In 2008 I took a soul-searching trip to Australia and spent 3 months living with my Australian cousin in what I thought was the outback – a thick dense rain forest speckled with leeches, ticks, spiders and tiger snakes. Any claim to re-affirming my manhood quickly evaporated when I was told by the locals that this was ‘just’ the bush – “the outback is a different beast, and certainly not as green” they said with a wry smile.
My cousin had built his own self-sufficient cabin, surrounded by trees and wilderness on the top of a mountain in Bega, Southeast Australia. Possums visited nightly for welcome treats – vegetables, carrots and vegetarian leftovers were always on the menu. During the daytime the local wildlife enjoyed other gastronomic delights; the magpies gobbled up grated cheese, the Rosella parrots pecked at a wonderful array of seed mix that my cousin duly distributed. Even the wallabies got in on the act.
My time at the cabin made me realize that when nature is around you, it is incredibly hard not to have a relationship with it. Being a city boy, it was a real respite from the murky hues of concrete, glass and steel. At the end of my time, feeding the animals, watching them and learning about their quirks and individual mannerisms, I began to question my own choices – namely, why I ate meat.
That question remained unanswered until I met my vegetarian girlfriend – we’ve now been together for two years. Ironically perhaps, she is not a big vegetable eater – she tends to avoid anything green and opts instead for lavish servings of cheese, mayonnaise and vegetarian burgers. Whilst this remains an amusing and endearing trait, it does make it very hard when we head down to the supermarket. Actually, it becomes nearly impossible when we eventually make it back into our kitchen faced with the prospect of what culinary delight we can cook that we both actually like.
There’s something about eating meat in front of a vegetarian – unless you’re a sociopath – that is just uncouth. I found it increasingly difficult to maintain my meat eating lifestyle whilst we shared so many meals together – and now I’ve pretty much given up entirely. Of course, this choice doesn’t mean I am a vegetarian you understand, or that I won’t eat meat (somebody cook me a burger!) It does, however, allow me to boast about my green, environmental choices to my contemporaries, and earns me brownie points from the woman I love.
Everything worth doing requires sacrifice; I just get the added bonus of feeling good about my reduced (to non-existent) meat intake. Calculating the number of cows I’ve saved (or vegetables I’ve killed) brings me added pleasure. Of course, if I was ever stuck in the outback, I wouldn’t hesitate to throw a shrimp on the barbie – or even an endangered snake if it meant saving my own bacon!