When I tell someone I’m vegetarian, there’s generally two reactions
First is the traditional “oh that’s cool.” The universal sign that someone couldn’t care less. Or there’s the “why are you doing that to yourself?”
I often ask that very same question.
The truth is I did it on a whim and now I’m too stuck up on my moral high horse to enjoy a 99p McDonald’s Hamburger. I am consigned to convincing myself that there’s still benefits to a life of meat abstinence.
Vegetarian and vegan advocates often cite one of three reasons for their life of dietary restriction and misery: morality, environmentalism, and health.
Debates will be held until the world ends about the first two, but the claim the vegetarian lifestyle is automatically healthier is as fake as a £20 Rolex.
Whilst replacing chicken with sweet potatoes in a curry is probably healthier, there are plenty of vegetarian dishes that are more than a little self-indulgent.
There may be a perception that a vegetarian burger involves nothing more harmful than deep-fried grass and a sprinkling of diluted cow piss but take a trip to a supermarket’s vegetarian aisle and you’ll soon see how unhealthily filthy they can be. There’s salts and sugars everywhere – albeit salts and sugars without Peppa Pig’s blood also in the mix.
We’re also seeing dirty vegan food becoming more popular as the Instagram-ability of the lifestyle rises.
Take the sleepy no mans land of Lincolnshire, a county famed for its sausage. It now has three vegan-only restaurants, and, after a trip to one of them, I found I’d put on 3 kg. Still, at least I lost something: all respect for myself.
You might think by this point that I despise being vegetarian but, in fact, it’s quite a fun lifestyle – filled filled with plenty of challenges and far too much cheese. Put a sloppy vegan meal in front of me and watch it drop down the hatch in seconds.
Back to the question of why I’m vegetarian then, a question I continue to ask myself on a regular basis.
The phrase I mutter to myself when walking down the supermarket aisle – on my way to grab some lovely lab grown bacon substitute – is “if I couldn’t kill it myself, why would I eat it?”
Why would I need to eat a cow when I can have a filthy burger made of grass anyway?