Testify

I stopped eating meat for the first time in the autumn of 2002, having been to an academic talk about the sexual politics of meat. The year had been tough for me, for a number of reasons that I don’t need to go into here. I don’t know what was particularly effective about the presentation, but at that point in my life, everything seemed to be up in the air, while at the same time, I was still young enough to think there was some safety net below me. and at the next dinner with friends, I said that I was thinking about giving vegetarianism a try and one of the first year students started laughing — You? There’s no way you can be a vegetarian.

That was true, basically. Vegetarianism didn’t match my character in any way. I was a loud, fat, white, American male college student who loved Jesus. I had every right to eat meat, all day every day. Still, my vanity at the moment, my own bloody mindedness, somehow caused me to dig in, to want to show Shirley that, no, I could actually do it. I went some six months without meat that time until the next year when I graduated from college and everything went weak in the knees for a few months and I never seemed to find my footing again.

As a child, I was terrified of the apocalypse — that Jesus would come immediately and I, at 12, would either be left behind in the tribulation to fend for myself because my family, the really spiritual ones, were taken away. Or worse, that I would be taken too, and somehow miss out on the rest of life. I was fervently religious, evangelical, ready to argue about pro-life issues at the drop of a hat, with imaginary people whom I had never met, the liberals, the gays, the atheists, the vegans.

This is relevant only because I really believed it, and I remember really believing it. I remember thinking the world was a particular way that it turned out not to be and I remember the feeling that you have when you have to rethink not just one thing in your life, but everything. I’m not sure where and when I really realised it, but I remember when it started: sitting across the table from a seventy-five year old Japanese man to whom I was supposed to be teaching the gospel at a small church in Fukuoka, in Japan, in 2003. Where I finally thought to myself, what if everything I know about the world is wrong.

I came back to vegetarianism when I returned to the UK in 2014, when I was sat round a table with a bunch of colleagues I was trying to impress and it turned out half of them were vegetarians. I told my story from college and went a month without meat until having two sausages in February and realising that I didn’t need it anymore.

And then sometime in 2018, that summer, I started to cut out milk and butter and was at a party where someone asked if I was going vegan and I said I was trying. They said something about how it was impossible to be vegan because you had to bring your own food everywhere and about not being able to give up butter and cheese — this cake we’re eating has milk in it — and I went on to say the sort of thing I’ve been careful not so say in polite company now, Yeah, but if some cow was in front of us and we could see it being inseminated and giving birth and the baby being taken from it to be slaughtered, we’d probably be less like to want to have its milk, wouldn’t we. This cake wouldn’t taste so good.

That same summer my brother and I went to Paris and walked some 50 or 60 kilometres in three days and found vegan food everywhere and then I lived in an apartment by myself in Sweden for a month and cooked plants only and wrote and wrote and it was over then, I had converted. I didn’t, it turns out, miss cheese at all.

Now, my own daughter is 12. I don’t know what to say to her about anything, because I remember being 12 and being terrified of my parents, of doing the wrong thing, of making them unhappy. She’s a vegetarian, and I’m proud, of course, but I worry as you do as a parent, about your influence on your kids, about the things you say, what they’ll remember when they’re older. I don’t eat meat, I’ll say, you do what you want — it’s of course never that simple. I want it to be, but it’s not. The other girls still want chicken nuggets and I buy them and feel guilty. I want you to not want this. But not because I want you to not want it. I just want you to not want it. When you say it, it’s madness, isn’t it. I want you to want this for yourself.