Another day, another frustratingly temporary (although this time paid) job: three months as a copywriter for an international volunteering company. And as with any new job, my first few weeks have been laced with the usual protocol that surrounds the meeting of any people in a professional and indeed non-professional capacity for the first time.
By this of course, I mean what Julie Andrews would tunefully refer to as ‘getting to know you, getting to know all about you’. Ever since I stumbled out of the sheltered, real-world ignorance of sixth form, into the gritty underworld that is part-time jobs, I have realised that it is an immeasurable benefit in life to be able to succinctly condense your background, lifestyle, experiences and likes and dislikes into small, bite-size chunks. This is because once you have left the safe familiarity of the schooling system, you will spend at least 50% of the subsequent portion of your life meeting and telling people about yourself for the first time. What with the veritable smorgasbord of fleeting encounters that I experienced during the hellish ‘part-time era’, proceeding round-the-world backpacking trip, three years at uni and now my ungraceful blundering into the world of full-time employment, I have been rendered so weary of the whole ritual that I have been left wondering why we don’t just each produce a booklet detailing our particulars and hand it out to everyone we meet who we will have to engage in any kind of conversation with, for them to read and digest at their leisure. At least then we could move swiftly onto talking about life’s truly pressing issues, like why Jurassic Park 3 wasn’t as good as anticipated.
For someone as inherently ludicrous as myself, the process of self-introduction is all the more difficult, as I essentially have to suppress my every natural impulse until I have come to know people by seeing them every day for AT LEAST three weeks. Then I can slowly allow my real personality to eek out, bit by bit. Sadly, I forgot this rule briefly yesterday, when I was asked by one of my new workmates (who also unfortunately happened to be my boss) whether or not I supported a football team. If I had been dutifully implementing the rule at all times, as I definitely should have been, I would have simply answered this question, ‘no’. However, I lost my head, forgot where I was and who I was talking to, and instead answered, ‘no, but I find the notion of supporting a football team fascinating from an anthropological and psychological standpoint’. I know, I sounded like a prime twat.
All of this aside, there is one thing about me that every new acquaintance comes to learn, that always proves the most contentious and sparks the most debate. And this is strange, because I happen to have it in common with 1.2 million people in the UK. In case you’re not massively au fait with your UK statistics, I am talking about being a vegetarian.
The story of my vegetarianism began in the grimy, rain-soaked and thoroughly bleak setting of the back yard of a small, village branch of the Co-Op. I found myself here, age 18, after having taken a job in the shop to save money for my travelling aspirations. And the role of ‘sales assistant’ at this branch was just as hapless as you may expect, being the sole reason that I was standing with the rain slowly falling and gently fizzing against the synthetic static of my polyester uniform, staring at a monolithic skip, brown with the smearings of rejected food, holding roughly two cows worth of sell-by-approaching steaks in a basket to add to its cavernous depths. Once back at the till, languidly packing up the various groceries of a customer, I decided that there simply must be something wrong with what I had just done. Namely, that (by my own estimations, granted) around 2 cows had been killed, only to be sliced up, and unceremoniously slung into a bin. And right there and then, I took the decision to become a vegetarian.
For three years since that day, I have been fighting my own internal, moral battle against my carnivorous urges, and so far, been winning. The journey has definitely not been a smooth one however. Far from the tree-hugging, hemp-wearing, kale-inhaling and above all dellusionally holier-than-thou stereotype of vegetarianism that I had been led to believe was accurate before I joined the dark side and became one of them, in my experience it is not so much the veggies doing the judgin’. I simply cannot mention my meat-free antics without being inundated with questions, questions that more often than not are underpinned by a disaproving and critical tone. Obviously the most common question I have to field is ‘why are you vegetarian if you like meat?’ because I openly do – I still believe that there are very few things as close to heaven as roast beef on a sunday, even if I no longer participate in the ritual.
So then I am forced to explain, to transport the question-poser back to the grim realisation I experienced in front of that fateful skip, and hope that my logic is sound enough to be accepted. Mainly it is, but for those less easily pacified, the question-process rambles on with the understandable ‘but surely if your problem is that there is too much waste, the best solution is to reduce it by eating more meat?’
This is an important and very pertinent question, as it undeniably makes sense at its rudiments. However, it overlooks my primary concern in my vegetarianism; the tagline for my whole endeavour if you will. This is that the reason for my not eating meat isn’t that I think my sole actions will make any difference at all to the meat industry and how it functions. Rather, I think of it as more like being a pacifist; I simply do not want to be involved in such an industry, and so have removed myself from it entirely. I do not want my actions, i.e. buying meat, to also involve buying into and furthering a system that involves unnecessary and wasted death of animals.
Re-reading that, I will admit, I do have some of the trappings of society’s burden: ‘The Preachy Vegetarian’. But, I honestly do not and would not ever judge others for eating meat, after all, I did so for a good eighteen years of my life and lord only knows there was none more blood-thristy and animalistic in their devouring of an 8oz steak than me at regular intervals throughout those years. And in addition, at my core I do believe that humans SHOULD eat meat. However, I personally feel that for me it would not be justifiable unless the animal was killed in the most humane of ways (ideally cuddled to death by angels atop a bed of fresh roses), and minimal meat was wasted. Sadly though, this is simply not a viable option in the world we live in, and would take up far too much time, time that the vicious demands of the quick-fix, fast-food, instantaneous industry simply do not allow for.
Therefore, as much as it is yet another bullet-point to expand on in the perpetual ‘getting to know you’ game of life, I am not ready to relinquish my vegetarianism and delve back into the undeniably delicious but morally corrupt world of meat quite yet. Except maybe if you ask me on a sunday.