Lord Stern of Brentford has declared that, “Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is much better.”
The bone-head in me silently said “Bah! Who cares?” We’ve known for a long time that a fully vegetarian world would be be more sustainable and better able to feed its growing billions. But it would be so mind numbingly boring and dull– besides just imagine the chronic farting of billions of vegetarians?
Upon further in depth chats with various meat-swervers and the like – and I must say without any preachy self-denial on my part or a Stalinist rant on their part – I have decided that the future is going to be the middle path, with a bias on being semi-vegetarian. From now on, I shall only host vegetarian dinner parties – with one important rider. My plates of vegetables, a.k.a. sorry weeds, will be utterly adorable in conception, visual effect and mouth action.
I am going to do this not because of some half-baked ideology of food that is in vogue at the moment – mostly from born-again eco-amatuer warriors who look at meat as some apocalyptic poison, plague, pillage and profit. As opposed to appetite or inventiveness, epicurean skill or celebration. Although that is going to have minimal gestural impact, I am going to do it because it is a decent thing to do. I will probably not do this forever – how terrifying not to have an occasional slap-up feast of sweet animal meat, seared, sliced and scattered with salt. Until such time – for the sake of my wallet, the planet and my health – I will just stop cooking meat for my guests.
Besides, I was not born craving a Whopper.
January 19, 2010 at 11:46 pm |
Goodness! Is the author the same person who, upon learning of any new (to him) species of animal immediately asks the question, “What does it taste like?”