Vegemaniacs - making fun of vegetarians

National Review, Nov 1, 1993 by Digby Anderson

They usually say it as if it were a minor afterthought: "Digby, just ringing to confirm what time you wanted us for dinner on Thursday - we did say eight, didn't we? Fine. Pamela and I are both looking forward to it enormously. By the way, I did mention she was a vegetarian, didn't I?"

Did he hell. I wouldn't have invited them if I'd known she was a vegemaniac. There is only one word to describe the social relationship that ought to obtain between vegemaniacs and normal eaters and that is apartheid. Well, it was too late and they came and it ended up as it always does. The conservative cook is a gentleman, so we start with crabs, then go on to eels sauteed in olive oil with garlic, then salad of endive, Roquefort, and some plums dried, then preserved in and reinflated with Marc.

Pamela doesn't eat crabs. She is nervous about shellfish. She doesn't eat eels either; "all wriggly, I can't bring myself to somehow, silly of me, but there we are." The salad she toys with. The Roquefort is too strong and salty; and the Marc, she has never had before and would "rather not." It also emerges that she would have eaten chicken or even pork if it had been suitably covered up in sauce or camouflaged in pastry. In short she is not a vegetarian at all, just someone who is wet about eating.

Then there's the other sort of Pamela. Once again we get the casual call. This one eats the crabs and the eels but then says, "I say, I've just noticed, did you do this for me? You need not have. You should not have. My meat-free week is the first in the month." Other Pamelas eat meat on Saturdays; yet others eat it all the time: vegetarianism was last year's hobby, and this year they are into bicycles.

But whether they are vegetarians or other sorts of food cranks, they show the same characteristics of ingratitude, bolshieness, rudeness, and lack of taste. They are ungrateful to the Almighty, spurning all the good things He has showered upon them. They are bolshie in their contempt for all the wonderful recipes tradition has found for the good things. They are rude in their insolent expectation that normal hosts should lay on abnormal food for them while they never lay on normal food for us. And they lack good taste. Fancy putting a boring quiche in the rightful place of a roast goose.

Also, people who are cracked about food are usually cracked about other things. Go to dinner with them and not only will they insult you with aubergine pie, but they will talk about the need for bicycle paths and the beauty of Red Indian art. They get very annoyed when you point this out. Indeed, one of them has just brought out a book in England arguing that the vegetarians are not cranks. He roots through history turning up lots of them. The idea is the same as that maneuver used by homosexualists. "Look," they say. "If there are that many of us, and there always have been a lot of us, and some Very Important People have been vegetarians or homosexualists, then we can't be cranks, can we?"

Unfortunately, all the VIPs this fellow finds turn out to be roaring loonies. We learn about the absurdities of the Victorian raw-food obsessionists, George Bernard Shaw's obsession with the excreta of meat eaters, the Bogomils, Pythagoras' theories about souls and beans; about the frequent association of anti-meat and anti-alcohol crazies; about the 1890s "Fellowship of the New Life" for "Atheists, Spiritualists, Individualists, Anarchists, Communists, Vegetarians, Anti-Vivisectionists, and Anti-Vaccinationists." And we learn about Adolf.

Even better is an American, one Carol Adams, and her book The Sexual Politics of Meat. Her thesis is that you can't really be a pukka socialist unless you are also a signed-up veggie, antiracist, feminist, and possibly a lesbian. Likewise you can't be a pukka vegetarian unless you are also ... She too roots around history but she finds socialists who turn out to have been lesbians and vegetarians. It is a wonderful book, pages and pages of barminess. Carving meat, she says, is like rape. Meat-eating is a symbol of male power and an index of racism. Her chapter "For a Feminist Vegetarian Critical Theory" is - I was going to say a masterpiece. Best are her concluding lines, "Eating rice is faith in women. On this grace may we all feed." Amen, Ms. Adams, amen.