I became properly vegetarian in the early 1980s, after an earlier attempt which aborted largely because my dad, bless him, persuaded me of the ‘unnaturalness’ of not eating meat. I remember I had a cold at the time and my dad sat at my bedside and, with patient and loving gentleness, explained that my cold was clearly due to my new (only days old) diet.
Much later in his life – with all three of his children grown up and confirmed vegetarians – he too ate less meat, especially with all the modern emphasis on ‘five portions of fruit and veg a day’ and concerns about obesity, heart disease and so on. He never gave up meat – liked it too much – but did come to see the ‘spin’ involved in the ‘because it’s natural’ argument.
Back in the eighties, it was still rare and odd to be a vegetarian – and hard to eat out (‘Oh, it’s not meat. It’s just ham/fish’). Now, of course, it is becoming normal – at least in certain zones. And Quorn has been invented as a tasty ‘meat substitute’, and it is getting tastier and more inventive as time goes by. What sometimes makes me uneasy, though, is the way our dogs and our cat – when he was alive – love it, as if ‘the real thing’. I refused to eat Quorn for ages on the grounds that I didn’t want a ‘meat substitute’, which simply feeds into the ‘idea’ of meat. There is, after all, so much to eat anyway. But nowadays, Quorn is part of our diets, though our diets are not Quorn-centric by any means. As I say, there is so much else to eat. And right now, we are feasting on veg and fruit that Gorwel is growing in our garden. He keeps a Welsh language garden blog here: http://llysiau.wordpress.com/
You will see there photographs too of some of the food that he and the garden are growing. For instance, you can see some of our beans above. Such simple and delicious pleasures.
