Fur

April 12 2010

As you may have noticed, I’m a vegetarian. I haven’t – knowingly – eaten red meat for 19 years and 11.5 months. I may have buckled and eaten a couple of slices of chicken breast 6 months after I became veggie, but that was it. Since then the closest I’ve come to eating the flesh of beasts is eating a Trebor Xtra Strong Mint before I realised they contained gelatine.

Now, there are a million diets with a million names out there. I’m not interested in converting anyone to vegetarianism – if you don’t want to do it yourself you won’t make a very good one, so I’d be wasting my breath.

But please, if you eat fish, duck, frogs, snails, beetles, stuff that moves about and/or has a face, can we just be clear that you

ARE NOT A FUCKING VEGETARIAN!

So let’s have none of this “I am a vegetarian who eats fish” or “I’m vegetarian who eats poultry”. If I introduced myself as “an atheist who believes in God” you’d be pretty confused. You might even suggest that atheist was perhaps the wrong word, and that there were other titles available depending on which God you believed in.

I don’t care what you eat, but because of “vegetarians who eat fish” I am constantly offered – and in the worst cases actually given – fish when I ask for a vegetarian meal. Why is a fish less of an animal than a cow? I know it’s smaller, but tuna are bloody enormous. It can’t be because they’re not cute and furry – neither are pigs (in fact, we eat very few things with actual fur). It’s not that they live in water, because no one wants to eat dolphins or otters.

“I’m a vegetarian, but I eat otters”. That would do down well in the pub.

Mind you, the Spanish thing ham is a vegetable. It could be worse.