Steak

I was brought up a vegetarian, and remained in that state until I was 21. I’d already had a lot of sex by the time I tried meat; I’d already used the word “soporific” in a sentence; I’d already tried and tested a plethora of class A drugs, got wasted with Boy George, read Ulysses twice, and punched a man in the face, all before I had my first taste of meat- lamb, to be more specific.

My dad became vegetarian because of this meditation group he belonged to in the 60’s, and my mum can’t remember why she became a vegetarian.

But I had my own reasons: I didn’t know what it tasted like and it was my thing; I liked having a thing.

Not only was I raised a vegetarian, but my parents are Orthodox Jews so we were also kosher. I decided when I was 20 or so that God doesn’t exist, and then I decided that since I’d decided that God doesn’t exist, he probably wasn’t going to strike me down for eating a prawn. So I did. I ate loads and loads of prawns and squid and lobster and scallops (mmm scallops) and mussels, and it totally changed my life. Seafood is so fucking delicious, and I’d spent 20 years not eating it; I’d been deprived and had deprived myself of something totally amazing. And it got me thinking: what if meat was fucking delicious? What if it was even better than seafood, and I wasn’t eating it just because?! What a ridiculous reason to rob yourself of an experience that could potentially change everything you know to be true! What if meat was what I had been looking for all my life? What if the mystery of my desire to live lay in the smallest sliver of beef carpaccio, or in the tiniest shred of szechuan duck? I had to know.

But the thought at once thrilled and terrified me: I spent maybe six months talking to anyone who would listen about how I thought maybe I should try meat, just, like, only the best, like if someone was eating a steak and they said that was the best steak they’d ever eaten and they’d eaten a lot of steak, well, like, maybe I should just try a bit, you know, just a bit because you should try everything once. Then one day, during one such speech to my brother whilst he ate a roast dinner, he put a little bit of lamb, and a dip of mint sauce, a chunk of honeyed carrot and a tear of gravy -soaked yorkshire pudding on a fork and shoved it in my over-exercised mouth…

Lamb though. Seriously. Lamb. I can’t describe it. How often in your life do you experience something that you can’t liken to something else? Try describing lamb, further than saying it is tasty. You can’t. It’s just fucking tasty.

Anyway, after that it was all downhill. Chicken was an easy contender; you know those little ones where you get one to yourself? Yeh, tasty. And steak. Man, steak! STEAK IS SO GOOD! If I could make the caps more cappy I would because STEAK IS SO GOOD!

Obviously, I went mental for a bit. I might have been responsible for the culling of a dozen farms by the end of my first meat-loving year, and I’ll tell you something, I don’t regret it. Sure, I think lambs are cute, and cows are harmless and I still have trouble with the idea of eating bunny rabbit, but STEAK!

This year I went travelling with a vegetarian friend and, that combined with the questionable source of some meat in Asia, I was pretty much vegetarian again for eight months- except that time I ate freshly murdered barbecued wild bore in the jungle which was AMAZING! But other than that. And I thought, maybe I could be vegetarian again. I toyed with the idea, told a bunch of people so I could hear what it sounded like, and I was pretty close to becoming born again…And then someone said, But what about duck? And I thought, yeh, what about duck? I can’t not have duck again. That would be like arriving on a secluded tropical island, and rather than checking in to your five-star beach-front accommodation and slipping in to the warm green sea, saying, I think I’ll go home now thank you. I don’t think so.

There are so many different kinds of meat that I have yet to try, and life is short. Maybe I’ll stop when I’ve tried the lot…Or maybe by then those clever scientists will have invented a way of growing the most delicious cuts in a lab, independent of the animals which inspired them, and we can all eat as much meat as we want, guilt-free! Just imagine! Until then, we must fight the good fight and do what must be done, for the alternative is too awful to consider.