Here in St. Andrews I had a very funny conversation with a colleague. I don’t know how much you know about haggis (you could look it up), but it’s the quintessential example of a food where you really really don’t want to know where it comes from.
I mentioned to my colleague that three years ago, when I first visited Dundee, a friend had taken me to a restaurant where they served vegan haggis. My colleague was astonished by this revelation.
Getting into the spirit of things, he asked me “Which part of the plant do they use, exactly.”
Warming up to the theme, I replied “You really don’t want to know.”
Then I pretended to hesitate, out of a sense of delicacy. “Actually, it’s the part of the plant that, well you know…” and here I feigned an embarrassed silence, a delicate understanding that to say any more would require me to cross a line of discretion that must not be crossed.
We both laughed, and then I had a thought.
“You know,” I said to him. “The way that we just had a fake conversation, because we were talking about plants?”
He nodded.
“Well,” I continued, “the way that it would have been real if we weren’t talking about plants. That’s why I’m vegan.”
He totally got it.
Only yesterday I was thinking how free I feel since eating vegan. It is amazing how the mind shifts once the body has forgotten meat. What was previously consumed without question, feels now so unquestionably wrong to eat.