Here’s a thing that had never occurred to me until I was talking about it with Elise (she of the amazing lasagne) on Friday night: I have never really thought about the fact that I am a vegetarian. Well, of course I’ve thought about it, but I’ve never thought about it – not in the way that one thinks about one’s religious beliefs or political views. I just am. I am a vegetarian because I have always been a vegetarian; I have never eaten meat. My mother turned veggie when she was eighteen, so my sister and I were both brought up vegetarian. I don’t know anything about meat, I don’t know how to cook it or even really what the various different types look like.
Once, in a French lesson at school when I was about twelve, as part of learning different kinds of vocabulary we were given a list of French names of different kinds of food and a pile of little pictures to match them up to. You know the sort of thing, you find the little picture of an ice cream and pritt-stick it next to ‘une glace’ on the worksheet. I couldn’t finish it. I could translate ‘jambon’ as ‘ham’ and ‘boeuf’ as ‘beef’ just fine, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out which of the drawings was supposed to represent ham and which beef (and which steak, and which pork, and which chicken). In the end, I wrote the English words down on the worksheet next to the French ones and left all my little squares of paper in a pile, which confused my teacher no end. (Being French and something of a foodie herself, she had a terribly hard time comprehending my explanation when I gave it to her!)
My mother always offered me a choice, I was never forced not to eat meat. It’s never appealed to me, though, and truth be told I find the whole idea rather disgusting. I don’t mind that other people do it, of course, but the whole idea of eating a corpse turns my stomach whichever way you put it. The tiny handful of ‘accidents’ I’ve had (when I was about fourteen my nan once got confused about which plate of mini quiches was which and I had a mouthful before we noticed her mistake, and a couple of years ago a shop once gave me a meat pasty when I’d ordered a veggie one and I took a huge bite out of it before realising) have all left me feeling extremely queasy, and I can’t say the taste appealed in the slightest.
It didn’t occur to me until I noticed that Elise sounded slightly surprised that it was something I ought to have thought about at all, to be honest. I find the notion of actual me consuming actual meat with my actual mouth completely unthinkable, in the same way that while I do indeed possess the physical capability to go and get on a bus stark naked while singing ABBA songs at the top of my voice, the real, genuine act of doing so isn’t very high up on my To-Do list.
