I've joined the ranks of the vegetarians (if only for 40 days and 40 nights.) Strictly speaking I've joined the ranks of the pescetarians. Is it ok to eat fish, I wonder? And do they have any feelings?
Some people say that fish scream when they're caught.
Perhaps at a pitch only dogs can hear. I've no doubt that dying, gasping for air, crushed under the weight of your fellow fish in a net is as horrible a death as the steel bolt to the head of the cattle herded into the abattoir, or the slash of the halal butcher's knife across the throat of the fatted lamb.
The wrung neck of chickens, pecking round Trinidadian yards is equally disturbing–I've heard tales of men simply picking them up by the neck and swinging them.
Nonetheless, this lack of meat has me hallucinating, salivating and growling after only two weeks. It's hard–two days into my self-imposed ban I completely forgot and bought jerk chicken from a Trini-owned restaurant in Stroud Green (the area of North London CLR James once lived in.) Known as Hummingbird restaurant for 30 years it recently re-branded itself Lulu's–a brothel-esque name if ever I heard one–with a makeover like a hair parlour.
If Jesus was alive today and planning a quiet Friday night in with a dvd, you'd forgive him for succumbing to Lulu's curried goat.
I'm not giving up meat for Lent (I don't believe in God) and it's not in support of animal rights. I don't feel guilty about eating our four-legged friends; I'm an animal lover but I love eating them too! I could eat a bacon sandwich while listening to the miserable indie singer Morrissey, singing that "meat is murder."
Last year Morrissey walked offstage at a concert because he could smell "burning flesh" from the burger stands. He's compared the meat industry to the slave trade, the Holocaust and child abuse. Since my flesh fast began I've smelt cooked meat coming out of pub kitchens and found myself walking towards the source, blindly following my nose–entranced like Pepe Le Pew the cartoon skunk enraptured by the aroma of Penelope Pussycat.
I'm giving up meat to see if I physically can. It's a test of my willpower that would rival a heroin addict withdrawing from skag. I've never gone without meat for more than a few days in my whole life. I'm indecently carnivorous. In recent years I've even developed a Hannibal Lecter-like obsession with innards. Chicken livers, cooked to perfection with just a trace of blood left on the plate, are one of life's greatest pleasures.
In France, where my mother (a strict vegetarian) lived for several years, the supermarkets were a meat-lovers paradise: offal and body parts of every description, and prime cuts of course. I'd play jokes on my veggie mother. As she went off to buy lettuce, tomatoes and onions I'd take half a pig's head off the shelf, or the cadaver of a skinned rabbit wrapped in clear packaging, place it in the shopping trolley then nonchalantly stroll past as she came back with the salad ingredients. The swear words that followed were epic.
Once I bought a pig's heart and took it home to cook. Unfamiliar with heart recipes I simply boiled it. It was tough and when I got to chewing through the hardened ventricle it became frankly inedible.
The other items on sale–cows' tongues over a foot long, lambs' brains (cervelles d'agneau) neatly lobotomised, entrails and intestines, pigs' trotters and ears–I found fascinating. If you're going to kill a sentient being, use every last bit of it I say.
On a recent trip to Trinidad with my mother, Trinis struggled with the concept of vegetarianism. A dear friend made her signature smoked herring dip which she served with Crix. "She's vegetarian," I told her as she eagerly offered it to my mortified looking mum. "But it's only herring!" exclaimed our host.
Later in the trip my mother ate meatless roti. Not boneless eh.
I would eat most types of meat (though never horse, dog or rat under any circumstances). If I was the guest of an Amazonian tribe I might eat monkey, tapir or parrot. In former, more abundant times in T&T I might have tried tatou or agouti (just the once!) but I would recoil at the hideous spiny tailed manicou. As for the thought of killing a turtle for meat–utterly repulsive.
Eating animals (as well as domesticating them for companionship, hunting, wool, milk, eggs and transport) was an essential part of human evolution. Without it we would have perished as a species. Meat is of course nutritionally important too. But the ethics and practices of the meat industry are vulgar and if I could rear my own animals I would.
Recently I was shocked by an article on a vegan Web site which described how thousands of chickens can be killed in minutes using foam sprayed over them, suffocating them. The same article described the fate of male chicks from the egg-laying species of chickens. The tiny baby males–redundant as egg-layers and not big enough to be sold for meat–are simply thrown into a shredding machine to dispatch them as quickly as possible. Happy Easter everybody!