I mean, what if that were my own potbellied pig out there?

Okay, so pig is the wrong word; let’s say gourmand. — Would I be able to eat him?

Look, have no illusions here; I’m fairly certain that Oliver would be feasting on my bloated corpse the moment I breathed my last. He might do so sadly, with a tear in his eye, but still manage to splatter bits of my entrails all over the kitchen floor. He is, after all, a meat eater. A very messy one. He’s just built that way.

So are we…kind of. We can do quite well on a non-meat diet and people have been proving that for quite some time. Let’s face it: meat eaters, of which I am one, really have no good excuse except maybe to say that it’s tasty.

I can’t rightly say don’t eat meat, just maybe not so much. And even less baby animals; that just doesn’t seem right, does it? While we’re at it, why not choose meat from an animal that has had a decent life? Of course you pay more for that, and that’s because it really should be a premium: Eat it less and savour it more. Veggies are, pound for pound, dirt cheap anyway, even if you buy organic which simply means your food’s been exposed to less crap. Save money, potentially more healthy, and happier creatures. I fail to see the downside.

Those who will tell you free-run, organic whatever tastes better are, for the most part, sadly deluded. The non-organic fruit tastes as good as the organic, the free-run don’t run on the butter better than the no-free-run — now three times fast.

There is this one milk that, to me, seems less gamey and more creamy than other local brands, but aside from that I wouldn’t recommend buying these things for improved flavour. Some, like fruit, will actually go bad quicker than the non-organic versions, but that’s probably because bacteria aren’t repelled by it.

Ultimately, it seems like it’s not a bad thing to be a bit more mindful of where our food comes from, even if just for ourselves. Making food more precious makes it taste better somehow, despite what I’ve just stated in the previous paragraph. It’s the difference between a single orange and a crate-full. You’ll never eat the whole crate before they rot so you can, nay must, be wasteful. You could fling armfulls at people for fun and still have a glass of freshly squeezed. A single orange, though, would be peeled so much more carefully, coquettishly even. And long after the orange was gone, the rending peel would remind your of the golden days of yesteryear, when you still had your orange.

I was going to start this paragraph with “But I digest…“, but after some reflection I came to the conclusion that I can’t stomach that kind of humour. I’ll just end by reminding you of that orange. Remember that orange? How it looked up at you with those sad, teary eyes? Remember?!

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