On the Veg

It was a conversation I couldn’t have imagined having a year ago, let alone two years.

‘What do you want to do for Lent?’ I asked PDB11.

Last year’s attempt at fasting one day a week had not gone well, to say the least.  I had written a list of goals in my diary, including the following:

Lent Aspirations 2022 – joint
Fast at least one day a week
Make the community soup-and-roll lunch our lunch one day a week
Read Embracing Justice by Isabelle Hamley
Have one prayer session together per day

Lent Aspirations 2022 – me
Go on at least one all-day walk per week (weather permitting)
Practise playing hymns every day
Practise meditating where possible
Write at least one blog post per week
Go on litter-picking walks
Most importantly – try to stay sane

In practice, I/we didn’t manage any of these – and particularly not staying sane.  We did eventually get back to reading Embracing Justice, and found it a very interesting book – but to be able to engage with it, I needed not to be edgy with hunger.

So this year, we needed to find something achievable that wasn’t likely to drive either of us to a nervous breakdown.  I asked PDB11 what he wanted to do, and he said, ‘I’d like to go vegan for Lent.’

In the perspective of history and geography, this shouldn’t seem so unreasonable.  For most of the past 2000 years, Christians have traditionally given up meat, eggs, dairy, and in most cases fish, from Ash Wednesday until Easter (with the exception of Sundays).  This, after all, was the point of Shrove Tuesday: you make pancakes to use up the eggs, milk and lard that you won’t be using in the weeks to come.  Nowadays this has gone out of fashion in western culture, as the Wikipedia article on Lent describes:

 

‘Fasting practices are considerably relaxed in Western societies today, though in the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Eastern Catholic, and Eastern Lutheran Churches abstinence from all animal products including eggs, fish, fowl, and milk is still commonly practiced, so that, where this is observed, only vegetarian (or vegan) meals are consumed for the whole of Lent, 48 days in the Byzantine Rite. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church’s practices require a fasting period that is a great deal longer, and there is some dispute over whether fish consumption is permissible.’

 

Yet today, climate scientists keep telling us that we need to keep fewer domestic animals and eat less animal produce, and that considering how much more agricultural land it takes to produce a kilo of protein from meat or milk than from beans, if you’re not living on the veg you’re taking up too much space.  Not only that, they point out, but while most of us have moral objections to factory-farming, it takes even more space to graze a free-range animal than it does to grow fodder for an intensively reared one – and grass-fed cattle do far more to wreck the environment with methane-filled burps than cattle fed a specially designed cake would do. 

In practice, of course, it’s not as clear-cut as the handy comparison charts make it look.  For one thing, a lot of the land which livestock are farmed on is used for grazing precisely because it isn’t suitable for growing crops (too marshy, too rocky, too hilly, or whatever). 

Secondly, you may use less land in growing crops than in rough pasture, but you use it more intensively.  You can graze animals in meadows full of assorted grasses and wildflowers and butterflies, as long as you keep moving them around so that they don’t over-graze one area too much.  You can graze them in small fields edged with hedgerows that birds can nest in, without worrying about how to manoeuvre a tractor in a field that size.  You don’t plough or spray insecticides, and you don’t need fuel for machines to mow or spread manure because the animals are happy to do that themselves.

So I’m certainly not arguing that everyone should go completely vegan.  All the same, if farmers kept fewer animals and people consumed less meat, and if dairy products were a staple food for children but an occasional treat for adults, there is plenty of pastureland which could usefully be turned into forest – preferably not monocultures of timber for harvesting, but diverse mixed woodland.  If we’re going to protect biodiversity, we need meadowland and hedgerows, but we need much more forest, too.

If it is going to be profitable for farmers to change the way they farm, however, then consumers need to change the way they eat.  Why should it be a radical step to adopt a plant-based diet for a mere forty days, when our ancestors have been regularly doing the same every year for centuries?

All the same, a year ago this would have seemed too big a sacrifice for us to make.  Nonetheless, looking back, we have been drifting towards a more nearly plant-based diet for several years.  For the past few years we had been trying not to eat a huge amount of meat, and when we did, we tried to go for things like liver which are both strongly-flavoured (so you don’t need a huge amount to make a tasty meal) and, in Britain at least, are an unfashionable part of the animal (so if we didn’t eat them, they’d just go to waste if everyone else wanted steak instead).

Then, in 2020, came the first Covid lockdown, and a mass of panic-buying.  We turned up at the supermarket with a shopping list, only to find empty shelves where we expected meat and eggs to be.  The fake meats in the vegetarian aisle, however, were largely untouched.  We hastily rewrote our recipes – for example, might mixed grill stew, which usually features sausages, bacon and kidneys, work with Quorn sausages, soya bacon-substitute, and veggie burgers?

