A long time ago I knew a vegetarian who did eat smoked sausage. He didn’t think smoked sausage was really meat. At the time I thought that was inconsistent, of course, because those who do eat meat love to point out inconsistencies to vegetarians, as if consequence is the most important thing on earth, much more urgent in nature than any abused animals or climate disasters.
But admittedly, smoked sausage but no meat is inconsistent, although there are smoked sausages where you can wonder whether they do not pursue the same as the vegetarian. Either way, it’s an understandable indulgence. I know a vegan who makes an exception for bitterballen. As a little meat eater, I don’t really think ‘meat-eating’ because of the turnip greens stew. I mutter those bacon away spiritually, as it were, but not materially, because their heartiness seems almost indispensable to me. Let alone if you suddenly get an irresistible appetite for spaghetti carbonara – then you don’t talk about speck pieces or whatever the solutions may be called, carbonara without real bacon, or actually pancetta, is not carbonara.
And of course that bacon comes from a farmer who would dare to call his pigs his friends, and those pigs in turn are also Very Happy and they walk outside and they are uh… are by a traditional butcher, so not in a big abattoir …
Well, people make up all sorts of things to justify the frugal use of meat. Deer that still get shot. Just a slice of ham. Chicken that is also raised and killed so lovingly. frankfurters from Brandt and Levie. I ate recently, on a fresh sourdough sandwich, with pickles and mustard and ketchup and fried onions, so like a kind of happy organic hot dog – phew, how delicious.
We will never eat a steak at home again, because those cows that need so much pasture and extra fodder and that also emit methane, that’s not possible. But cow yogurt does appear on the table, because I think soy yogurt is disgusting. Oat milk in the coffee, but a dollop of real whipped cream with the apple baked in the oven with marmalade and whiskey (oh, that’s so good). And we’re not even talking about cheese in all possible and impossible forms, also often coming from the same cows, although they last longer as a dairy cow than as a beef cow, to put it irreverently.
Where is the consequence here? nowhere. Still, it helps, because meat consumption as well as dairy consumption, at least in my life and in the lives of most people I know, has become a lot less than it used to be. Meat plays a small supporting role instead of a main role.
But a pig is not just bacon. If you allow yourself, filled with meat shame, sausage and bacon and reject the rest of the pig, you actually increase production. Better to give the whole pig the credit it deserves. Not just her bacon.
Seen in this way, reducing meat is actually in a certain sense meat increasing, that is to say: not shying away from the consequences of your own inconsistency. And willing to pay for it, of course, even if the meatball protection service immediately springs into action at even the suggestion of a meat tax. In Ghent, I read The morning, they feared that the ‘botram mee uufflakke’, a kind of press head, would be shot through the nose when someone suggested that there might also be a few vegetarian eateries at a festival. It was not! It’s the nothing-but-bacon people who need to get on the head, not the head-to-tail ones.
So soon again turnip greens stew. With kidneys.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of May 2, 2022