A Shit Sandwich

If I handed you a salad sandwich with a thinly-sliced piece of dog shit in it, would you eat it? And then, if I took the dog shit out of your sandwich and passed it back to you, would you eat it after that? Of course you wouldn’t! Dog shit is disgusting.

For me, meat is the same as dog shit; I find them equally repugnant. I have been a vegetarian for fifty years, and for at least half of this time, I have been ridiculed for refusing to remove the piece of meat and eat the remaining sandwich.

For the first few decades of my life as a vegetarian, I was regarded as an absolute weirdo. At restaurants, generally the only option for me was a salad, which in those days consisted of iceberg lettuce, tomato and cucumber. Luckily, a full breadbasket on the table was also in vogue. Those simple salads cost me a fortune, because bills were usually split evenly amongst the group. I accepted the cost; it was the price I felt I had to pay for being different.

The worst thing however, was the frequent requirement to justify to fellow diners as to why I was vegetarian, because this invariably elicited a full-scale personal attack. Sometimes it would just be one affronted meat-eater leading the charge, sometimes it would be a veritable pile-on. Usually it would stop only when some inconsistency in my logic was discovered. “Ah, she wears leather shoes,” they would pronounce smugly to each other, as if in some way they had just demonstrated that they were in the right, and that I was in the wrong.

Remembering back to those long-ago scenes still makes me angry. For not once, in all my fifty years of being a vegetarian, have I ever asked somebody to justify why they eat meat. And I have never passed judgement or attacked anybody for their food choices.

Besides, I actually found it extremely difficult to explain in a coherent way as to why I became a vegetarian, because it was not really a decision I made. Instead, it was purely a visceral reaction.

I have spent my entire life as an animal-lover, and have had many pets. In 1975 I moved onto a rural property with my horse, rabbit, dog, chooks and partner. Naturally I befriended the small herd of steers that lived there as well. I had a particular favourite whom I called Smudgie, and I used to sing to him. But one day I arrived home to find that Smudgie, along with all the other steers, had disappeared.

A week later, I was shopping at the local butchers and looked at all of the meat on display in the glass cabinets. Suddenly it hit me. I realised that some of that meat could be Smudgie, and that was it.

Now prior to this day, I had been selective about what kinds of meat I would eat. Since very young, I’d had pet rabbits so they had been off the menu for a long time, and when I began to have chooks, I also stopped eating chicken. The thought of photos of horses adorning the walls of butcher shops in France filled me with horror, and anyway, of course, it’s not within our Australian culture to eat horse meat . . . or dog meat. So in short, I had always gagged at the thought of eating the meat of an animal species I personally knew.

However, in the case of Smudgie, it was different. My experience didn’t make me want to stop eating beef. No. That day in the butchers’ shop, I stopped seeing all meat as food and saw only the flesh of dead animals. The connection in my head was definitive, completely eradicating the usual cultural and familiarity boundaries that for me had determined which animals were food, and which were not. I could no longer differentiate; I simply couldn’t eat the meat of any animal whatsoever.

And perhaps this is the same as when I offer you a shit sandwich. I’m guessing that it actually doesn’t matter to you if the shit in the sandwich is from a dog or a cow or a kangaroo, because the bottom line is that it’s still shit! And if you find shit repulsive to eat, like I do meat, then you just can’t eat it!