The musing of a recovering Vegetarian

We were in Whitstable yesterday, visiting some friends and their no-longer-so-new baby down in Kent. As any Sarah Waters fan knows, Whitstable is famous for its oysters and the oyster parlours that line the high street and the harbour. Since I’ve read Tipping the Velvet about twenty times and was actually sitting in an oyster parlour sipping a fine local ale, it seemed a travesty not to try one. The verdict? It was pretty nice. I’m not entirely sure what all the fuss is about yet, but it did have a nice savoury flavour and wasn’t nearly as fishy or salty as I had expected.

Why am I blithering about this, you might wonder, except of course to draw to your attention that I had a nice day at the seaside yesterday? Oyster eating on my part would be totally unworthy of note, except that I’ve been calling myself a vegetarian for the past nine years. Slowly but surely, I’m having to admit that my vegetarianism is probably on the way out.

This slippery slope all started last summer. I was back in Norway for a month, living in Bergen, mindful of the fact that the previous sojourn in Norway had left me fainting from anaemia, and the fish really started to look damn attractive. I finally succumbed on a trip to an offshore island, where as the only veggie out of a group of sixty, I was also the only one prepared to cut the head off a newly caught mackerel and pull its guts out so that it could be stuck on the BBQ. My only real feeling on the matter was surprise that the gall bladder of a mackerel was quite such a bright sky blue. It had been caught by a friend of mine with a hook-on-a-line, it was for our own personal consumption (would that argument stand up in court?). I couldn’t really see much of a an ethical problem.

Since then I’ve had fish a few times, bought from the fish van that parks as the bottom of our outside stairs on Saturday mornings (frankly any fishmonger who drives all the way from Grimsby to Cambridge before 8am on Saturdays deserves as much custom as he can get), and I’m definitely coming round to chicken, which means its probably time to start abandoning the vegetarian tag. I’m certainly not going to be one of those people who says ‘I’m a vegetarian. But I do eat fish. Sometimes chicken. Bacon doesn’t really count, does it?’ I tell any lingering misgivings that we have a butchers over the road who sells high quality meat from local farms. I grew up in a farming area and have a lot of support for farmers in this country. Above all, I don’t think I can face another winter of trying to make interesting vegetarian dishes from local sources, since I know from bitter experience that there’s only so much you can do with a big pile of Cambridgeshire cabbage and swede, however ethically impeccable and organic they might be. A surprising amount of stuff that vegetarians use to make their food more interesting comes from a hell of a long way away.

Sod it. I could go on for pages like this, but my conscience dictates that I should come clean. It’s too late for all this soul searching. The Farmers Market at Whitstable had a slightly incongruous South African food stall. One excited expat girlfriend later, and I was scoffing biltong* all the way home.

*A South African delicacy. Wind-dried beef, heavily salted and cut up into small pieces. Not exactly something you'd find in a Rose Elliot cookbook.