At last! An important and serious Guardian columnist, John Harris, declares his vegetarianism and writes thoughtfully about it.
As the Alcoholics Anonymous mantra would have it: my name is John Harris and I am a vegetarian. I haven’t eaten meat or fish since Christmas 1984, when I had my share of the Christmas turkey, and then quit. I can faintly recall arguments about the inbuilt inefficiencies of meat-eating, but the decision of this particular hard-bitten 14-year-old was based on two different considerations: first, a belief that it was wrong to kill sentient creatures to eat them; and second, that living without meat was an integral part of the 80s counterculture that set itself against the adult world, international capitalism, and Margaret Thatcher. With the arrival of the Smiths’ album Meat Is Murder in 1985, everything became clear.
If only for reasons of space, we’ll have to leave vegans out of this – but in the intervening 20-odd years, it’s been strange to watch vegetarianism ooze so easily into the culture. The great post-PC backlash that began in the mid-1990s seemed to briefly threaten its quiet ascendancy – but though avowed British herbivores still form a pretty tiny minority (between 2% and 8% of us, according to polling), their influence is obvious. The recent story of British meat consumption may essentially be one of fish, chicken and processed meat supplanting our appetite for beef, pork and lamb straight from the butcher’s block, but the parallel growth of vegetarian food has been astonishing: after well over a decade of year-on-year surges, the research firm Mintel reckons that the annual value of the British “meat-free” market is about to reach £780m.
