30 years a veggie: why I don’t eat animals

The waitress at the Whitley Bay cafe was bewildered when I asked for a vegetarian breakfast…

 

“What’s one of them?” she responded in dumbfounded disbelief.

The rain fell hard that Saturday morning trawling over wet sand trying to find somewhere to eat.

That particular veggie snub was 20-years-ago but somehow summed up the daily kitchen sink dramas experienced by vegetarians back then.

I became vegetarian more than 30 years ago when I was in sixth form.

The last time I ate animals was during an open day at a university I’d no hope of winning a place at.

The lyrics of The Smiths’ Meat is Murder hit home while I ate carcass on the campus. I think I made the decision to stop there and then.

I only got into The Smiths once they split up. As well as the music I was interested in what the singer Morrissey had to say.

I came across one of his interviews and he said something like: “You wouldn’t eat your cat, so why eat a cow?”

With me having cats and claiming to like animals, I thought: “How can I possibly eat them?”

When I stopped eating meat in autumn 1990 my parents believed my fad would last 30 minutes, not 30 years.

I’m not pretending that going veggie back then was seamless.

It was 18 months before Linda McCartney’s food range hit high street shelves and started to make life easier.

My vegetarianism always seemed to come under sharp focus on football trips.

Shortly after grey Whitley Bay we boarded a plane to sunnier climes – to watch Liverpool at Barcelona.

Aboard our mid-morning flight somewhere above Paris we were getting a bit peckish. Suddenly a cabin crew announcement.

“Will passengers Felton and Latta make themselves known? Your vegetarian meals are ready”

Out of a plane-load of football fans just the two of us were veggie.

We felt quite the ambitious outsiders to be the only ones opting for a meat-free meal.

More consternation down Las Ramblas as the vegetal sandwich turned out to be everything but vegetarian.

I’m not going to go all Greta Thunberg on you, but stopping eating animals while at school is one of things I’m most proud of.

It’s up there with refusing to dissect a mouse during biology class and my bronze medal in the 1982 sports day tug-o-war.

To me eating meat is as alien as eating stone or steel. It’s not so much a choice as a necessity.

Paul McCartney once said: “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would go vegetarian”.

I think he has a point.

There seems to be a complete disconnect between the food on our plates and where it came from. Or who it comes from.

I live in a little village in south Cumbria surrounded by farms.

It’s depressing to see farm wagons go by with animals held behind bars as they live for the last time.

I always think of Banksy’s Sirens of the Lambs artwork at the sight of this sad convoy.

Banksy packed a slaughterhouse truck full of stuffed animals. It then toured New York’s Meatpacking district. A stunt which was both comical and heartbreaking.

 

Over the last three decades it’s been brilliant to see rise of vegetarianism.

Today, prompted by pandemics and climate change, almost all of my friends tell me they are ‘eating less meat’.

Yesterday I bumped into a mate on a late night socially distanced walk – he told me he was now vegetarian.

He’d also binned the booze – which I thought was overdoing it a bit…

The catalyst for Al giving up meat was him watching Apocalypse Cow: How Meat Killed the Planet.

In that C4 documentary environmental campaigner George Monbiot argues the biggest problem driving us towards global disaster is how we feed ourselves, particularly on meat.

My mate was convinced enough to change his own lifestyle and put the lives of animals and the environment first.

I’m seeing more and more people making similar decisions. If not giving up eating meat altogether, they’ve drastically reduced their intake.

Having been veggie for three decades, I can’t believe it took me until August 2020 to become vegan.

Truth is, I just felt a bit of a fraud consuming dairy products.

I just wanted to stop being part of animal exploitation altogether.

I’d tried veganism a few times before and lasted a month or so before caving in to cheese.

Since August my resolve has got stronger. I now view dairy as harmful as meat – to animals and ourselves.

Six months in and so far so good. I’ve found it relatively easy to stick to.

I’m cooking more than ever before, and not missing dairy one jot.

But I guess the real test will be when we come out of lockdown; when cafes and restaurants reopen and I find myself searching for a vegan option on the menu.

And then there’s the football.

I’ve a season ticket at Celtic.

The club unveiled a vegan eatery in one of the concourses last season just before the first lockdown.

Twenty years ago I could never have imagined a football ground having vegan options.

So it’s a pity I’ve not been able to sample the chickpea and butternut squash curry just yet.

I hope that Hoops & Roots concession is a success once fans are allowed back in.

I reckon if I was to go back to that cafe in Whitley Bay they’d now be serving oat milk lattes and vegan sausages.

The might even be a day when a customer asks for a bacon butty and the waitress says: “What’s one of them?”