It’s hard to know where to start in reviewing this book. When I finished it, I felt like I had been trapped at a stranger’s breakfast bar for two hours, too polite to leave but unable to get a word in edgeways, jumping occasionally as a fist came down on the counter. It’s so relentless you could lift sections of it and paste it seamlessly into a copy of Private Eye, except that they probably agree with her in thorny issue of what we should not be eating these days.
Apparently, Jayne Buxton has no beef with the likes of me, one of the 1.16% (gasp!) of the UK population who identify as vegan – a 20 year veggie who took the dive three years ago to become a 99.9% vegan (I’m getting there) - because I’m doing it privately, in my own time, and not publicly haranguing the Whopper noshers. No, it’s those high profile proselytizers she’s gunning for. Except she isn’t: despite what she says she wants to convert me back and she intends to stop you even going there. The book is littered with anecdotes from ex vegans whose health, they say, was all but decimated by the attempt to cut animals out of their plate. I’d have had more respect for her if she had acknowledged that those high flyers she despises like Greta Thunberg, George Monbiot, Joachim Phoenix and, er, me, are all plant eaters, or whatever she likes to call us, and actually look and feel rather well. But she has to keep up an unrelenting chorus that a vegan diet is injurious to health because it’s inextricably bound to the notion of the need for a meat and dairy industry.
But the problem is all rather muddled isn’t it? First there’s the poor farmers. It seems it’s the vegans that have been giving them bad press and not their own animal husbandry: cannibalising their cattle (but no one remembers that now!), salmonella in those eggs, mass slaughter of badgers; contamination of rivers in Wales by intensive chicken farms. Not to mention the role played by retail in keeping prices artificially low and forcing economies of scale. But as Patrick Holden of the Sustainable Food Trust opines there is ‘...no differentiation between livestock systems and meats that are part of the problem, and those that are part of the solution.’ (He’s talking about sentient animals by the way). Only he intends to educate the masses on his farm about the good guys. Pull up that drawbridge!!!
Vegans are all middle class, she jeers in one chapter and yet later on in the ‘tips’ section, she exhorts you to trade up financially on meat quality and eat less of it. Easy if you’ve got a good income but bugger all help if you live in a food desert on income support. So I think class wise we’re all in the same carriage on this one Jayne.
Anyway, even though I now run 5k twice a week and feel pretty damn good since alpha covid finally went, I can expect to suffer anything from ‘gastrointestinal conditions to neurological disorders and muscle wastage’, anytime soon. Ms Buxton said it, so it must be true. Could that be why I felt so stressed at the end of the read? The last thing I wanted to do was eat anything at all. My lovely Dad swore by the nutritious benefit of all meat and often brought home skinned rabbit, and fresh caught whole mackerel for gutting, to make ends meet. We ate bacon, pressed tongue, black pudding, boiled ham and pigs liver and the Sunday roast. For years I thought that was what you had to do. He died of colorectal cancer aged 69.
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The Booker Prize 2022
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Not all the pages were bound in my hardback copy. This was very disappointing.
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