Monstrous Festive
How Going Vegan Ruins Christmas Forever
On Christmas Day 1889, playwright and notorious vegetarian crank George Bernard Shaw set off on a bracing solitary walk from Broadstairs to Margate in the south-east of England, finding nothing to please him anywhere he ventured. Especially the food.
…[T]he ozone had made me so ragingly hungry that I burst from the train and ran all the way to Nuckell’s Place, where, to my unspeakable horror and loathing, they triumphantly brought me up a turkey with sausages. “Surely, sir,” they said, as if remonstrating with me for some exhibition of depravity, “surely you eat meat on Christmas Day.” “I tell you,” I screamed, “that I never eat meat.” “Not even a little gravy, sir? I think it would do you good.” I put a fearful constraint on myself, and politely refused. Yet they came up again, as fresh as paint, with a discolored mess of suet scorched in flaming brandy; and when I conveyed to them, as considerately as I could, that I thought the distinction between suet and meat, burnt brandy and spirits, too fine to be worth insisting on, they evidently regarded me as hardly reasonable. There can be no doubt that the people here are mentally enfeebled. The keen air causes such rapid waste of tissue that they dare not add to it by thinking.
