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I was vegetarian for about 12 years, from the age of 18 when I fell for a vegetarian girl during an archaeological dig at the start of my year off (gap year to you youngsters). Weirdly I only became a veggie after the dig was over and our kissing was done, but I suppose it was still partly to impress her. I had been a very fussy eater as a child and scared to try new things - I even rejected tea and coffee as too exotic and grown-up, feeling that if I gave up drinking coke and squash I was somehow rebelling against my youth and joining in with the fake mature adult world - so although I was denying myself something (and a major part of the food I ate), I was actually opening up a new world of experience. I now had to eat vegetables (carrots and peas had been about the extent of my interest) and pulses and tofu burgers. And because in the 1980s it was very difficult to find anything vaguely veggie to eat (especially when I was interrailing around Europe), I had to learn to cook.
I think when I was travelling round Europe I mainly ate mashed potato with cheese in it, cooked on a little calor gas stove, but at home, with the help of my patient mother who indulged this seeming fad, and a couple of veggie recipe books I got quite good at making vegetable chills with bulgar wheat in them, aduki bean pies, chick pea casseroles and a very spicy black-eyed bean feast. By the time I was at University and all the other clueless idiots were paying up to 50p a day to eat in halls, I was in the little kitchen at the end of my corridor making myself meals that cost next to nothing and would last for days. It meant I missed out on socialising, partly because I wasn't eating with the others and partly because of the flatulence problems of such a diet (and even when I could hold the farts in my breath would smell of garlic), but in the space of a year I went from someone who would only eat bacon sandwiches and Kentucky Fried Chicken to someone who would eat anything that didn't have a face. And would experiment with cumin seeds and paprika. I had no friends, but I had a relatively healthy diet (if you ignored all the fizzy pop and sweets) and I saved some money.
I stuck with vegetarianism for longer than my friends and family assumed I would, but in the end I felt that I didn't believe in the arguments enough to put everyone to the inconvenience, that I was doing it partly to look interesting and that I missed eating meat. I still have respect for the idea and I certainly want to see animals treated as well as possible, but as with most complex issues there are a lot of factors at play. If people didn't eat meat then it's not like farmers would still breed and feed the animals, they simply wouldn't exist. Is it better to have lived and been eaten in the end or not lived at all? It depends a bit on what kind of conditions that animals live in of course. Ultimately I suppose my vegetarianism began, at least partially, from self-interest (wanting to impress a girl, wanting to look interesting and show that I cared) and it ended because of self-interest (I wanted to eat bacon). That's not entirely fair on either the teenage or 30-something me. I am still glad I did it. it enriched my life.
Now, as I try to live a more healthy lifestyle and keep fit I find I am returning to these old recipes. Regardless of the argument about whether it's cruel to eat animals, I think we're all going to have to accept that meat will soon no longer be a daily staple. For the sake of our healths and the future of the planet we're going to have to cut down on meat intake or slowly slaughter our own species. A couple of weeks ago we bought some packs of dry beans (which I haven't done for ages, preferring the convenience of canned ready-to-heat beans) and I've been doing some of the old recipes. Last week, from memory, I did the old school bulgar-wheat veggie chilli (we got three meals out of it) and last night I soaked some aduki means to see if I could recreate the old lambs shepherd's pie I used to make.
As I was preparing my ingredients it struck me that I still had the vegetarian cooking book that I had bought (or more likely my mum had bought) in the 1980s and realised I could check the recipe. It's “Vegetarian Kitchen†by Sarah Brown if you want to follow the recipes.
The book has not been opened for a couple of decades, but it was well used. The pages were a bit stuck together with the splashes of meals long past. It was probable that in my quest to be healthy I would be killed by some airborne poison created from an ancient meal. Back when most men my age were sticking the pages of magazines together in a much less wholesome fashion, I was doing the same to a vegetarian cook book (and also the porn mags if I am honest).
I found the recipe (I'd forgotten that it was called Red Dragon Pie) and although I had added a few more veg to it and had substituted Worcester sauce for the soy it recommended, I had remembered quite well. I'd forgotten that you could use the water that the beans were boiled in as a stock.
It felt great to be cooking something slightly complicated again and to have taken the time to make it all properly. And the pie wasn't too bad and now I am married so my wife has to put up with the garlic breath and the Dutch ovens.
But I liked the domesticity, of providing sustenance for my wife (and thus also for my baby). I am enjoying being a semi-vegetarian again (otherwise known as a terrible and failed vegetarian). Maybe I will just become a house husband. Fatherhood won't change me right? Storage jars and Red Dragon pie? This blog is soon just going to be all recipes and baby-raising tips. But maybe that's for the best. What has become of me?
The audio version of RHLSTP with Milton Jones is now up.
