On being vegetarian

I'm not even going to begin to explain my total lack of blogging since my New Year's resolution...! I suppose we were busy for a while and then I just got out of the habit of writing. I think we also tend to rely too much on Facebook to post pictures and news of our escapades, forgetting that a) not everyone uses Facebook and b) a time may come when we don't want to use it anymore either, and then all of our photos will disappear from the tinterweb!

It's a bit of a shame that we have let blogging slip, because I have really enjoyed reading back over the posts I wrote last year, and you quickly forget the little details of trips (especially when you are fortunate enough to go on quite a few!). Therefore I have now decided that it is necessary for me to set a weekly reminder on my phone so I don't forget to write and keep up to date.

To make up for it, I plan on doing a mammoth blog series on 'one year in Malaysia' in the run up to our 365 day anniversary. To start this off, I wanted to write more about our decision to become vegetarian since moving here. This isn't something we were expecting or planning to do, but it has actually become something that both Dan and I are now quite passionate about so I thought I'd explain how we came to the decision and why we aren't now (often) tempted to return to our former carnivorous ways. In the interests of transparency, I must admit that we are not actually vegetarian - we are pescatarian, as we both still eat fish. For some reason I find that term is just too annoying to use frequently, so apologies to any true vegetarians for hijacking your label (and I'm sorry that you still get asked all the time if you eat fish because of people like us). To make this journey more colourful I am going to intersperse this piece with random pictures of delicious vegetarian food we have enjoyed since living in Malaysia.

Indian food at a hawker centre in Singapore

For me, the first step in cutting out meat was a rather unpleasant experience at the end of what was otherwise an amazing honeymoon last year. On our penultimate night on Gili Meno we decided to treat ourselves to a dinner at one of the islands slightly more expensive and up-scale restaurants. It lived up to it's brilliant reviews and we enjoyed a lovely evening. The next day, however, was a different story - I felt terrible and have never been so violently ill. This also made for a particularly nerve-wracking two hour boat trip back to Bali... I will say no more. Suffice to say I was put off chicken a little bit that day and I no longer believe that the more you pay for a meal, the less likely it is to make you ill.

Of course, it is possible to get food poisoning from almost anything (including fish), and in Asia you even have to be careful about salads and suchlike, but I felt like cutting out meat removed one potential source of particularly nasty food poisoning. In my experience, the meat in South-East Asia is also not of a particularly good quality in most places - the chicken can be gristly, and the beef quite tough - so this put me off even further. Living in a Muslim country also makes it difficult to purchase my favourite - pork - but nevertheless, when we first lived here we would still buy meat a couple of times a week to cook at home, generally the better-quality supermarket chicken. But we both weren't entirely happy with this because of the low welfare standards - in the UK we used to try to buy free range, or at least freedom foods/high welfare chicken, which is almost impossible to find here. We were gradually reducing our meat intake, but at this point I would still jump at the chance to eat a nice big juicy cheeseburger.

Roti telur (pancake with egg), one of the cheapest and most delicious Malaysian foods

The final step came when we decided to watch a documentary on Netflix called 'Cowspiracy', which received quite a lot of media coverage recently. For those who haven't watched it, I would highly recommend doing so if you can, as it is interesting and thought-provoking even if you have no intention of becoming vegetarian. Many people don't eat meat for ethical reasons, because they don't like the idea of raising and killing animals for food, but this programme doesn't just focus on that (although it does give quite a graphic depiction of some of the factory farming environments). It's main argument is around the environmental impact of eating meat and the detrimental effect this has on the planet. This is something that most people, including me, have not previously considered about eating meat and there are some quite shocking data - for example, did you know that the average 1/4 lb hamburger requires around 460 gallons of water to produce? It has also been estimated that we actually grow sufficient food to feed every single person on the planet - but much of this is given to animals to raise them for meat. This argument had quite an impact on me and Dan, and we did a bit of research, and then decided that evening that we would just stop eating meat and see how it went.