Some of the fake meats turned out to be revolting.  Others were surprisingly tasty.  We kept the packaging, to scribble notes on the back about which varieties worked or didn’t.  We weren’t necessarily going to give up the occasional liver casserole (after all, nobody makes fake offal), but in general, meat no longer felt like something that we needed to buy every week.

Meanwhile, PDB11 was trying to lose weight, and worked out that if we went from having breakfast cereal and milk followed by toast and margarine for breakfast to starting with just the toast, he only ate the same amount of toast that he would have done anyway, so omitting breakfast cereals meant that his overall calorie consumption was down.  So we didn’t really need to buy as much milk – though I wasn’t going to give up milk in tea, and PDB11 wasn’t planning to give up hot chocolate.

Then a couple more shifts happened.  One was that PDB11’s favourite brand of instant hot chocolate (just add hot water) became available in a vegan variety.  It turned out to be nutritionally much the same, and taste much the same, as the one with milk powder, so there was no obvious disadvantage to buying it.

The other was that my friend Doom Metal Singer was prescribed a medication which she wasn’t allowed to consume milk within several hours of taking.  Since she needed to get used to drinking her tea or coffee either black or with soya or oat milk, I took to making sure we had soya milk in the house, so that if she came round, I could offer her a drink.  I tried putting soya milk in my own tea, and was surprised to discover that it wasn’t bad.  Obviously, it didn’t taste the same as cows’ milk, but ‘different’ didn’t mean ‘bad’.  It was just an acquired taste.

I like yogurt – but it seems that even some yogurt bacteria don’t mind living on a vegan diet of soya or coconut!  It is now possible to buy non-dairy yogurts with live probiotic bacterial cultures.

Disappointingly, what isn’t easy to find is vegan cheese-substitute that is either nutritious or sustainable.  Most of the vegan ‘cheeses’ on sale are made almost exclusively of palm oil, which means that they are just pure fat with little or no protein, calcium or anything worth having.  And there isn’t necessarily a guarantee that the palm oil is sustainably sourced.  I don’t even know what the ‘cheeses’ taste like, as I have never felt inclined to buy one.  But even if they taste cheesy enough to make a tasty pizza topping, they certainly don’t make for a protein source in a cheese-based meal.

Still, I can manage without cheese, or for that matter eggs, for six weeks.  They’re nice, of course, just – not essential.

I’m now five days in (we agreed that Sundays could be days off, but I didn’t really feel any particular need for milk today), and so far, it’s going okay.  At the beginning of the week, we used up the last of our eggs and cheese on omelettes and cheesy cauliflower bake.  I checked which of the unopened foods we had contained milk (some of the crackers, and a surprisingly high proportion of the packet soups), donated them to a food bank.

On Shrove Tuesday, just before the beginning of Lent, I went to my new job in a charity shop, where one of the other volunteers had brought in a plate of pancakes to share, and another had brought a bag of family-sized slabs of milk chocolate to distribute to everyone there.  I happily accepted one, thinking I could share it with my friends at the Dungeons & Dragons group that evening.

I went along to the pub after work and waited for my friends to turn up there, only to discover that games night was cancelled (the Dungeon Master had emailed me about this at lunchtime, but I hadn’t had a chance to read the email, as I was at work).  Still, no worries.  I took the chocolate bar home in my bag, and the next day, at the church Ash Wednesday service, asked everyone who hadn’t given up chocolate for Lent to put their hands up.  Nearly everyone hadn’t, so they shared out the chocolate between them.

I’m not sure what is going to happen about the Lent Lunches of soup, bread and butter and cheese, followed by tea and cake.  These are a tradition in our village.  Although they are organised by the church, they aren’t an evangelical outreach scheme, but just a community event for people to meet in a village hall and chat over a simple shared meal.  I don’t want to miss them – but finding out which, if any, of the home-made soups on offer doesn’t have milk in, and having just this and a dry bread roll when other people are enjoying cheese sandwiches and delicious cakes, is going to be a test of resistance.

I think we do need to allow for Sundays off, especially with PDB11’s birthday, Mothering Sunday, and my birthday all coming up in the next month.  Also, at some time we need to arrange to drive up to London to visit my friend Harley Street Therapist.  We sent him a parcel at Christmas containing a Christmas present from us and his share of the Christmas cake that my mum had sent me.  The parcel didn’t find its way to him, but returned to us about a month after we had posted it, and while we had tried to arrange a time to drive up to London to give Harley Street Therapist his present in person, somehow or other it hasn’t happened yet. 

I don’t know whether the cake is even still edible by now (though a rich fruit cake which is mostly dried fruit and brandy probably has a lot of staying power) – but at some point we need to open the parcel and find out.  Then we need either to take it to its rightful owner, or just to apologise to him and take him for a meal out instead.  Either way, Lent is going to need the occasional day off.