My Meatless Month

Those who have been visiting the Omphaloskeptic since its earliest days will know that I love food.  This includes meat of all descriptions. You’ll also know that, for some time, I’ve harboured some concerns about how the meat I consume is produced and what its environmental and social impacts are. I’ve held forth on each of these subjects at some length in earlier posts (see here, here and here).  As of this morning it has now been one full calendar month since I’ve eaten any meat.

I’ve never been enamoured with the concept of New Year’s resolutions; it’s always seemed to me that if you want to make some sort of change you should simply do it rather than waiting for a specific date.  Obviously this can be hard if that major change desired necessitates major surgery; such procedures are usually best booked in advance.  However, as 2010 began to draw to a close I recognised that, yet again, I had let a significant amount of time pass without making any real effort to cut down on my, by western standards, already minimal meat consumption.  Thinking about this I realised that I was simply too lazy to make any real effort, to see how long I could go without eating meat.  That’s when I decided, come 1 January 2011 I would see how long I could go without eating meat.

I didn’t mention this decision to anyone until dinner on New Years Eve a meal that consisted of smoked salmon and cheese fondue.  I’m not sure why, maybe I thought I’d change my mind, but I am happy to report that this first month has passed relatively hassle free.  There have been a few days where I’ve been obsessed by thoughts of a nice juicy steak or some  pepperoni pizza.  One Sunday, returning home from a 30 mile cycle ride in near freezing conditions, I was almost knocked out of the saddle by the wave of joy and hunger that hit me when I caught the smell of bacon frying at a roadside cafe but I kept going.  For the most part though dropping meat from my diet entirely hasn’t been a terribly difficult experiment to maintain.

I’m still eating fish and plenty of other meatless proteins.  Perhaps this is why I can’t say that I feel any different, better or worse, than when I was still a practising carnivore.  At the same time I’m not willing or ready to say I’ll never consume animal flesh again.  There are, to my mind, a lot of good reasons to give up meat, or at least eat as little as possible or necessary.  As far as I can tell it’s a responsible and simple thing to do in terms of protecting the environment and trying make a small effort to make sure that there is as much food available to as many people as possible.

At the same time I know that, in the past, I have tried and failed to become a complete vegetarian.  After each of those two failures I returned to my carnivorous habits with a vengeance as if I was trying to make up for lost time.  So for now, and because I’m eating fish, I’m not going to call myself a vegetarian.  I am going to see if I can’t make it through another month – rather convenient that February happens to be the shortest of them all – and if I do another after that.  However if, at some point in the coming year I break down and have that steak or that pepperoni pizza I’m hoping and planning that that decision will be a temporary blip and that I’ll return to my pesky ways at the next meal.

Two Car Guilt

Without any real plan to do so, the Omphaloskeptic homestead has suddenly become that most middle-class of beasts: a two car household.  Despite being able to explain all the steps of logic and decision as well as the pertinent financial circumstances that led to this development I have to admit to feeling rather confused and slightly guilty over the fact that there is a one-to-one ratio of cars to drivers in my home.    I know I probably shouldn’t, but I can help but worry that I’ve started down the slippery slope to driving  some sort of V12, 4X4 that is the stuff of many a climate-change denier’s dreams.    Given that I was intimately involved in the decision to have two cars I don’t feel I am best placed to judge my level of guilt or petroleum-based selfishness.  Instead I’ll give all you readers out there the opportunity to play judge and jury and pronounce on the severity of my transgressions.  Hopefully my personal, anecdotal observations will spark a bit of thought about some important issues.

So . . . how did my wife and I end up with two cars?

We’ve had our trusty Polo for a good five years and, in that time put over 140,000 miles on it.  That’s a huge amount of driving, but it was simply unavoidable.  My wife’s job sees her sent all over the country and, most usually, she has to present herself at a time of the morning at which even the earliest of public transport would see her many miles and hours away.  This gives her/us three options:

1. She could quit her job (that doesn’t make much economic sense)
2. She could leave the evening before and stay in hotels (this is not affordable and, on some days, not even possible)
3. She can drive a low-emission car to get where she needs to be (this, obviously, is the option we think makes the most sense)

As regular readers will know we had a run of rather serious car trouble earlier this year.  To make a long story short we’ve spent nearly as much on our old car as its total resale value in the last 6 months.  It has served us well and has some miles left in it, but it’s not a vehicle you’d choose to drive across a snowy rural landscape for 3 hours starting before dawn only to make a return journey after sunset.  It makes funny noises and there’s a strong likelihood of a hole appearing in the floor soon.  The electric mirrors haven’t been electrified in 3 or more years and the window cranks are getting, well, cranky.  One of them came off in my hand the other day and it was only with a great deal of effort that I was able to the get the associated window closed.  At this point in its life it doesn’t make a great deal of economic sense to spend much money on what is a very old, if very faithful automobile.   Any day it could slip into a terminal decline of failed starts and bits dropped by the side of the motorway.

The car we chose to replace the Polo produces fewer emissions, has many fewer miles on the clock, gets great gas mileage and is very, very safe.  As you might expect it’s nicer to drive; heck it’s a nicer place to sit.  We toyed with the idea of including the Polo on part exchange toward the new car but it’s worth so little at this point that all we would have been doing was trading it away to gain a benefit worth less than the tax and insurance remaining on it.  We could have scrapped the Polo but we don’t throw things away, ever, which is a whole different problem.  There’s no way we could sell the thing privately without feeling we’d cheated any buyer of his or her money so we kept it.  If it passes its next MOT then we’ll keep it a bit longer.  If it fails and we have to spend more than 100 quid or so to put it right than it won’t make any sense to keep the car and our once noble steed will be sent to the knacker’s yard.  In the meantime we still have two cars and I still feel confused and a bit guilty.

So far, I’ve avoided making any journeys I would not have made back in the days when we only had one vehicle.  I’m still walking and cycling where I need to go rather than spending my days tearing up and down Devon’s once peaceful lanes with lead in my shoes and hatred in my heart.  The fact that having two cars hasn’t, so far at least, increased the number of car journeys my wife and I make between us is, I think, a good thing.  We do, however, have the option using the second car on those rare occasions where we both need to get someplace inaccessible by public transport that caused so many problems in the past.

At the same time the fact that I haven’t needed to make use of the vehicle now constantly at my disposal makes me wonder if we’re really justified in keeping the Polo.  Perhaps I’m justifying the same pack-rat tendencies that mean I still have cards from restaurants I ate at over a decade ago in my passport wallet and system discs for Windows 98 in my attic.  Maybe the redneck in me is hoping at some secret and subconscious level that it will be necessary to put the Polo on cinder blocks in front of house where it will become a garden for blossoming rust and a home for empty beer cans and empty shells.  Who knows?  I certainly can’t figure it out and I certainly don’t want to drive the car unless I absolutely have to given my concerns about pollution and what it’s doing to our world.

My reasoning makes sense to me and, when I read over what I’ve written, I feel less confused about how I wound up a member of a two-car household.  Of course, criminals are good at self-justification.  So, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I invite you to retire for deliberations on my guilt and innocence.

A Better World is a Bloody Pain

So, some sort of ‘motion’ back by my native country has been passed in Copenhagen.  There’s more on that here.  I’m going to restrain my impulse to comment on it at this point as anything I might say would be little more than a reflexive howl of pain and disillusion.   I would like to share a cartoon that seems to be making the rounds of a number of American blogs and that, I believe, originally appeared in USA Today though it appears to be syndicated by the NY Times.

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