Meat

I was thinking about becoming a vegetarian for a long time before I finally did when I got back to Australia. A lot of my family and friends are, and I felt so guilty about eating meat that it seemed inevitable. But there are a lot of convenient excuses. Aside from the fact that I really like eating meat, it’s easy to tell yourself that vegetarianism will be difficult when you’re travelling. It’s not. In terms of the everyday, it’s easy to convince yourself that you’ll reduce your meat consumption, but pretty much everyone who says that they do is lying. I only noticed this after the various friends of mine who get the guilts when I say I’ve become vegetarian protest that they don’t eat a lot of meat, but then have to apologise for the fact that I can’t ever try the food they’ve ordered out or cooked in.

I don’t want to be high-horsey about it and I certainly don’t care about animals. I watched a video of a monkey forcing a frog to give it oral sex on YouTube the other day and found it really funny. Stupid monkey. I am apparently what Wikipedia calls an ‘environmental vegetarian’. But this is kind of off topic. The point is it’s really easy to be vegetarian. So much so that while I still really like meat I don’t really get it. That might sound strange, but since I’ve had to start refusing it I’ve started to think that much of the world is insane. Why does everyone eat meat all the time? Why is it in everything? Why can’t people cook a meal without it? It’s as though the whole world decided one day that food should be eaten with tree bark. Tree bark has to be in everything! It is to be the basis for all meals from now on! I arrived at this conclusion through two vegetarian cookbooks my brother Tom got me for my birthday, when I realised that vegetarian cooking is not about having the meat ‘taken out’ or substituted for something else. That might seem obvious, but if you think about it for a moment that approach is the basis for the majority of vegetarian options in non-vegetarian restaurants.

I didn’t set out for this to become such a rant and I probably should have stopped writing three-hundred words ago. The only reason I’ve been thinking about it is that I finally tried a burger from the fantastically named Lord of the Fries and it was amazing. Until recently I had no idea all of their stuff was vegetarian and much of it vegan. Although I love the idea of drunk bogans unwittingly buying veggie burgers for the taxi ride home, people should know. If I can get so drunk I can barely walk and still buy a greasy, greasy burger from a late-night burger stand I can cope with being a vegetarian.

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