This article first appeared in the London Standard Magazine:
By Henri Llewelyn Davies
For many years I have been vegetarian(ish), because of farming
savagery. Now I can become one of those newfangled animals – an
ethical eater.
Basically it’s still a lot about creature-cruelty:
their filthy diseased living conditions; and the way they’re
often killed – throats slit while still conscious. (They’re
supposed to be stunned first, but it often doesn’t work.) Plus,
we now have the overfishing of cod (and many other fish) which
upsets the eco-system and wrecks all our lives ultimately.
I love
animals (especially my cat) but there are also the third world
people, starving and ripped off, while we chomp on.
I’m chucking out all our tuna fish tins. (Not just
recycling the cans - ditching the beastly lot). Nets the
size of football pitches entrap tuna, accidentally catching, killing
and gruesomely maiming dolphins, turtles and seabirds.
Susie, my cat, glares yearningly as the tins get hurled out. She
loves this junk food, but it’s bad for her. And anyway,
should she eat ethically?
My meals today include baked beans, ready-made frozen veggie curry
(brand-named ‘Respect’) and chocolate. (Too
fraught thinking about ethics to cook properly.)
With my charming friend Roger, in a restaurant. I eat yummy
fried potato skins, guacamole, salsa; refusing sour cream. (Regretfully. I’m
naturally a – genetically programmed, I’ll swear – milk-etc
addict. But there are cows crying for their one-day-old murdered
calves, just because I want to be a dairy junkie.)
Roger delightedly munches a rib-eye steak. So tender, he
whoops, so cheap.
Would you like to come with me on a nice day trip to the abattoir?’ I
snarl.
Of course, he declines. As always. Honestly, he’s
a very nice person in many ways – and he’s not really
two sheep short in the top pasture. (It’s just we all
learn different things at different times).
At the supermarket, I hungrily survey the almost-past-sell-by-date
bargains: for a start, there’s an aromatic crispy duck. (With
pancakes.) I used to salivate at the thought of the sauce
and spring onions. Now I shudder. Most UK supermarket
and restaurant ducks come from farms – i.e. sheds - where
the little quackers have nowhere to swim, fly, sometimes even walk. A
little known scandal. I settle for a chicken labelled ‘free
range’ AND ‘organic’. WAS this chicken’s
life GENUINELY happy (?) I fret. Anyway, I prevaricate,
trying to justify myself, my cat’s getting most of it (cats
just CAN’T safely go veggie-ethical). Forget the personal
trainer; I need a personal butcher/poulterer/farmer – whose
animals’ welfare I can intimately observe.
Supper at Roger’s place. I go armed with a nice butter
bean cassserole (never trust Roger’s food). He’s
been fantastically ethical about tonight’s pork chops, he
says. He proffers a nasty-looking, slightly bloodstained
paper bag, with the words ‘free-range meat’ scrawled
on it (in his writing, ill-disguised).
Although Roger can be a brute
to the over 90% of UK pigs who live and give birth in horrible
cramped concrete/metal bunkers, he’s
always been really New Man-ish in his passion for lengthy, fiddly
bouts of cooking (tonight he’s made finickety lemon meringue
pie). With eggs marked ‘barn-fresh’ and ‘fresh
from the balmy countryside’, he beams. I point out
such euphemisms on the boxes always mean ill-treated battery hens. Only ‘free
range’ PLUS the soil association symbol mean truly well-looked-after,
liberated birds.
Disastrous day.
Dinner party. I always tell friends I’m vegetarian, but I’m
one of those craven people-pleasers who can’t tell a relatively
strange hostess the truth about her starter - pate de foie gras. I
say I’m on a diet (the opposite of geese and ducks force-fed
massive amounts through metal pipes till their stomachs and oesophaguses
often burst and they can’t stand up with their massive livers
full of THAT pate). Roast pork next. (The crackling’s
perfect, the other guests say.)
Susie has been left with a reliable
catsitter all day (don’t
want my beloved to be lonely for 14 hours). Tragedy. She’s
gone and stuck a paw into the family fish-tank, hurling a goldfish
onto the carpet. Too late for rescue (the saddest words in
the English language). I am very upset – but, I must
admit, more mortified about the brave-faced polite catsitter than
about the dead pet she’d affectionately fed for 4 years.
In penance for yesterday’s fiasco, I read www.fishinghurts.com.
They tell me fish CERTAINLY feel pain (what’s ‘coldblooded’ anyway?)
and fish farms/other fishing methods sound gross. Don’t
eat ANY fish, they say.
Luckily, Roger hates fish. He’s
a Piscean and I’ve
noticed that, curiously, many of them think it’s cannibalism. Pisces
also rules the feet, so I phone to tell him shocking facts about
battery chickens :crammed into small cages, making movement difficult
or impossible, their feet sometimes grow around the wire cage floor. Then
they can’t reach the food trough, and starve.
Roger
just says he’s busy. Hard-pressed, he declares,
even to find time to eat a bacon butty.
As I throw out the thimble-sized chunk of salmon from my delicious
supermarket sushi (can’t be organic. Etc. Despair) I see
Susie’s absorbedly chomping a spider she’s just caught.
I’m eating lots of chocolate today. Food experts recently
said it’s healthy in various ways, so I’m being ethical
to myself (very Buddhist-ish – I think every sentient, suffering
being is as important as all the others. Me too. And
Susie.)
Eating ethically isn’t as easy as cracking eggs. All
those hideous tales of suffering creatures, from people like the
anti-cruelty charity VIVA (phone 01273 777688): I don’t cry
often, honest, but now end up practically in a pool of tears. While
Susie looks at me (as only cats can) with that slightly outraged
quizzical gaze that seems to enquire ‘Have you finally flipped?’
« Back to previous page
|
