Restaurants make a virtue of going vegetarian
Don’t be fooled by the sudden rise of gourmet vegetarian diners. The force behind them is political and possibly evil.
I sit writing these words in a cafe in one of Sydney’s up-market inner-west suburbs. You know the sort of place: It has a manifesto that could have been spat out by an app, all full of buzzwords such as “sustainable” and “ethical” and “community”.
At a long communal table, mothers chat over coffees while their infants snooze in those fancy clip-in, clip-out car seats that seem clever but look in practice about as much fun as schlepping a cooing shopping basket full of tins of Campbell’s soup.
The shop makes its own pickles and ferments (though I’m not 100 per cent clear on the difference), and there’s a bottle of house-made Worcestershire sauce at my table that, to be honest, doesn’t smell much different from Lea & Perrins.
Oh, and one more thing: although they don’t make a big deal out of it, the place is completely vegetarian, so there’s no bacon on my $15 (!) cheese toastie, just pickles, which sounds weird but actually works, barely, and only if you have a taste for the sour.
“So what?” you may ask, and fair enough. It’s still a reasonably free country, and except for minor injustices such as the lack of fresh foie gras we can consume to our credit limit’s content. But there are a few more data points in this discussion.
A couple of suburbs away, some clever clogs have opened what they are calling Sydney’s first vegan — that is, even more hard-core — pub, complete with imitation beef burgers and imitation fish tacos and, presumably, a jukebox full of imitation recordings of Flame Trees and Thunderstruck.
Putting aside the complex moral reasoning that must go into convincing oneself that fake mince is a superior offering to a genuinely good vegetarian dish — it’s a bit like preferring pornography to fornication — other restaurateurs are going down this path as well. Think Yellow in Sydney, or Smith & Daughters in Melbourne.
As a dedicated omnivore, I find something unsettling about this, as if there’s some preference cascade about to pour forth, driven by a virtue-signalling fashion that imagines lettuce farmers live in harmony with Peter Cottontail and a weird postmodern inversion whereby a cheese sandwich is a higher-status object than a piece of meat.
The essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb recently wrote an article titled “The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority”. (Given Taleb grew up against the background of the Lebanese civil war, one imagines he knows a thing or two about the subject.)
In a wide-ranging piece, he suggests how — and don’t worry, this is not straying into Pauline Hanson territory — even with a small minority of observant Muslims or Jews, an entire population can wind up eating halal or kosher food: “A Kosher (or halal) eater will never eat non-kosher (or non-halal) food, but a non-kosher eater isn’t banned from eating kosher.”
Likewise, a single member of a family could refuse (in Taleb’s example) to eat genetically modified food, or (in our example) meat. As everyone goes along to get along, so long as the cost is not prohibitive, “you have the family going to a barbecue party attended by three other families. As they are known to only eat non-GMO, the guests will cook only organic. The local grocery store, realising the neighbourhood is only non-GMO, switches to non-GMO to simplify life, which impacts the local wholesaler, and the story continues and ‘renormalises’.”
The worry may be premature. But given the stated aims of vegetarian advocates to “denormalise” meat eating, efforts by UN busybodies to classify carnivores as the greatest threat to humanity since the plague, and the cooing positivity in certain quarters each time a veggo venture opens, one wonders.
Perhaps there will be an upside: Just as every cuisine of the poor from polenta to short ribs eventually finds its way up the food chain (as it were), if meat-eating becomes declasse then perhaps some time hence we can enjoy a $12 wagyu ribeye while posh couples sit down with little Annabelle and Maddisson to $80 haloumi chat-faux briands.