It has occurred to me more than once that I really must endeavour not to be a bad person, because that would increase my chances of being reincarnated as the absolute lowest form of life — no, not plankton or one of those insects that lives on dung, but even worse than that — a male vegetarian.
The same male vegetarians were in the news last week because the Harvard School of Health has warned that tofu, something of a veggie staple, appearing in anything from soy sausages to yoghurt to energy bars, can have an adverse effect on male fertility, with even modest amounts significantly lowering sperm count.
It gets better. It seems that all this is due to soya compounds called isoflavones, which mimic the female sex hormone, oestrogen. So there you have it — male vegetarians are shooting blanks and not enough of them. On top of that, they are stuffing themselves full of oestrogen and practically turning into girls. Is that Jeremy Clarkson I hear cheering?
Pity the male vegetarian. Female vegetarians such as myself have it easy. All we have to contend with is the occasional boyfriend who can’t understand that the offer of a bacon sandwich loses its admittedly intense comic power the 300th time around. We also have to do a lot of lip-biting at dinner parties as someone finds out you are vegetarian and instantly launches into a spiel about how they would never eat ”cruel meat”, just ”organic”, presumably from a magical farm where no animal ever dies, and they are all saved at the last moment by an ingenious spider writing messages in her web.
However, that’s about it for the female vegetarian as far as being hassled goes. For women, vegetarianism doesn’t automatically mean unfeminine, unsexy and boring. If you are a female vegetarian and unsexy, unfeminine and boring, you managed that all by yourself. For the most part, female vegetarianism seems to be somehow lumped in with other baffling lady pursuits such as feminism, menstruation and ”getting” Sarah Jessica Parker, a case of: ”We’ll put up with it, because you can’t help it; after all, you’re only girls.”
So pity the male vegetarian who needs real courage and fortitude, as he is battered from all sides by the incomprehension and ridicule of the world around him. On the one hand, he’s bullied by the likes of Gordon Ramsay, increasingly the comedy Sergeant Major of carnivores (”Eat this bacon, you ‘orrible little man”). On the other, he’s perceived as somehow unmanly (pasty, unsexy) by the ladies. Indeed, I have often thought that, if it weren’t for Paul McCartney, the male vegetarian would be right up there with Lembit Opik as The Guy No One Wants To Be. What’s more, is it my imagination, but, in terms of the perceived link between meat-eating and machismo, are things actually getting worse?
You only have to look at our TV food programmes to realise that the climate is changing. Once, merely cooking animals was deemed enough. These days, the chef must be sent out into the wild, armed only with a TV camera crew and an Ernest Hemingway delusion, to catch and kill the animal, bird or fish before our very eyes.
There is also a new TV fashion for keeping animals (chickens, pigs, lambs) in your back garden, as kind of quasi-pets, giving them names, letting the viewers get attached and, in the last episode, slaughtering them. A bit like the Blue Peter tortoise, only with increased viewing figures and blood.
Watching this, you ask: is this ”me, hunter” syndrome a man-thing? And of course it is. You don’t see Nigella running amok through wildlife with a knife, while Delia gets her mince from a tin. And if killing your own stuff for the table is suddenly perceived to be sexy, the latest way of being über-male, is the male vegetarian doomed to be denounced as even less attractive, even more weedy, ever before? Well not necessarily.
When you think about it, soya is too ubiquitous for this Harvard report only to be directed at vegetarians. Moreover, hard times are coming for animals and those who rather like them. I have seen it suggested that the economic crisis may see a decrease in the expensive, ozone-ruinous farming of livestock. However, I fear that what will actually happen is that the world will simply become even crueller and more penny-pinching in its treatment of them.
In this hostile, ultra-macho, morally arid climate, to stand up and be counted as a male vegetarian must require cojones of immense size, much bigger balls, in fact, than your average carnivorous wimp, who just goes along with the crowd. So pity him no longer, for it could be that the male vegetarian is suddenly looking kind of sexy again. – guardian.co.uk