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| Talk,
Julie Miller,
14 January 1999 | |
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Its not always easy being a Vegetarian, although it’s a lot easier now than when I first announced to my long suffering parents in the early 80’s that I no longer wanted to eat anything that had a face. Horrified they asked themselves if it was something they’d done, and although being fed deep fried fish fingers throughout my childhood hadn’t helped, it was only a small contributing factor to my impending abstinence from the flesh.
After all, food in the seventies was pretty much a low time in culinary terms for all our generation. Pizzas (long before Pizza Express came to the suburbs) bore very little resemblance to their Italian origins. They could be found buried deep in the deepest freezers, in frozen multi packs, tasting much the same as their plastic packaging even after being thawed, grilled and presented with crinkle cut chips. The most exciting dish on the weekly menu throughout my childhood was cod and chips twice or an extra large sausage in batter if we were really lucky.
Corn-beef hash, liver and bacon, and shepherd’s pie, all played their part in my vegetarian conversion. But the big deciding factor for my final departure from the world of meat and fish was that as a child, I would be encouraged to pet sweet woolly lambs on day trips to the country side, only to be faced with a roasted limb on our return for Sunday lunch! Almost cannibalism.
In the early days of a vegetarianism you had to be really committed. There where no ready made meals lining the aisles of M&S brandishing the comforting ‘V’ sign. No in those days it was a packet of dried Veggie burger mix, a couple of eggs and about and hour of preparation, all to watch the end result crumble on the barbecue, a less committed soul would have been sent rushing back to the nearest Birds Eye counter.
Thankfully things are much easier today, and as the mother of a toddler with a committed veggie husband our family manages to eat a brilliant, well balanced diet. Although it has taken some time to convince my parents that their granddaughter would be able to survive her formative years without meat and fish, “She might be missing out on vital vitamins” spouted my Dad as he rammed yet another Milky Bar down her throat, “she needs all the iron she can get” I was forced to remind him that my brother and I had survived on more E numbers than hot dinners, and that spam fritters weren’t exactly up there with steamed broccoli and organic lentils when it came to a good source of protein.
In the end my parents relented, and very shortly had invested in a bumper box of veggie sausages (served of course with oven chips and ketchup). An urgent call to the ‘Linda Mc Cartnery Hotine’ confirmed my husband’s worst suspicions that too much soya is difficult for the under twos to digest, let alone the risk of GM cross pollination, (I have yet to tell my Dad that vegetarian sausages are to be struck off the menu!) Until such time he’s quite happy in the knowledge that even if veggie sausages don’t contain meat, at least it LOOKS like his granddaughters eating it.
A book ‘Baby and Child Vegetarian Recipes’ by Carol Timperley (published by Ebury Press) is great for both parents and/or grandparents of veggie babies and children and a copy of this truly inspirational book now sits on my parents book shelf, ready for my daughters weekly visits. But sadly, I just know that (along with every other self-help book I’ve brought them- and there have been many) it will end up collecting dust, while my well-meaning parents discover new winning ways with mash potatoes and peas. Bless them!
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