The Happy Garden State
The Mind, that Ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find.
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other Worlds and other Seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.
From Andrew Marvel’s poem “The Garden”
The year 1979, when Mrs Thatcher became Britain’s first woman Prime Minister, turned out to be a momentous time also for me. I moved house and job and became divorced. Feeling the need for renewal I decided to go Vegetarian. The display of gory chunks of animal anatomies on show in supermarkets, the faint aroma of blood hanging around in butchers’ shops, the occasional glimpses of the chopped-up remains of sheep and pigs in friends’ freezer compartments had finally become too distressing for me in my tender condition. Also, before I moved, I lived near an abattoir and occasionally saw reluctant sheep being dragged to their doom.
I like food and even enjoy a spot of cooking. To be frank about my conversion, I never entirely gave up meat or fish and the truth is that then and now I can eat such fare without much of a conscience about the processes of production that caused the meal to arrive on my plate. Could I personally kill an animal to eat it? Yes, if I had to, but I admit I prefer others to do that rather nasty job.
What going veg meant for me was trying out all kinds of non-meat dishes I’d never eaten before. This made me much more considerate of animal welfare. If I eat eggs now I have to know that they come from chickens given the freedom to roam around the farm. I never eat farmed fish and choose meat cut from animals reared humanely and without drugs. In fact, nowadays, I eat very little fish or meat at all.
When I delved into the literature concerning the diet and cooking of Vegans and Vegetarians I was amazed to discover so much variety. That beans were pulses and their variety legion was news to me. If I’d always enjoyed spices and sauces I was now introduced to meat-free foreign riches never dreamed of in my former incarnation. The linguistic pot-pourri was equally flavoured and sensual, words like creamy, crunchy, pungent, penetrating, piquant and even aphrodisiac abounded in cookbook recipes. Above all, I found I could survive quite well as a Veggie.
The American writer Henry Thoreau wrote about how to live the simple life in his splendid book Walden. He describes how a farmer said to him, “You cannot live on vegetable food solely for it furnishes nothing to make bones with.” Thoreau noted that the man was “walking all the time he talks behind his oxen, which with vegetable-made bones jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.” For my own part, I took particular pleasure from the lost meals of childhood, like macaroni cheese and porridge. Wholemeal bread and brown long-grain-rice suited my bodily functions admirable. Experimenting, I felt I was thriving.
Most of the food I cooked and ate tasted all right but wasn’t much to look at. Nearly all meals tended to turn out as undistinguished mush that might have been eaten with a single spoon out of an all-purpose porringer. Above all, the meals didn’t come cheap as you might expect from a kind of peasant diet. Many recipes involved buying quite
pricey ingredients, especially herbs and spices, which might be used once only and then left to go mouldy in the larder. And nearly every meal resulted in many pans and dishes lying piled up in the sink.
The big test would come, I knew, when my sons visited. At that stage, two were at university and two about to leave school and follow suit. The eldest, Martin, became intrigued, even mildly enthusiastic at my conversion; two stayed neutral; the youngest, Peter, remained definitely hostile, his favourite repast hamburger and chips. Nearly twenty-five years later, Peter, his wife and two small children are all Vegetarian and claim they always will be.
I believe I impressed him and the others at the time with a few culinary surprises. For example, they loved the savoury-filled pancakes and artichoke flan, gobbled up the wholemeal pizzas and were delighted with Portuguese eggs and lentil rissoles. The one unmitigated disaster was marrow pudding, the delicious smells inviting them into the kitchen only to discover a soggy dish with no particular taste.
My sons now live in various countries across the world and I see them and their children infrequently. In the run of time, two became Vegetarian but now only Peter has kept to the diet. When they and their families came for the big Christmas feasts, some would eat the traditional fowl others nut-roast, tolerance shown all round. I admire Peter for sticking to what he believes is right but I couldn’t follow his example. What he and his family eat is reasonably balanced in terms of protein and healthy food. God knows, we’ve seen some pretty ghastly examples of malpractice in the rearing and butchering of animals in recent years, public health suffering as a result. For myself, occasionally I like eating fish and some varieties of meat.
Until and unless animals do what they did in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and parade with their own slogans and policies, I cannot bring myself to believe that they have any rights. To ill-treat dumb creatures will always leave a stain on the human character and it is right that we should enact laws to protect them. To rear and then slaughter animals for human consumption is not a crime, however. Moreover, of all the world’s major religions hardly any prohibit it. It is hard to conceive of a society where animal husbandry does not exist If it did disappear how many farm animals and species could continue to go on living among us?
The real issues reside in the area of consciousness, or philosophy, even. In one sense, the vegetarians are on the side of the angels, refusing to kill or cause suffering in order to eat. On the other hand, Mr Hitler was a vegetarian, not that that proves much. The point being made here is that what you think, or don’t think, can affect what you eat. The majority of people nowadays buy their food from supermarkets. Possibly many of them perambulate with large trolleys along the aisles of the stores piling up the goods indiscriminately. Everything neatly packaged, everything has a similarity, some wrapped pieces of chicken not looking all that different from a micro-wave oven to cook them in. The methods of production take place well out of sight of customers.
For quite a lot of children, the concept of living creatures involved in the process is actually difficult for them to grasp but a good few people, many of them young, have become outraged at the way we treat animals. As a result, life styles have changed and political action has followed.
A few years ago, political rallies were organised at the Port of Dover, where I live, as a form of protest against the transporting of livestock from England to the Continent in cattle trucks, resulting in much suffering on the part of the poor beasts. In between bouts of slogan shouting and banner waving, I succeeded in speaking to one or two of the protesters.
Generally, I found them civilised and highly articulate. One young anarchist tried to persuade me that shipping sheep abroad was related to capitalist exploitation, the police and the judges involved in the plot. I soon shook him off and listened to other, more reasoned arguments concerning animal welfare. With this I readily sympathised but when a young woman informed me that the treatment of animals was equivalent to the Holocaust I parted company.
If we argue that what we eat is very much a matter of chacun a son gout this it is not to deny that there will always be social, economic, political and moral questions involved in that choice. The culture of our particular environment, especially the culture of the early years of our upbringing, very much determines our daily diet. In former times, it was all much simpler. For example, the shops now offer us “organic” food. In my childhood, a good few years back, I confess, all food was grown organically. The industrialisation of farming began long ago but has accelerated phenomenally in the last fifty years with chemical fertilisation, not to speak of current methods like genetically modified crops. It behoves all of us to think about what we eat, but not think too much, possibly.
I quoted a few lines from Andrew Marvell’s poem “The Garden” at the top of the page. It comes from wonderfully rich versifying, the whole poem celebrating a kind of paradisical world of fruitful and vegetable plenitude. In such a garden we live happily forever, that idea also strong in much medieval religious literature. For myself, I’ve always had difficulty in envisaging a heavenly state. I mean, what do you do all day if, like me, you’re not much of a gardener? I note particularly that the poet speaks of “annihilating all that’s made to a green thought in a green shade.”
I can’t help wondering if that is what we do when we seek perfection – ie destroy everything except the one perfect ideal condition. The trouble is that if you do that you might not only sweep away injustice but also that very variety and freedom of choice that is somehow linked to our very imperfect human condition.
It is partly because I know a little of my own imperfections that I shall continue to eat food derived from living animals. I share the concern for animal welfare of those who choose not to eat any meat or fish at all but I somehow obstinately feel that I continue to live in the real world and that they don’t.
