Veggos versus meat lovers: there’s still no beating a roast
In our house there are almost as many vegetarians as carnivores. But the guilt flows all one way.
You know how this goes. While the vegetarians are away, well, the carnivores will play.
In our family of five we have two veggos and three meat lovers. That means 40 per cent of our household doesn’t eat meat – way above the national average of 5.3 per cent of Australians aged over 15 who identify as vegetarian (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2023).
Last weekend, however, the veggos were interstate. Leaving the house full to the gills with rabid, free-range, salivating meat munchers.
A blended-diet family is not always smooth sailing.
Our vegetarians not only keep a close eye on what they consume, but they also seem to want to adjudicate what we carnivores ingest. Many a time in the supermarket a selection of chicken thighs or eye fillets is met with nose-scrunching distaste from the veggos, returned and replaced with an organic version.
In other words – if you have to be so disgusting as to eat meat, then at least do it in a responsible way, oh ye of foul taste and habits.
It goes further. Our vegetarians never stop shaming we carnivores with animal cruelty stories while we’re eating said bits of animals.
Lately, our weekly meat rations have mysteriously found themselves banished to the battered, chug-along old refrigerator in the garage, lest they sully any of the plant-based purity inside the house.
It’s a sort of beef-and-chook apartheid.
Never do we complain about the difficulty of finding anything in the ice box other than giant heads of cauliflower, impassable hedges of kale, whole thickets of celery and the not uncommon shower of cherry tomatoes that always manage to tumble from their containers, out of the fridge and on to an innocent meat lover’s caveperson-like feet.
We present stiff upper lips. We bite our tongues. (And may eat the tongues of others, so disgusting are we.)
Then came the guilt-free weekend window. The open pasture, so to speak, where we could indulge our brutal carnivorous desires without judgment. Our stomachs collectively groaned in anticipation as we waved the veggos off at the airport.
By unanimous vote, and for the first time that any of us could remember, we bought a monstrous 1.7kg leg of lamb for dinner that night. We carried it home with reverence (not the least because it cost the gross domestic product of a small nation). We lovingly slathered it in olive oil, prickled it liberally with rosemary sprigs and salt flakes, and delicately lowered it into the barbecue, that criminally underused altar to our heathen pleasures.
For an hour the three of us simply sat together on the deck and stared at the Weber in a weird collective bliss. We were struck with the sort of narcosis scuba divers experience when they go too far down, also known as “raptures of the deep” or the “Martini effect”.
We swooned at the sound of sizzling fat and our eyes simultaneously fluttered as the aroma of cooking lamb washed over us. Oh, the joy in the near-silence of the lambs.
We experienced all this largely free of shame. Largely. Because the shadow of the vegetarian looms large.
Interestingly, the word “vegetarian” first entered the public domain via an English actor, writer and social reformer called Frances “Fanny” Kemble. She was famous for her stage work in the 1820s and ’30s before marrying and moving to the United States.
There, she lived on a plantation in Georgia and began keeping a diary, which was later published.
The journal is today best remembered for this single line: “The sight and smell of raw meat are especially odious to me, and I have often thought that if I had had to be my own cook, I should inevitably become a vegetarian, probably, indeed, return entirely to my green and salad days.”
Fanny, apart from being partial to greens, salads, dutiful servants and a rash of unnecessary commas in her prose, wasn’t herself a strict vegetarian. She once described pork and bacon as a “welcome addition” to a particular diet.
Still, she set sail a word that, a century and a half later, would go on to describe a way of life and indeed a global movement. So three cheers to Fanny. Perhaps she was some sort of 19th-century Gwyneth Paltrow precursor. The Goop of Georgia.
None of this mattered, of course, with the lamb leg cooked to perfection. We let it sit for several minutes, then carved it in thick slices and served it with good old-fashioned baked potatoes and green peas. On a Sunday afternoon.
We drooled. We gobbled the chunks of meat. Sometimes we let loose and used our fingers. We got meat fat on our beards (and my youngest son is only 12).
We thought of that world-class bellowing carnivore, chef Gordon Ramsay, who once allegedly said he’d never forgive his daughter if she married a vegetarian. (Ramsay has since turned down the volume and blessed vegetables and vegetarians.)
As we threw the discarded lamb leg bone into the fireplace (metaphorically), wiped our mouths of lamb grease and unashamedly belched in unison, I did wonder if my carnivorous ways were a little old-hat and that I was not giving my children the right message. That I had not informed them fully of the ramifications of a meaty diet.
My lamb had barely been digested when, in my paranoia that I was setting up some of my kids with a diet that might doom them for life, I searched the internet and stumbled across a new study published just this month in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology.
Its official title was a mouthful, just like the lamb: Diet and nutrition in cardiovascular disease prevention: a scientific statement of the European Association of Preventative Cardiology and the Association of Cardiovascular Nursing & Allied Professions of the European Society of Cardiology.
Its conclusion was unequivocal. “Plant-based dietary patterns rich in minimally processed foods, vegetables and fruits reduce CVD (cardiovascular disease) risk, while patterns rich in ultra-processed foods, meats, salt, sugar and saturated fat increase risk.”
It added: “Vegetarian diets reduce CVD risk.”
Then another salvo boomed across the deck.
A new study out of the US – Ultraprocessed Food Consumption and Risk of Early-Onset Colorectal Cancer Precursors Among Women – revealed the alarming increase in colorectal cancers among both women and men under aged 50, with some sufferers in just their 20s and 30s.
This rash of a disease usually reserved for older people had alarmed doctors.
Dr Andrew T. Chan, a gastroenterologist with the Mass General Brigham medical centres in Boston, suspected this shocking revelation may be linked to ultraprocessed foods, which included processed meats, soft drinks, chips, lollies and any number of goodies that many of us unthinkingly consume.
While the jury is still out on the precise cause of this alarming statistic, Dr Chan told The New York Times that consuming ultraprocessed foods could “increase the chances of developing obesity and type 2 diabetes, which are both associated with early-onset colorectal cancer”.
He added that “diets high in ultraprocessed foods may also disrupt the balance of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ microbes in the gut and damage the protective lining of the intestines”, which, in turn, might encourage abnormal cell growth.
We carnivores are rational beings. We’re realists. We come from a direct line of hunter-gatherers who, when they saw a four-legged shadow pass across the mouth of the cave, leapt to their feet and chased down dinner.
The two missing veggos, I knew, liked plant-based burger patties or “fake meat” whenever we did fire up the barbecue. So I did some research. I brought an open mind to the task.
Lamb contains lamb. But the fake version can be made from pea protein, dried yeast, potato starch, beet juice extract and something called “soy leghemoglobin”, which is genetically engineered and in some instances is responsible for the meaty flavour and appearance of the fake stuff.
Many of these plant derivatives – commanding their own ever-growing section in the supermarket, a smug corner of refrigerated virtue – are still technically categorised as “processed” food.
The veggos returned home. We went back to our tenuous we-agree-to-disagree position.
I will occasionally think of the great British writer Samuel Johnson: “A country will seldom be well-governed where a man cannot roast a joint of meat.”
The veggos will think of Leonardo da Vinci: “My body will not be a tomb for other creatures.”
And we’ll all glance at the Weber on the back deck for different reasons.
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