I was vegetarian for a few years. Then I revolted for a while, gorging myself on sausages and black pudding. Finally I settled down into what I call a practitarian – when it’s practical, I’ll make and eat vegetarian food, because it makes me feel better, keeps the gut microbiome in good shape and results in slightly less of the planet getting incinerated for my benefit. And when it isn’t practical, I’ll just eat whatever is put in front of me: fish, cow, horse, dog, fucking whatever. This is an especially useful when you’re a dinner party guest, because nobody wants to be the vegan who comes to dinner.
Being vegetarian comes with a few features. Firstly, it introduces you to a wide range of idiots, the main one being the spluttering, red-faced man (yes, it’s almost always a man) who sees vegetarianism as a personal slight. “That’s not natural!” he’ll bellow, whilst wearing clothes made from plastic, driving a car, living in a house, using glasses to see, flying on planes, and working with a job as far removed from nature as you can possibly get. And then he’ll go on at great length about human teeth.
Secondly, being vegetarian exposes you to the ultra-processed plant-based food in the shops which, with few exceptions, is vile. I’m talking about the stuff that ends up in the bargain bin: your pea protein slab, your nuggets of unclear origin, your “beyond meat”. I sometimes test these and I’m always stunned by their terribleness. No flavour. No spice. And, knowing this, the manufacturer often covers the item in a nasty sweet coating, trying (and failing) to hide the wet cardboard texture.
There are two reasons for things being this way. One: there’s a belief that what puts vegetarians off meat is its taste (a suggestion given to me by Sewing Goddess). And meat, by popular understanding, tastes good. Therefore, what vegetarians don’t like is taste, meaning that ultra-processed vegetarian foods can’t contain any of it. This leads to the proliferation of tasteless, textureless crap in our shop freezers. It’s possible that this is a Swedish thing, I’m unsure. Linda Mc Cartney’s vegetarian sausages, for example, I found to be quite good. But any factory-made vegetarian food aimed solely at the Swedish market is, for some reason, almost guaranteed to be shit.
And two: profit. It’s in the interests of those who make ultra-processed food that we keep on buying it. And when someone in a family turns vegetarian, the panicked parents, instead of, you know, just making some lentils and vegetables, will buy whatever crap is marketed to them as being vegetarian so that their child can still enjoy “normal” food, meaning meat (or meat substitute) and some sad vegetables. And so the industrial food producers keep on turning out those bland meat substitutes in the hopes that people won’t discover that vegetarian food is just about making it yourself, from scratch, in a way that does not provide profit for them. Because on no account can people find that out.
This, incidentally, is why so many people could never consider switching to vegetarian food, since they assume it consists of removing the meat from “normal” food and just serving the rest, with a gaping hole on the plate, instead of actually learning how to cook in a different and more interesting way. Because for me, vegetarian food is about making as much of it as possible, from scratch, myself. And there are so many excellent cuisines to draw from. A tasteless slab from a factory doesn’t really cut it.
And whatever you do, do NOT order the vegetarian meal on an aeroplane, because then you’ll get the weirdo meal, that single attempt at covering all those who don’t eat “normal” food: the veggies, but also the nut people, the gluten people, the religious people, and all those allergic to flavour.
Maybe there’s some deeper reason I’m missing here. And if you know it, do tell. Because I can’t see why food conglomerates would keep on pumping out factory-made, tasteless slop that’s guaranteed to go straight to the bargain bin and not make them a huge, stinking profit.
Because that would be the most unnatural thing of all.
/ Paddy
Paddy K 