The culinary world is changing, I read in the newspaper. More and more (semi) vegan restaurants are being added where the food is so delicious that Michelin awards stars for it. Cooking without meat or fish is a challenge, explained chef Emile van der Staak (De Nieuwe Winkel, two stars): ‘If you bake a steak you will have great results within five minutes. But to get the same layered taste with plants, you have to put in a lot more effort.’
A refreshingly honest comment, for a vegan (maybe he does eat meat outside of office hours?). I immediately thought of the famous story ‘Pig’ (1960) by Roald Dahl. An orphaned boy Lexington is only twelve days old when his old, eccentric aunt Glosspan takes care of him and takes him to the unspoilt countryside. She teaches him at home and teaches him to cook. Vegetarian, because she finds eating meat ‘not only unhealthy and disgusting, but also terribly cruel’. (This was an outlandish position in the early 1960s.)
Lexington grows up to be a fantastic cook and foodie. His aunt dies when he is 17 and he leaves for the big city of New York, where he orders the daily special in a shabby cafeteria. He is served a plate of cabbage with a ‘grey white slice of something warm’ on it, which turns out to be the most delicious food he has ever tasted. It’s meat.
‘But, but… that’s impossible,’ stammered the boy. ‘Aunt Glosspan, who knew more about food than anyone in the world, said that meat was without exception disgusting, repulsive, abominable, filthy, and repulsive. And yet what’s on my plate here is without a doubt the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten.’
Correct. What else can be said about eating meat (and that’s a lot): meat is tasty. Vegetables, too. I was reminded of another story by Dahl, ‘The Sound Machine’. Klausner, the slightly deranged inventor type, manages to build a machine that can pick up sounds inaudible to humans and ‘translate’ it for the human ear. He tries the machine out in his garden. His neighbor is cutting roses from a bush and Klausner hears an icy scream with each cut stem.
A daisy that he picks also appears to be screaming, and he is terrified. “He thought of a wheat field, a field of wheat stalks, upright, yellow and alive, through which the reaper goes, 500 stalks a second, every second… oh my God, what would that sound like? (…) I could never eat bread again.’
Apples do, he muses, because they fall on their own when they’re ripe, so as long as you don’t rip them off the tree, it’s fine. ‘But not vegetables. No potatoes, for example. A potato would certainly scream, a carrot too, and an onion, and a cabbage…’
Simon Carmiggelt once, in the 1960s, described a man who “abhorred vegetarianism and wrote in disgust at “the shedding of the green blood of our silent fellow creatures.” He decided to live on salt alone. Until he read a brochure: ‘Why does salt have to suffer?’ Then he gave up eating, consistently to death.’
Cold, of course. But the idea that vegetables have a soul and can feel pain is not so absurd. Until the 21st century we also thought that fish could not feel pain, and it turned out wishful thinking†
Suppose it is true, of those vegetables, then there will be very little left to eat, for people with a conscience. Those screaming wheat stalks…
But I draw the line at salt.