Now, there are a few things that you might be thinking here (depending on how much you have already read or thought about this issue): 1) what about fish? 2) what about dairy? (cheese, yoghurt and milk also have a huge environmental impact because they come from cows), and 3) Bethaniel are not about to win the Environmentalists of the Year Award because they take so many bloody flights to all corners of the globe. Our answer to point 1) would be: true, but we're trying. We eat fish quite infrequently but it would unfortunately be extremely difficult to eat at many restaurants here if we completely eliminated fish as well as meat, as pure vegetarian friends of ours have discovered. We might move to a fish-free diet once we're back in the UK permanently, but for now we are compromising. In relation to point 2), we have actually cut down a lot on our dairy consumption as it is fairly expensive and not always great quality or even available. We do buy some yoghurt but don't routinely buy milk or cheese and we plan to continue this once we're back in the UK too. However, neither of us have any particular desire to become fully vegan. For now we would like to have some flexibility when eating out or with friends and family, as we know it can be difficult to cater for very restricted diets. Finally, it is point 3) that is perhaps the hardest to counter. How can we say we have become vegetarian for environmental reasons if we are still flying all over the world? I try to think of it this way: if we had continued to eat meat then our carbon footprint would be worse than it is now. We would still be going on lots of holidays, but we would also be adding to this by supporting the meat industry. Another option would have been to cut the holidays and continue to eat meat, but this seemed like the easier and more enjoyable option (I prefer beaches to burgers). Clearly, the best option would be to do neither - but we figure that doing something is better than doing nothing. We are still trying to make more environmentally-friendly choices with our travel where possible - for example, our upcoming trip to the Perhentian islands will involve a 15 hour sleeper train on the outbound trip and a 10 hour sleeper bus back, when we could have just taken a 1.5 hour flight. But we have a more environmentally-friendly option available that will also hopefully be more of an adventure (not to mention the fact that the train and bus is 80% cheaper than flying).

Eating dinner in Malacca, including a very lovely laksa

Finally, I feel I should once again emphasise Dan's role in all of this. For some reason people perceive being vegetarian as quite a feminine choice to make, and assume that if a man is a vegetarian it must be because a woman has forced him to become one. That certainly isn't the case for us. Dan has been a driving force in this and on more than one occasion I have required him to share his incredible willpower to help stop me from 'relapsing'! As most of you know, once Dan has decided to do something he will commit 100% to it, whereas I would more easily fall off the proverbial wagon despite my best intentions. But I am glad he has pushed me to stick to my decision and I am now very rarely tempted by a meat dish. We are enjoying discovering more vegetarian recipes and I have branched out a bit with my cooking. It does sometimes take a bit more thought, as we can't rely on the standard meals we often used to cook on automatic, but there are quite a few favourites that can be easily adapted. I used to love lasagne and thought a veggie version would be a bit boring, but a friend made one for us recently that was delicious and every bit as enjoyable as a meaty one (I must admit that the cheese plays an important role here!). I think the perception of vegetarianism as feminine is also partly because people think that meat is an important source of protein, but you can actually get more than enough protein from nuts, eggs, beans, legumes (whatever they are) and green vegetables - and of course fish. To inelegantly illustrate my point, here are some famous masculine men who are veggie or even vegan:

The best tennis player on the planet is a vegetarian...

...and the coolest man on the planet is too!

Even Spiderman is VEGAN!

So there we go; that is our veggie journey.

Some footnotes that the academic in me feels compelled to include:

1. It is still possible to be an environmentally un-friendly vegan or vegetarian if you eat a lot of unsustainably produced soy and other exotic foods imported from all over the world and in various forms of plastic packaging. Eating locally produced food that is in season and without packaging, and reducing meat and dairy consumption as much as possible is possibly better for the environment than being a vegan who eats lots of individually-packaged avocado salads and soy yoghurts with tiny plastic spoons.

2. All of this is based on the assumption that you are concerned about carbon footprints and the planet. If not, then these arguments are going to sound a bit weird. But if you are a bit of a global warming sceptic then I will refer you to our very clever friend, and Dan's squash buddy, Professor Ed Hawkins knows quite a bit on the subject: http://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/author/ed/  Even if you are still not convinced that human activity contributes to the warming of the planet, few people dispute that there is an increasing amount of deforestation going on to make way for animal feed to be grown, and for land for the animals themselves to live on. This is having a negative impact on the rainforest wildlife and causing some species, such as orangutans, to be in danger of extinction. And who doesn't love orangutans? Look:

3. Despite what I have said, this doesn't mean that if you haven't become vegetarian by the time that I next see you I will think you're an evil orangutan murderer. Everybody makes their own choices and I am just trying to explain how Dan and I made ours, given how many people have been curious about the process, and why we care about these particular issues. And I fully accept that I am a terrible environmentalist.