Grumpy Vegan

When I returned to college for my last year from my summer vacation in a chicken slaughter house, I was keen to meet up with a girl friend in the year below who was the only vegetarian I knew at that time. I could not wait to play the machismo role of trying to make Amanda upset, even make her cry, at what I had been doing. Instead, we argued about everything to do with eating meat through to the end of the year. (That it was cruel. How could you put pieces of charred corpse in your body? And so on.) Consequently, I became a vegetarian on January 1, 1974. Adopting a vegetarian diet while taking a class in French cuisine and hotel and restaurant management is akin to converting to Judaism while studying at a Catholic seminary because you want to be a priest!

I had only another six months to go on my course. How was I to cook and taste meat if I was a vegetarian? “Fake it,” said Amanda. “Pretend you tasted it.” Notwithstanding some earnest experimentation with alcohol and drugs while I was at college, I knew I did not have to worry about being caught faking it because my teachers saw me as one of their best students and did not focus their attention on me. A report at the end of my first year stated that I was a “quite outstanding student in both ability and spirit.”

I was still living with my parents when I became a vegetarian. My mother’s response to my born again vegetarian proselytizing was, “Not in my home, you’re not!” This I interpreted as a fundamental challenge to my personal integrity. I was now a zealous vegetarian. I believed she should be a vegetarian, too. I would not accept that she could not see what I now saw.

Thirty plus years ago vegetarians were seen as harmless cranks. There was even a famous vegetarian restaurant in London called Cranks, which opened in Carnaby Street in the “swinging sixties.” It seemed that all of the vegetarian food stores that existed then were privately owned by well-meaning eccentrics. They sold “health foods.” My snobbish haute cuisine taste did not find whole foods very appealing as they were always brown, including the rice, flour, margarine and pasta. Organic food had yet to make much of an impact at this time. The nearest health food store to Camberley was in a nearby village. The shop was run by two elderly sisters. Even though it did not offer very much, you could enjoy a cooked vegetarian snack at a couple of tables in the corner. Mother and I were glad when a year or so later Holland & Barrett, a national chain of health food stores, opened in Camberley’s new pedestrian town center. She eventually worked there for many years. I always feel nostalgic whenever I visit a Holland & Barrett because they continue to sell many of the same products that I bought all those years ago.

Another independent health food store I particularly remember was in Blackpool, Lancashire. I was working for the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection at the time (mid-1980s) and represented them at the Labour Party’s annual conference in our “Putting Animals into Politics” campaign. The health food store owner had cut out salacious photographs of young women in bikinis, pasted them onto cardboard and placed them on the shelves. The implication was “Eat this can of red beans and you will look like her!” Or “Take this vitamin supplement and you will be able to seduce her!” (This will not be a surprise if you have been to Blackpool.) Today, whenever I visit a Whole Foods Market or even my local Safeway, I am amazed at the availability of vegan and organic food and products in comparison to the little that we had to choose from in the mid-1970s.

After much argument about why she should be a vegetarian, mother and I agreed to call a truce. She agreed to cook meat-based meals for father, Wendy (my sister) and herself, and cook vegetarian food separately for me. For example, every Sunday she would roast a chicken but cook the stuffing separately so that I could eat it. She would add an egg to the stuffing mix to make sure I got enough protein. Our knowledge of vegetarian nutrition was nonexistent. Mother was extremely accommodating to my dietary needs. She listened patiently to my opinionated outlook on the world. But I still believed she should be a vegetarian. Several months into the truce, I started up again. “You should be a vegetarian. You know you should be a vegetarian. Why aren’t you a vegetarian?”

To which she replied, “When was the last time you saw me eat meat?”

She had, of course, become a vegetarian some months earlier but never told me. She wanted me to see how long it would take for me to notice. I was, of course, too involved with myself and my self-righteousness to pay attention to what she did and did not eat. She remained a vegetarian, later becoming a vegan (father also some years later) until her premature death from cancer in 1986.

Toward the end of 1975 the British Broadcasting Corporation began an innovative series of community-based programs called “Open Door.” They selected a handful of organizations to help them make a program about themselves. The first one was by and about The Vegan Society. This was my second exposure to veganism and mother’s first. The program was broadcast twice and we watched it separately. (My determined drinking practices clashed with the first screening.) We later agreed that they had a point or two but we thought the vegans on the program were all rather, well, odd. Looking back, it was clearly original programming and an ambitious step for the Vegan Society to take. I subsequently got to know some of the vegans who appeared. They were, of course, not odd at all but dedicated pioneers. (Perhaps by then I had become odd, too.)

I am eternally grateful to Kathleen Jannaway who was the society’s secretary and played a prominent role in the program. She had a profound impact on many people through her indefatigable work for the society for many, many years. I know she helped to persuade me and mother to go vegan on January 1, 1976. Kathleen is a quintessentially English vegan that personifies a stoic determination. For example, who cannot help but resist the Vegan Society’s then advice (The Vegan, Vol. 23, No. 1, Spring, 1976, p. 24) on flatulence as just a “passing reaction” that the body will adapt to? Would it be too unkind for me to note that – 30 years on – the wind of change still passes somewhat controllably through me?