Beginnings…
Somewhere between Boxing Day and New Year in 2018, things changed. For some reason, I believed that I hadn’t indulged enough with all the meat and chocolate, and I decided to make myself a spaghetti carbonara. It had all the good stuff: smoked bacon, italian sausage, cream, marscapone, and a liberal sprinkle of grated parmesan. It was the sort of meal that – up until that point – I had held up as the reason why I could never not be a meat eater.
And I had been challenged to give up meat many times.
More than half of my life had been spent in a relationship with a committed vegetarian, and I had three vegetarian children (still do, as it happens). A large proportion of my cooking was meat free. I knew all of the ethical reasons, and the environmental ones, for giving up on eating animals, but I’d just never felt I could. Until that fateful carbonara.
For the first time I could remember, eating one of my favourite meals, I felt like I was actually harming my body. It could have been all that dairy and fat instantly inflaming my body on contact. It could have been the rampant meat-sweats. It could have just been that moment – the one that had been slowly, quietly building for years – when I recognised that my poor diet was probably going to end with me dying on the toilet before retirement age. Rock ‘n’ roll.
For whatever reason, Ray… call it fate, call it luck, call it karma: I believe everything happens for a reason.
I believe I was destined to make that carbonara.
At the dawn of 2019, spurred into challenging myself in the traditional New Year manner, I took on Vegan-uary. Daunted by the prospect of a whole month free of meat, I took my first tentative steps into the wilderness.
I’ve been trapped there ever since.
