Eat. Meat.

It’s a very small point, but it happens so often that it bears mentioning: why, if when you’re at a restaurant or calling Mr Delivery and you happen to order a dish that does not contain meat, are you deemed to be a vegetarian? Does a pasta or a pizza with a vegetable topping not constitute a meal, that people must ask why you haven’t ordered any meat?

Don’t get me wrong – I am very much an omnivore, one of those insensitive individuals that believe if the animal is lower on the food chain then it deserves to be killed and eaten (providing it’s not an endangered species) – but there is certainly an inordinate amount of stigma attached to those who graze on greens rather than masticating on meat.

I have felt keenly aware of this judgement before – once, while working in a client’s office in Pretoria (surrounded by hefty Afrikaans men) for a few weeks, one of their employees, who I’d got to know quite well, said, “that’s not usual for a vegetarian”. Now, apart from the judgement of what is and what is not normal for a vegetarian, the man had clearly seen me eating pepper steak pies and ham sandwiches before, but due to my pale skin (yes, I asked for reasons) and (fake) blonde hair, he chose to ignore all evidence that might disrupt his world order of who eats whom and who eats shrooms. I felt compelled to prove to him that I was in fact an avid meat eater – because in my mind I was a lesser person in his eyes for being a supposed vegetarian, so for lunch the next day I brought a rare cooked fillet, and relished somewhat theatrically in the bloody juice running down my chin as I crammed the carcass into my mouth.

In another incident, I was gift shopping for a vegetarian friend of mine in Cape Town. Out of ideas, I resorted to buying her a vegetarian cook book, and I can remember that the anxiety I felt while waiting in the queue to pay for my book, instilled by the chance that someone might spot me carrying a vegetarian cook book and assume I was a vegetarian, far outweighed the anxiety I felt when waiting in a queue at an Exclusive Books in Jozi with a book with a woman’s naked ass on the cover entitled… (the name eludes me at the minute, but it definitely had the word ‘anal’ in it).

So from whence does this stigma arise? I never see any advertising campaign that markets vegetarians as lesser people – in fact, I have a fair number of close vegetarian friends that are quite remarkable people – yet somehow, the stigma exists. Is it because the alpha-male image in South Africa is considered to be a staunch Afrikaner standing next to the braai, and anything that is incongruent with this image is considered to be less than alpha-male? Though why does this affect me, a female?