Has Sam de Brito given up?

It’s midday, dark, pissing down with rain, and I’m supposed to be finishing my PhD application. There’s water seeping through the walls and on the living room floor because the landlord has ignored three years of requests for the useless guttering to be replaced. So much for protecting your investment. But they have just put the rent up again.

Man Friend is at uni (hopefully) finishing an assigment for his Masters. My best friend and her partner are packing up their house to leave Sydney in two days. We’ll grab a couple of pizzas for them tonight, and then there will 400km between us.

As I said, I’m meant to be PhD-ing, which is why I just read Sam de Brito’s column in today’s Sun Herald. (Hendo, this one’s for you.) Sam’s topic is “why veganism is against nature”. His arguments are so obvious that I’m not sure he even believes them himself. Maybe he was having a bad writing day?

Is there anything more tedious than a vegan?

I dunno Sam, what about a tired cliche? That’s pretty tedious.

Vegans, especially the militant, preachy ones, tell us eating meat is barbaric and unncessary, yet they wouldn’t have a mind complex enough to conceive of the term “barbarism” or be able to spell the word “unnecessary” if it wasn’t for the increased brain-size meat provided for our distant ancestors.

Oh, yawn. C’mon Sam, it’s like you’re not even trying anymore. Why not just say “if we weren’t meant to eat animals, then why are they made of meat”?

Miranda’s offally funny

I don’t normally read Miranda Devine’s opinion pieces because frankly, I couldn’t give two hoots what she thinks. And she’ll only make me angry. But her first sentence in today’s piece in the Sydney Morning Herald – Bottoms up in simply offal world – had me laughing so much I had to read on:

Here’s another thing to blame on greenies: the revolting trend of nose-to-tail eating.

Apparently the greenies, who can’t even get politicians in Australia to agree to decent cuts to emissions, have managed to convince cultures all around the world to eat parts of animals that make Miranda a bit squeamy. Cultures that have been eating offal for longer than the environmental movement has existed. Hang about, let me finish laughing so I can write something scathing.

You can’t go into a restaurant these days without finding some gruesome item on the menu, like sweetbreads – see the euphemisms offal-eaters must employ to justify their perverted indulgences. As if frogs legs and snails weren’t bad enough. Now we have to contend with rolled pig’s spleen and roast bone marrow. Gulp.

Really Miranda? People eating things you don’t like is the biggest worry you have this week? Aren’t there asylum seekers or Nobel Peace Prize recipients or feminists you could be railing against?

Visiting another sister in Tokyo last year, my family dined at a shabu shabu restaurant with no English menu or English-speaking waiters. We pointed at the fragrant bubbling pot on the table next door and in broken Japanese explained that was what we wanted to eat. The waiters seemed surprised and tried to dissuade us. No, that was what we wanted. And that was what we got.

The bunsen burner arrived with the pot of broth and a side dish of herbage. So far so good. On the boil we plunged in the veggies and ladled ourselves out the delicious smelling concoction. Mmmmm … until the faces around the table changed slowly, from contentment to wonder, to abject disgust.

In our mouths was a meat of indeterminate origin. Meat was too fine a description, really. It was morsels of gristle, slightly spongy, tasteless, but with a faint je ne sais quoi that made the tongue recoil in horror.

Oh, the horror.

Personally, I’m not a fan of offal – I can’t quite get there yet after 14 years of vegetarianism – but I do admire people who eat everything. It’s very Anglo to only eat meat that doesn’t look like it came from an animal, wrapped in plastic at the supermarket. But for Miranda Devine to spend 894 words having a whinge about what some people eat, and blaming it on the green movement, is the funniest thing I’ve read all week.