I enjoy mocking the grim delight of meat-eaters
MEAT has been in the papers this week. I don’t mean you opened your Herald and found a sausage sandwiched between pages 16 and 17. And no, madam, your impending wisecrack about tripe on this page will not be considered humorous or wise.
Strictly speaking, it’s lack of meat that’s been in the news, with the announcement that one in eight “Britons” – loyal subjects of King Arthur all – is now vegetarian or vegan. A further 21 per cent were “flexitarian”, people who eat meat only occasionally, meaning that, in total, one-third of the fake nation’s masticators have reduced or removed meat from their diet entirely.
Up and down the fields of Britonia, sheep and cows danced with delight, or would have done if they weren’t so dense. Thousands of years of being fed grass and hay before being packed into lorries for slaughter and they still don’t suspect a thing. Idiots.
When I was a full-time meat eater, I sometimes justified it by discerning little other purpose to sheep. Lambs, yes: nice, funny, playful. But sheep? No. Now that I’m flexitarian, I’m baffled as to why you can’t get mutton any more. Used to enjoy a nice bit of mutton. It’s all lamb now, though if it sets your mind at rest, madam, that’s lamb on the verge of being sheep and not the wee things you see gambolling aboot in the fields. People are only marginally brighter than animals, and it’s striking how many still find vegetarianism odd or unusual. When I was properly vegetarian
– or pescatarian (I made up for it by eating vast shoals of fish with every meal) – a friend wanted to phone ahead to a restaurant to warn them I was coming.
Recently, I’ve started incorporating meat into my diet again. I’d fallen into vegetarianism quite accidentally – just kept cutting out meat until there was none – but latterly had cut out dairy too. It wasn’t a moral decision and I’m not lactose-intolerant, but I have or had an illness that cutting dairy seemed to help.
The trouble was that though there are non-dairy, dairy-style products out there, I found my meal options limited, particularly for a limited cook. Do I feel guilty? Not much, and I enjoy mocking the grim delight of meat-eaters when I tell them.
For all the horror of more directly political comment that we now endure online, after the internet foolishly gave everyone a voice, it’s as nothing compared to the guilt-riddled, vein-throbbing fury of meat-eaters. At the same time, you discover many unexpected vegetarians – otherwise tough, uncaring, right-wing people
– who became so after witnessing slaughter.
The subject is characterised by hypocrisy on both sides. Another news item this week reported that half the country’s vegetarians, and even vegans, will occasionally have a sly bacon butty or steak pie. They cannot be condemned for this, for hypocrisy lies at the heart of the human condition.
None of us is perfect. Many of you will have encountered militant meat-eaters and noticed how ironically bovine they are, sunk in moral turpitude and displaying clear signs of advanced syphilis. But that doesn’t make them better than the rest of us. There should be room for all. All the time, our tastes are changing. My own diet consists mainly of sausage rolls, and I’ve come to prefer the taste of Quorn (mushroom-based) ones to the real efforts made from processed slurry. My prediction, meanwhile, is that meat-eating will bounce back to near-universality when lab-grown steaks and chops, produced without cruelty, become the norm.
In the meantime, during the course of writing this article or thesis, I have become hungry. Is that bacon I can smell? Lentils?
Mutt-less wonder
EVERY day, someone tries persuading me to get a dog. I’m one of the few people today who doesn’t own one, and fully expect it to become compulsory soon.
Stravaiging on my local suburban hill, I usually find I’m the only citizen who’s mutt-less. One woman actually asked in horror: “But where is your dog?”
There are several reasons why I don’t own a dog. First, I’ve a horror of commitment and cannot bear the idea of responsibility. Secondly, I like to spend my evenings talking loudly to myself and gesticulating wildly while inebriated, which I think most animals would find discombobulating. Thirdly, I couldn’t afford a hamster never mind a hound.
Fourthly – and this is the clincher – I cannot stomach poop. The very sight of it makes me gag. And, beyond the intrinsic horror of it, I find poop-scooping absurd.
I used to live in a flat overlooking a park in a posh suburb, and remember once looking out the window to see two Morningside ladies politely discussing the latest opera while clutching bags of excreta. Still, at least they picked it up.
The Chinese are starting a system where anyone failing to do so could have their pets confiscated. That’s harsh. But, if dogs are so intelligent, surely they could be trained to scoop their own poop. If that ever happens, I might consider getting one.
Revision? Oh man!
REVISIONIST history is something I deplore deeply, though I reserve the right to revise that view and argue the exact opposite several years hence.
We’ve been told the Vikings were actually pioneers in social work, and Attila The Hun was a strong campaigner for peace in between all the massacres. Now it’s the turn of the Neanderthals who, far from being brutish and dim, appear to have been quite cultured, wearing claes, doing cryptic crosswords and everything.
In this instance, I’m minded to agree with the revisionists, as there’s a little Neanderthal in all of us. Indeed, there’s a theory that they’re particularly prevalent in Celtic DNA.
Urgent news items this week suggested Neanderthals stood straighter than the old sapiens goons and were better endowed
– at least in the lungs. So let’s be upstanding and shout it from the rooftops: Neanderthal and proud!