It's Impossible to Shut off Your Inner Vegetarian

By Danny Katz

"BABY killer," he yelled at me, "Stop stabbing that innocent baby with your knife!"

Fair point he was making: I was stabbing an innocent baby with my knife but that's only because my knife was blunt, so stabbing was the only way of cutting up this baby-flesh easily.

“Simon seems to be getting louder and louder each day: maybe it's because I'm cooking more meat lately because I have teenage kids who won't eat anything that can't be petted in a petting zoo, including miniature horses.” 

But Simon (my inner-vegetarian) was angry, yelling inside my head as I cut up lamb backstraps to put in a soy-honey marinade for dinner — he always gets like this when I'm cutting any meat or using animal products. Though he's strangely silent whenever I eat white chocolate made from animal fat. Not so shouty now, are we Simon, you quinoa-munching hypocrite?

All of us meat eaters have an inner vegetarian living inside us: they're that little voice yelling somewhere down the back of our heads whenever we cook or eat meat. They usually sound like Mahatma Gandhi, look like Missy Higgins, and have little bits of chervil stuck to their teeth.

Most of the time we can ignore their shouting and just eat our meat without shame, but every now and then their feeble, anaemic voices get through. They're the ones who make you feel guilty when you order a seven-meats pizza over the phone, forcing you to change it at the last moment to three meats, half garden-veg.

They're the ones who made you buy that can of nutmeat that's been sitting in your cupboard for a decade, and also that packet of fakon — a delicious smoky bacon-substitute that even rabbis love to nosh. They're the ones who whisper in your ear when you're slicing a rare steak, going, "I love steak too, but I prefer mine FURRY on the outside and BREATHING in the middle."

Try as you might, it's impossible to shut off your inner vegetarian. I've only ever seen it happen once when that guy on MasterChef series one cooked a pig's face and burnt off its bristles with a blowtorch. You could actually hear his inner vegetarian howl in despair, then hang himself from a rope made out of nori strips and celeriac.

Simon seems to be getting louder and louder each day: maybe it's because I'm cooking more meat lately because I have teenage kids who won't eat anything that can't be petted in a petting zoo, including miniature horses. So Simon's been making me watch news footage of Indonesian abattoirs during dinner. I tell you, it really puts you off your beef rendang.

Making me listen to his long anti-meat dissertations every night while I'm cooking dinner: "That animal on your cutting board was once a living being like you, Danny, with a soul and feelings like you, with
legs and snout like you. And fur — let's not forget your fur."

I try to argue back, reminding him of that Sam Neill TV ad where Sam tells us that meat eating allowed us humans to evolve better, then he walks off holding hands with a cute little orang-utan that he's about to eat.

But Simon's not buying it. He reckons I should at least make an effort, so maybe I will. I'll start acknowledging the animal I'm eating instead of using dumb-arse MasterCheffy denial-words like "protein". I'll try thanking the animal for giving its life to me; say a silent blessing to a backstrap, give a grateful cuddle to a chicken fillet. And I'll try cooking more vegetarian meals now and then, starting tomorrow night. I'm going to attempt a bean-based taco: no animals will be harmed except those who have to share a room with anyone who ate it.

Source : The Sydney Morning Herald