellow, brown, red, orange.

The Maritimes are still thickly forested, with little sign of the commercial interests like mining and fracking that are threatening much of Northern Ireland's natural beauty. And there are lots of unspoilt little fishing villages.

We learnt about some of the indigenous communities that fought for their survival against invading English and French forces - such as the Acadians, the Mikmaq, the Inuits and the Glooscap. They refused to be cowed into submission.

At the Alexander Graham Bell Museum in Baddeck, we discovered that Bell not only invented the first practical telephone, but invented many other things like metal detectors, the hydrofoil, the audiometer and the wheat husker.

We learnt that New Brunswick is the only officially bilingual province in Canada, and many of the inhabitants speak both French and English. Jenny and I soon realised that our pathetic grasp of French hardly mattered as English is spoken everywhere.

The residents of the Maritimes are keen on lighthouses, with over 160 in Nova Scotia alone. They also like model lighthouses, which pop up in people's front gardens and other unlikely spots.

Like our guided tour of New Zealand in January, this tour gave us a great overview of the area and what makes it distinctive. We more than satisfied our nagging curiosity.
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We were hoping to meet up with Wise Web Woman. But like most people, I confused St John's Newfoundland (where www actually lives) with Saint John, New Brunswick. So we never met up. Maybe some other time....

Veggie woes

I never cease to be astonished at how bemused meat eaters are by my vegetarianism. My very simple preference for foods that don’t include meat is met with anything from wide-eyed puzzlement to seething hostility, as if I’m asking for something utterly outlandish. Freshly grilled newborn babies maybe or honey roasted virgin’s vagina.

Whatever reason I give for my aversion to meat, it’s usually regarded as slightly bonkers, or stubbornly perverse, or deliberately awkward. Seldom do people understand the quite valid reason for my attitude – that I don’t want animals to be killed to provide me with food, when there are hundreds of delicious non-animal alternatives readily available. And a lot cheaper.

I’ve been a vegetarian for 37 years, but the general bafflement at my choice is as strong as ever. The idea that meat is not only vital for health but is obviously tastier than any other type of food is a long time dying. The fact that most people are eating vegetarian dishes every day of the week – macaroni cheese anyone? – seems to make no difference.

So I wasn’t too surprised to read 20 stories of vegetarians being insulted and patronised and sneered at in umpteen different countries. The reactions are all too typical - insisting ham or chicken aren’t really meat, serving totally inedible meatless dishes, declaring anything other than meat to be mere animal feed, assuming a secret yearning for meat. And so on and so on.

So many meals became an all-out battle between diners who just wanted something meat-free and cooks and wait-staff determined to give them something meaty, even if it had to be stealthily concealed among the other items on the plate.

One woman who was constantly harangued by meat-eaters in West Africa finally stumbled on a foolproof tactic. When she explained that her dying grandfather had forbidden her to eat meat, to her delight she found that nobody dared question her grandfather’s final wishes.

I really don’t know why meat-eaters get so defensive and angry at those of us who don’t share their particular passion. A guilty conscience perhaps over the thousands of animals who’ve died for their gastric pleasure?

Something missing

Whatever I say, whatever I do, I never feel people are seeing the real me. I feel the image they have of me is always distorted, inaccurate, simplistic.

I do my best to explain myself, to express the reality of how I see the world, how I live my life, how I relate to others, how I react to tragedy or blessings. But I feel something is always missing, something that conveys the uniqueness of who I am. Something always gets left on the cutting room floor.

People know for example that I'm a vegetarian. But do they understand why I'm a vegetarian, why I'm so horrified by abattoirs, why I hate the mass slaughter of animals, why I loathe the sight of a butcher chopping a carcass? No, they don't, because I have no way of conveying the depth of emotion and antipathy and incomprehension that's involved. I can't express more than a tiny sliver of what's actually going through my mind.

And so it is for everything else that makes up my particular identity. It's like the layers of an onion. People see the top layer and they think that's what I am, but they don't see all the layers underneath, going right down to the core of my being. How on earth do I explain all those other layers, the bits that can't be seen but are all parts of me? It's frustrating and perplexing.

So most of the time I just give up. I decide there's no point in trying to explain the complexities of the real me. It would take too long, I don't have the words, and everyone would lose interest long before I'm anywhere near finished.

So I just reconcile myself to the fact that people don't understand me properly, they never will, and there are always going to be a thousand false images of me in circulation, bearing as much relation to the true me as a plot summary to a 600-page novel.

A novel that may not be worth reading anyway....

Why eat meat?

Several times over the Christmas period I was asked why I was a vegetarian, as if not eating meat is the oddity and meat-eating is as natural as breathing.

When I asked my questioners why they ate meat they were dumbfounded. They didn't think it needed any explanation, as if my query was crazy.

But it's a serious question, because actually meat-eating is contradictory in several ways.

Meat-eaters usually say they love animals - they may even have pet cats or dogs. Yet they happily eat animals which have been viciously slaughtered, and reared in the most appalling conditions.

They say they eat meat but in fact only eat 'acceptable' types of meat. They don't eat dogs, cats, horses, guinea pigs, ponies or donkeys. Why do some animals have exempted status?

They say they never eat vegetarian food because it's boring and fit only for namby-pamby wimps, yet they chomp their way through vegetarian staples like bread, cakes, biscuits, dips, peanut butter, cheese and eggs.

They say they're concerned about climate change and the environment, but eat animals which demand huge tracts of land and huge amounts of animal feed and produce huge quantities of greenhouse gases. Going vegetarian is one of the single most effective ways of cutting environmental damage.

Why am I a vegetarian? Because I don't believe in killing animals for food when there are plenty of food sources that don't involve severe pain and suffering for living creatures. What's so odd about that?

See also: On Being a Vegetarian