My first week was quite successful, the second I ate a lot of fish, until my neighbour told me that fish a) counted as meat b) was much worse for the planet than just eating lamb as you were eating wildlife to extinction. The third week I resolved to do better and made a lot of lentil curries, tofu curries, and chickpea curries, until I was well sick of curries. Friday, I had a morning that involved talking to a lot of people I didn’t know and being nice, which is my least favourite thing to do and fills me with minor social anxiety. To reward myself, my colleagues and I went to my favourite Taiwanese restaurant where I have been going for years. I have only ever ordered one thing from there, stewed pork noodle soup. I arrived and ordered. "Lots of fat and all the gross bits foreigners usually don’t like," I told the lady behind the counter.
My meal arrived first, I slurped at noodles and stabbed at the vegetables then suddenly remembered that I wasn’t supposed to be doing any of this. "Oh no!", I cried, horrified. "I am a vegetarian!"
"It doesn’t look like it," teammate #1 said.
"Just eat it, you have already ordered it now, it was a mistake," T2 said kindly. I ate it. Equal parts ravenous and guilt ridden.
I walked back to the office sadly. "You are going to write this, and everyone will think you just ate bacon sandwiches the whole time," T1 said gleefully. "Just lie," said T2. "Say you didn’t."
"I can’t,” I wailed. There is one thing worse than eating meat and that is lying about eating meat.
I stupidly confided in my husband the next morning. "It was a mistake!" I said meekly.
"A mistake? ‘Ohhh, I fell over and ate a hamburger!’," he chortled. "Did you confuse it for a carrot?" I stared at him hatefully, got a packet of chips from the cupboard and ate them in front of him.
I told my vegetarian friend when she came for dinner on Sunday. "It’s food waste! If you left it, it would have been food waste! That is worse," she said to make me feel better. It did make me feel better. Maybe a little too much better because when I discovered leftover takeaway chicken on Monday night, I whispered to myself, "It will just have to be thrown away," as I heated it up in the microwave.
"Hey! Where is that chicken?" my husband yelled the following day. I slunk out of the hallway and sank into the couch as the joyful whoops came from the kitchen. "Ha! You ate it!" he yelled and dissolved into laughter. He came into the living room holding a salami. "This one is made of meat ... just in case you get confused," he said between gasps. "Why can’t you just admit you will never do it?" he said. "You like it too much. It’s not for people like us."
But it has to be for people like us. It has to be for everyone. I loved smoking even more than I loved eating meat, but I had to stop that altogether. At least with meat I just need to stop eating it as a normal part of every meal I have, and instead of getting workable lungs we get a whole workable planet. We need to get used to eating meat as a luxury item, which we should be paying farmers for more generously. So, after the lamb shank celebration dinner, I am planning a mostly vegan and definitely vegetarian weekday from now on, albeit one where I occasionally fall over and accidentally eat a hamburger.
