Ghent in Belgium is making every Thursday a no-meat day. Well, vegetarian dishes can be delicious but, please, spare me the sermon
A friend texts me on the morning of the dinner party to remind me that his wife is vegetarian. I groan. Will she eat fish? No, he says, but she’ll have whatever is on the side and we can eat the real food. I can’t resist the challenge, though, so I tear up the shopping list and start grubbing around in the cupboard and fridge for the makings of a vegetable stock.
Unlike some foodies, I don’t despise vegetarians. I do feel sorry for them — what a waste of an eating life. And I do think it’s naughty to lie to them, as many cooks do.
That’s not hard. After all, who’s to know that the tomato sauce was beefed up with a few chopped anchovies? That there was chicken stock in the minestrone? Vegetarians are mild people: they are hardly going to put down their spoon and challenge you.
What I object to is how they bang on about it. Discussing what sort of vegetarian — vegan, fruitarian, nutter — you are is as tedious as the theological debates of the early Christian sects. There is no interesting reason for becoming a vegetarian; no moral epiphany or animal-welfare revelation that will grip me. Clearly you can’t open the gates on a billion domesticated pigs, chickens and cows and send them back to the wild: the answer is to farm meat humanely and pay a price that that will guarantee respect for them.
This week the Belgian city of Ghent announced that it was having a non-compulsory vegetarian day once a week, which may reduce the greenhouse gases emitted by animal production a smidgin. But the burghers of Ghent would have had much more impact on the planet’s health if they had announced that they were all going to have one less child. I don’t have much truck, either, with the argument that if we all ate only greens and grains we could feed the planet: half the people of southern India are vegetarian by credo, yet the country has appalling rates of malnutrition among children.
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