Food cooked with a conscience

Jun 27 2008 by Jane Hall, The Journal

SOME of my best friends are vegetarians. Honestly. But it’s not for me. It’s not that I’m against vegetarians or am even a committed carnivore; rather I’m a dedicated omnivore. When it comes to food, if you like it, I want some too.

But why people become vegetarians is interesting. And when I’ve asked, the majority of vegetarians appear to fall into one of two camps: either they have never really got on with the taste or texture of meat or they have issues with animal welfare.

Then there are most of the remainder who feel strongly that eating meat, no matter how humanely it’s reared, is wrong. And it’s a view I respect even though I can happily debate the subject, and will if asked. But with over 90% of the population being meat eaters, I think that even the most evangelical vegetarian would admit that it’s highly likely that meat’s going to remain very much a staple of our diet for the foreseeable future. So I didn’t know whether to be amused or hurt when, recently, we received a complaint from a vegetarian. A few months ago we started an exercise called Oldfields Food Heroes which comprises a series of images and descriptions of people, close to us, who’ve influenced us.

They include pictures, on placemats and posters, of some of our suppliers, friends and even relatives. And as a timely aside, one shows my colleague Peter Wood’s Gran whose egg custard recipe became a firm favourite with many of our customers. She turned 80 this week. Happy birthday Myrtle.

But one of the images is of one of our meat suppliers, Steve Beaumont, standing in his cold room with half a dozen beef carcasses hanging behind him. And one of our vegetarian customers took exception to that image being on her placemat.

If she’s reading this, I hope she realises that we never meant to offend. But I hope that her distaste is tempered by the knowledge that no-one cares more than we do about how our meat was bred, reared, fed and slaughtered.

Compare that with a restaurant I ate in recently that proclaimed its “local” credentials where, when I was invited into the kitchen, the chef could only tell me which butcher supplied the meat. Not from which locality it had actually come. Nor did he seem to care.

However, if you’re a vegetarian who really can’t stand seeing meat, avoiding the supermarkets and the vast majority of pubs and restaurants is about the only option unless you wear a blindfold. Otherwise, knowing that you’re eating in an omnivoriam that cares, can at least lessen the pain.