Hedging your Veggie Betting in Warsaw

I walked into the centre yesterday to buy some new ski gloves. I had cause to shell out as later I was picking up my new bike from a friend. Betsy Mk. 1 was stolen from inside my klatka in Powiśle, so let Betsy Mk 2, who shall heneceforth be known as Maggie, have a luckier life.

The place was deserted. As Warsaw goes through its big freeze – with Meteo.pl saying the range goes between -15 and -23c – people take to their homes and stay there, only going out if they absolutely have to. This is proper Mróż, breathing is sharp about the lungs and exposed bones ache within minutes. On TVP they’ve just announced the lowest recorded temperature of -25c.

I don’t really mind, this year I’m a lot better prepared than last year (memo to all Brits turning up in October, it isn’t enough to just pull your collar up a little: have a proper winter coat with hood, insulated boots and ski-socks) and with all the gear it can be quite nice to go for a long walk, nevertheless I tram it home and make a warm vegetable soup for the rest of the week, before heading out to pick up Maggie.

And it’s vegetables I want to quickly cover in today’s post. Just after New Year’s Eve  (which in Poland is called Sylwestre for reason’s I haven’t quite got round to understanding. This Sylwster guy must have been quite a party animal to get the whole night named after him) I read a book called Eating Animals by Johnathan Safran Froer.

Part personal memoir and part journalistic enterprise, Froer explores the factory farming industry and all of the consequences of its production – on our health (not good news) our planet (even worse) on the animals (worse than cruel). As he quotes endless sanctimonious animal rights activists and goes on about his Grandmother’s excellent chicken soup, I began to tire somewhat. Then in three concise pages he summarises a chicken’s 39 days of life (genetically manipulated, tortured and abused) and death (beyond description and only comparable to the death camps of Treblinka, Sobibór and Bełżec – and that is not something I say flippantly). I decided there and then that I was really not able to support this anymore, especially because I don’t need to eat the amount of meat I do (around once a day). 

Look into it yourself and see what you think.. if you're a sentient human being I challenge you to disagree.

And then the excuses and slips start flying in.,,,

In Częstechowa, we arrive to go to a club. It’s 23.00 and nowhere except McDonalds and Kebab shops is open. Low blood sugar and the knowledge of a long night ahead force me to break my meat-fast and have a Big Mac. A one-off, I assure myself, anyway beef is the least intensively farmed meat there is, so that’s OK. Yeah?

Next, another long journey to Cieszyn and another long night ahead. We arrive at the house of my friend Lukasz’s and his devout mother welcomes us in.  A turkey kotlet lies before me in minutes, with salad, green beans, potatoes and pickled cucumbers. I’m starving, and I know how good that's will taste. If, in the Polish phrase of which I am most fond, a Guest in the Home is God in the Home, then I was about to do a most unholy thing.

Then the floodgates burst and I find myself eating fish quite regularly, and even a ham sandwich when I have to rush into work early. It’s just quite difficult to live by your principles in Poland.... yeah, that's my excuse for my moral failings. I go for a meal in the excellent restaurant Papu on Niepodległośći – not one item on the menu is vegetarian friendly except the kids’ options. You see, I really have no choice... right?

I decide that the only way I keep this up is by reading Eating Animals on a continual loop. 

But the memory of those three pages on chicken remained. Yesterday I was in Carrefour picking up the ingredients for my soup. I’d already decided to cave in and eat this last, remaining meat because it makes such a good stock for soups. But one look at the offering on the counter persuaded me otherwise: the pitted skin, the brown stain of the chemical burn used to remove the feathers. It brought back those three pages of Froer's book so tellingly - I had unlearnt my love of this meat.

Because what I was looking at was not meat, as most of us understand it.

And I didn’t buy it. The soup was fine without and I realised that I wasn’t quite as spineless and as greedy as my various culinary defeats indicated,  that there was a limit.

So now I’m one of those sancitimonious animal rights activists too, except worse, because I’m a hypocritical sanctimonious animal rights activist, but I can live with that. 

ps. don't worry, I will refrain from over-moralising here. First we need to get over mr Alexander Boot, then we can move onto over-furred Babcias and the usual PzW ilk.