There has been an outbreak of vegetarianism in our family. Asking around, I find the phenomenon is reaching epidemic proportions, and I am not surprised that the Meat Promotion Executive is mounting a campaign. If north London is anything to go by, butchers will soon be an endangered species.
The ideology behind vegetarianism is a whole new world to those who have never given the matter a moment's thought. I have found it both a puzzle and an escape. Suddenly one needs no longer worry about privatization versus direct labour, or tertiary colleges as opposed to all-through comprehensive schools. The camera travels at the speed of light backwards from the human predicament, and man becomes a small and mischievous creature on a wider screen. As the cares of the day drop away, the evening meal presents a new sort of moral and intellectual challenge.
There are many different kinds of vegetarian. Since it is in most cases an individual moral decision, every individual draws the line in a different place. I have not yet met a fruitarian (the sort that believes no food must be eaten whose harvesting involves the premature death of the plant), but there are plenty of vegans around. Vegans eschew dairy produce as well as meat, on the grounds that dairy farming is part and parcel of the meat industry and involves the abuse of young animals. In particular it destroys the relationship between mother and young which is a bond that we, as fellow mammals, should not break.
Some vegetarians will eat fish. These are members of what one might call the Mammalian Solidarity movement. They feel strongly about the brutality of the dairy industry, but fish are far enough away from ourselves in the evolutionary chain to command no such fellow feeling. Logically, I argued to an adherent of this philosophy, he should feel able to eat chicken as well. But he showed me an article about factory farming that has put me off buying chicken or non-free range eggs ever since.
Most vegetarians, however, regard the taking of life as the cardinal sin and will eat dairy produce (though perhaps only from farms that set themselves up as a model of humane - if that is the word - practice) but not fish. You can imagine the complications of catering as I do for both sets of beliefs at the same meal: anchovies on one side of the pizza, mozzarella cheese on the other.
Indeed, sometimes I suspect the whole caper is designed to give the cook the runaround. Or - another theory I have developed in less petulant moments about my own children and the thousands of other assimilated Jews, half-Jews and quarter Jews in this part of London - that it is an atavistic longing for the strict dietary laws which their ancestors lived by for most of the last 25 centuries. But on analysis neither explanation holds up. There are plenty of gentile vegetarians, and on the whole one of the benefits of the new dispensation is the extent to which all these young people are cooking for themselves. Packets of strange pulses appear on the kitchen shelves and peaceable casseroles bubble away on the back of the stove.
It is in fact all enormously seductive. One of the great appeals of vegetarianism is that it does seem - to use an appallingly inapt metaphor - to kill so many birds with one stone. "What can I do," asks the troubled soul of the late 20th century, "to help the Third World (by making available cereals now fed to cattle and pigs), stop cruelty to animals, improve my own chances of a long and happy life, and cut my cost of living?' And the answer comes with all the appeal of any Four-for-the-Price-of-One offer: stop eating meat! All those bowls of muesli and chick-pea stew and high fibre macaroni will lift the spirit as they exercise the jaw muscles.
But I laugh - as I am sure anyone with an ounce of insight can tell - defensively. There is in fact no defence. I recall as a child overhearing an adult conversation in which someone who had just been to India was describing the huge banner that had greeted the arrival of the British visitors at the airport. "Be Kind to Animals by Not Eating Them," it said. The group of grown-ups rocked with laughter at the story. The very idea that being kind to animals (which was of course a strong and commendable British tradition) should actually lead to vegetarianism! It was clearly seen as an example of the over-literalness of a childlike native people. In fact the logic is inescapable.
We have seen the rise and fall of vegetarian fads before, but never, I think, one as strong as the current trend. This is partly because it has coincided with ever stronger nutritional advice about the damage caused by the present high levels of animal fat in the British diet. We are also in an era when anything to do with food produces a huge amount of alluring published material. Food photography - something, I am sure, in which you can now get a degree - is so skilled that glossy pictures of piles of nuts and raisins look like a gourmet's paradise. I am staggered by the numbers of cookbooks, magazines and specialist shops catering for vegetarians.
Over the decades, perhaps, meat eating will diminish and eventually disappear. People will look back on the carnivorous past of their species and shudder with moral superiority, as we do when we consider how our ancestors treated women and slaves. Small groups of depraved recidivists will meet in secret for illegal barbecues, as they do now for cockfights. We will be at peace with the animal world, if not - yet - with ourselves. But then, of course, a host of other moral questions will present themselves. What should we do with our carnivorous pets? How to reconcile the lion and the lamb?
Meanwhile I have a freezer full of meat, laid in before the new regime, and a reluctance - based on habit as much as good housekeeping - to take the oath at present. My attitude is perhaps best described by St Augustine: "Lord, make me a vegetarian, but not yet.'
