Special dietary needs - vegetarianism

National Review, Jan 29, 1996 by Digby Anderson

Mr. Anderson is the editor of This Will Hurt: The Restoration of Virtue and Civic Order (National Review Books).

I have received an invitation to a weekend conference in Detroit. It is a two-day conference -- a residential conference. Today whenever a chap is invited to a conference, meeting, training weekend, or whatever, he is asked to fill in a form. And among the boxes for names and addresses will be one in which he is invited to declare any "Special Dietary Needs."

This box no doubt originated very properly for persons of religious faiths with dietary codes. Today vegetarians have taken it over. They think it is their box. I mean secular vegetarians, health nutters who think meat is bad for them and that munching damp cardboard will make them live forever (why they should want to extend their miserable lives is beyond me); intellectual vegetarians, perverts who put sheep above the crowning pinnacle of God's creation (man) and throw the Almighty's best and tastiest gifts back in His face; fairweather vegetarians who won't eat meat that looks like animals but don't mind if it's covered in sauce; occasional vegetarians, who happily eat chicken at home all week, then the moment someone else, in this case a hotel, serves them chicken, rediscover their vegetarianism and claim that their rights are being denied; competitive vegetarians, who stray for days eating properly, then when another vegetarian asserts his rights, don't wish to be outdone in rights assertion and noisily reconvert; infantile vegetarians, people who are no more than overgrown children with food fads who have learned to name their squeamishness an "allergy"; and political vegetarians, the feminist-lesbian-Marxist vegetarians who exemplify Anderson's Law that a person who is cranky about his grub will be cranky about everything else.

These people -- the best collective word for them is "perverts" -- are not motivated by religion or tradition but by perverted sentiment, perverted intellect, perverted self-regard, perverted infantilism. They should not be allowed in the box.

Better still, they should be hounded from the conference, any conference, any residential meeting or training course. Why anyone feels obliged to make "special arrangements" for this perverted minority is beyond me. They certainly never make the slightest arrangements for normal eaters when we are misguided enough to visit them. However, be realistic. The box is there to stay and the vegemaniacs are going to use it for all it is worth. So, ladies and gentlemen, traditional Americans, Englishmen, Europeans, inheritors of the great Western culinary tradition, normal eaters, persons of taste and discrimination (in every sense) -- we must use it too. Up, rouse yourselves, assert your identity. Below you will find several paragraphs to cut out of your NATIONAL REVIEW. Every time you go to a conference with a box, stick the paragraphs onto the form:

Special Dietary Needs: Please provide choice of traditional American or Spanish breakfast. Traditional American means three fresh free-range eggs, homemade white bread, proper butter, and very rare steak (well hung). The eggs to be cooked in either chicken or pork fat. Fried potatoes are also required; that is, potatoes that have been peeled and boiled on the premises, then sliced and fried. Coffee should be espresso with no water. Traditional Spanish is toasted bread with pork fat or pate or olive oil, a large brandy or anise, a cigar, and even stronger coffee.

We conservative cooks are simple folk and are quite happy with sandwiches for lunch as long as there is lots of freshly roasted meat in them and lots of butter, and the bread is white and sturdy. Or we could have some Gorgonzola and bread and a bottle of Bordeaux each. By the way, conservative eaters are allergic to plastic plates, forks, and glasses, and to paper napkins.

For dinner we must have, it is our right to have, it would be denying our traditions and our very cultural identity not to let us have at least six courses. Our healthy lifestyle will suffer unless at least two of these are meat and one fish. Consult Digby Anderson's column in NATIONAL REVIEW for menus. But remember, please, that it's part of our belief that animals are placed on this earth for our use and convenience and we feel this is best expressed when one of the meat courses comes from a small, sweet, furry one shot in the wild.

Please respect our sensitivities and our self-chosen separatist philosophy and seat us well away from the vege-perverts. Oh, I nearly forgot. We are used to having our dogs with us while eating -- they lie under the table. And neither we nor the dogs can abide compulsory, piped lower-class music.