FOR LENT, I AM ABSTAINING from vegetables. It may seem counter-intuitive, because “Carnival” or “Carni Vale”—which the English in their glum way call “Shrove Tuesday” and the French, more cheerfully, call “Mardi Gras” — means “Goodbye to Meat”.
The worldly, historic purpose of Lent is to eke out deficient livestock, doomed, unless slaughtered, to die, emaciated and inedible, on sparse or frozen pastures. Nowadays, however, vegetables seem a sacrifice both reasonable and pious.
If I wanted to be lampooned in Private Eye, I’d say that vegetables are the new meat: marketed as dietetically superior, and flattering to a moral form of snobbery.
Like meat in the old days, they are the preferred food of people who want to look down on the rest of us. Flesh and fish are now…