I can't eat. This is something I would not normally complain about, but all I want to do is eat. It's just that I can't.
Over the last few days my entire culinary world has been turned upside down:
A British Rail bacon sandwich on the way up to visit the Ginger Pig Poultry Farm? Not happening.
A chicken fajita wrap from the sandwich bar on the corner? Can't face it.
A walk round the supermarket whose shelves are simply heaving with products from ready meals to neatly packed sausages, all in a row in the chill cabinet? Walk on by.
Instead I peer at the vacuum packed meats examining the flesh. I check the steaks for bruising and the lamb chops for red pin pricks - both signs of a stressed animal (I must look as though I have the measles) - and even though I find neither, I still return the packages to the shelf.
'Is it because you're writing a book about meat? ' A friend asked, imagining that I had grown squeamish all of a sudden because of the brutality of the butcher's block. This would be a fair guess given that last Thursday I walked through a field with mud the colour of toffee coming well over my ankles while around me milled a flock of snow white honking geese doing skittish comedy waddling with outstretched wings like fat men trying to balance themselves, and another swarming flock of dark bronze turkeys, screeching like fishwives - all of which were going to end up head down in a plastic funnel before getting the chop, just in time for Christmas. But no, I did the whole tour of the farm, fighting my way through the turkeys and the geese who surveyed each other warily like the Jets and the Sharks from their own corner of the field, visiting everything from the 3 day old chicks under sun lamps thinking that life is just one long spa treatment with tanning beds, to the abattoir where 41 days later they are hung and drawn (but not quartered) without feeling anything but twinge of nostalgia for all those fairy tales I read as a child about the little Goose Girl. It's not at all off-putting. It's proper farming. The birds seem to be doing what birds do and look well cared for, and if you plan to eat poultry this is definitely the kind of poultry you should be eating. The Ginger Pig Farm is an equally qualm free enterprise and would put no omnivore off his or her Sunday Roast. On the contrary, it's the other farming practices that have turned me against eating meat.
Where does the chicken in your Club Sandwich come from? What about the bacon in a BLT? Has it ever stood in a field in its life? Does the beef in your pie come from Botswana? Or Brazil? How long has it been in that vacuum pack? What part of the animal are you eating? And don't even get me started on sausages...
But modern life has become so much about convenience and I'm as guilty as the next person of picking up a loin of pork in a hermetically sealed package without asking or caring where it came from beyond aisle 10 of the supermarket, or cutting up a chicken breast for a stir fry without caring that it wasn't free range. Knowing now that it might have come from China has taken the edge of my appetite. I'm also Scottish - our whole cuisine (and yes, I use the term loosely) is based on mince... What can I cook now that the only minced meat I ever intend to eat will have to have been ground in my own kitchen? That takes time. I don't have time. I have a microwave. But after spending hours with a tape recorder talking about beef I'll never be able to buy another box of ravioli with meat stuffing without shuddering and wondering what's inside it.
And yes, I can and do (on occasion) make my own pasta and stuff it with my own ragout - but I am not an Italian housewife from the 1950s. I'm a woman who eats crispbread because it doesn't get mouldy as quickly as bread. The main reason I eat meat is because I don't have to think about it and it feeds a lot of people. Every night I have to provide a meal for 4 adults. One hates meat but has no moral objection to it so will happily eat the roast potatoes cooked in the fat, one won't eat pork, another won't eat anything on any given day that she has contentedly eaten on the previous one. So, I want certainties. You bung a leg of lamb in the oven, surround it with vegetables and go off and leave it for an hour and a half, come back and instantly you're mama Walton, slapping the big dish on the table - listen, you can hear that Bisto tune playing in my head. But now the lamb is in a vacuum pack from one of those countries that allows sheep to wear lipstick and it may very well not have come from a happy lamb.
I could, of course, shop responsibly and buy all my meat from a proper organic producer but frankly, I can't afford to - not unless I choose the cheap cuts and they, like everything else in my house, including me, need time and attention that is in short supply. The local farmers' market is fantastic, but it's only on once a week and I need something now. Right now!
So I'm hungry. There's nothing I can buy to eat with my vegetables except cheese: until I start to think too hard about the horrors of dairy farming which puts me off my cheddar. So, I shop for an hour and leave the supermarket with a trolley full of healthy green stuff, pulses, tofu, and a huge bottle of vodka.
I might not be able to have a cheap hamburger, but I can still get plastered.
