There was something on the news this morning about the Government offering blue badges for disabled parking to people with invisible disabilities.
Two thoughts spring to mind; firstly, why has it taken so long to fix what is clearly a crazy inequality and secondly, ‘I wonder if that includes vegetarians?’
I’m lucky enough to have been healthy all of my life so far and no one in my immediate family or circle of friends has any physical or mental challenges either. So I have no real idea what living with disability feels like. But, having been a vegetarian for the last 25 years it feels like I get a teeny, tiny insight into what being an outsider means.
Giving up meat is a doddle. Forget the clichés about bacon sandwich withdrawl, eating nut roasts and a life full of lentils – none of them are true (and be honest, when was the last time that you actually ate a bacon sandwich?). Going veggie makes life simpler; nothing takes more than ten minutes to cook, food lasts for ages before going rotten, and when it does you might get a tummy-ache, but rarely anything worse. And well-prepped veggie food is good for you, tasty and a lot cheaper than anything that used to have a face.
But tell someone you’ve never met that you don’t eat meat and it’ll be less than a minute before they start their tales of how they don’t really eat much meat (a lie), their friend who is a veggie and asking whether you eat fish (no, I just like to stroke their hair)? No one knows what to say because deep down no one ever thinks about it – why would they?
Lately, there’s smug backlash – some bloke called Piers Morgan has a thing about how being veggie necessarily kills millions of insects. I haven’t listened long enough to see how he gets there, but I can’t see how an industry that requires mass pollination of plants and soil management by worms and bugs can kill off those insects, but Mr Morgan is a man on the telly so I’m sure he’s done all the required research.
But what all these people miss is that no one actually needs to say anything. Not eating meat is like not wearing socks or having blue as your favourite colour. By far and away the hardest part of being a vegetarian are all the flipping conversations you have to have explaining it.
The awkwardness is stifling and the one other time you see such awkwardness is when people meet someone who is disabled. The same awkward questions, same attempts to demonstrate understanding and sympathy, same clumsy and unintentional insults while trying to be inclusive.
Ok, I’m being facile here and the last thing I want to do is insult anyone living with any kind of disability with my pathetic comparison. But it feels crazy that making such a simple decision as no longer eating meat is enough to exclude you from the rest of society in a teeny, tiny version of what it must be like to really face challenges.
For me, it was all about health, not the moral thing…at first anyway. When Mad Cow disease hit and our media was full of stories detailing the buckets of chemicals being fed to our animals to make them grow fatter, faster, I decided I’d rather not be eating them too. Giving up meat was simple – seriously.
What I wasn’t prepared for was how difficult it would be to eat out. Next time you’re in a restaurant or pub for a meal, have a look at the ratio of food-with-a-face to vegetarian dishes. If you’re lucky, in a menu of maybe thirty dishes, there will be four vegetarian and they will be the same wherever you go. Frozen (to be microwaved) mushroom stroganoff, frozen (to be microwaved) vegetable lasagne, frozen (to be microwaved) three cheese bake and frozen (to be microwaved) three bean chilli.
Indian can be better, Chinese is embarrassingly bad, Italian is worst of all. Priced the same as the meat dishes for a nasty, microwaved pot of nuked vegetables and stringy cheese. The whole experience is substandard and degrading to the point where you wonder if they should have special vegetarian access through the back. Buffets are the worst because the meat eaters supplement their fleshy feast with half a plateful of the veggie nibbles leaving even less to eat for the herbivores. Thanks chaps.
So, here’s the plea. Next time someone tells you they are a vegetarian, why not try something different. Instead of the faking interest and empathy why not either say nothing and ignore it, thank them for allowing you even more of the available meatstuff and offer them your pudding as a swapsie?
No, really, you’re too kind.
