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Unsurprisingly, our debate last week about listener Kev secretly feeding his vegetarian wife sausages polluted with meat-juice sparked feisty responses from you. Most suggested that Kev’s being a bad egg (and likewise Martin the Sound Man for abetting him). And here, for the sake of variety, are some of the rest. Firstly, Julia in Guildford has a sensible suggestion to help Kev worm out of his naughty situation:
I think he should stop putting meat juices on the sausages, and if she notices they’re different, he can tell her that the manufacturers have changed the recipe.
Good idea, Julia, even if it’s hiding a lie with another lie. But it’s worth a punt, especially if Mrs Kev has a similar stomach to that of Jessica in Charlotte, North Carolina:
I’m a vegetarian, not for ethical reasons, but because I apparently lack the appropriate enzymes to digest meat. Whenever I ate meat, poultry or fish, I would suffer painful stomach cramps and become horribly ill in ways that I will refrain from sharing with you.
Eating at restaurants has become much easier, but something I always have to ask about is whether soups, risottos, etc are made with meat-based or vegetable stock. Here in the Southern US, lard is a commonly used as a cooking fat, too.
I have become sick after consuming “vegetarian” items on the menu only to discover they were made chicken stock, or just had the pieces of meat picked out by the kitchen staff.
Chester in Wycombe is next:
I was a vegetarian for a year before I recently went to New York and tried some horrific but really tasty meat-based food (burgers, bacon melts, double downs etc.). My girlfriend is also a vegetarian after I inadvertently converted her. I’ve also found a new love in cooking. So answer me this: how can I get her to eat meat again so I can show off my cooking skills?
Eh? Show off your cooking skills by cooking her some nice vegetables, you twit! If only somebody had done that for poor Kirsty in Greenwich:
I went to stay with a friend the night before we were due to fly on holiday together, and his Mum had spent the best part of two hours cooking a huge chicken casserole for our tea. My friend knew I was a vegetarian, but idiot that he was, had forgotten. We sat down at the table, and his Mum, trying to be sweet and welcoming, insisted that as the guest I got extra chicken legs. Even the thought of eating meat really turned my stomach. As she ladled extra chicken onto my plate and my friend grinned across the table at me, I realised that refusing to eat the casserole would be just horribly rude, and I knew I would have to eat the whole plateful.
I hadn’t eaten any meat for at least 10 years by this point, and my body was just unable to break the meat down. I woke up the next day feeling like I was horribly hungover, and spent the flight trying not to be sick. By the time we had got to our hotel I was starting to feel better, and we went down to the restaurant for dinner. My friend watched me order the vegetarian option, and the penny finally dropped.
He looked at me, aghast and said, “You’re a vegetarian!” I smiled, happy that if nothing else I would get an apology for the trauma he had put me through and maybe a thank you for not upsetting his dear old Mother. “Yes I am,” I replied. He shook his head in disgust at me and, tucking into his steak, started on a massive rant about how disappointed he was with me, at so casually throwing away my morals.
Finally, another vegedilemma from Gary from Derbyshire:
Just to add to the whole vegetarians eating meat thing, my wife, a vegetarian of 20 years, loves chips. Nothing wrong with that, there are two excellent chippies in the village where we live. Only she prefers one chippy over the other, and as it is closer to us, I – being a bit of a sloth – prefer the trek to that one rather than the other, so everyone is happy.
However, I found out recently that the one that is closer to us uses animal fat to fry all of the produce – something very normal and nothing out of the ordinary – but from a vegetarian perspective it is a no-go.
I tried to go to the other one, not mentioning the whole animal fat thing, and my wife said the chips don’t taste anywhere near as good as the ones from our closer one, and that I had to go back to the original one. We don’t have fish and chips that often, and so answer me this: just like Kev, do I come clean or do I have an easy life eating the much closer and far tastier, albeit animal fat-laden, chips?
O readers, I am already spent after doling out advice to the vegetarian-duping Kev, so I beseech you to tackle Gary’s similar dilemma in the comments. Tasty, convenient wrongness or less tasty, inconvenient rightness? Which should triumph?
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Answer Me This! Podcast 
December 3, 2010 at 4:50 pm |
Well done for the first ever use that i’ve seen of the word ‘abetting’ without also using the word ‘aiding’!!
December 3, 2010 at 9:37 am |
I’d say Kev’s situation is very different from Gary’s. In Kev’s case, no extra consumption of animals was involved, in Gary’s, the chip shop is buying the animal fat instead of a vegetable alternative and thus increasing consumption.
December 2, 2010 at 8:25 am |
Vegetables are what food eats.