Cork: A taste of the future
IT’S NOT hard to understand cultural apathy to vegetarianism in a society where cattle were once the hard currency, where a herd defined a chieftain, a cow a privileged but still-encumbered cottier.
That apathy seems a natural nonchalance in a society that wove its great sagas around cattle raids.
You may as well ask a Basque not to drink rioja.
Vegetarianism was never an easy sell in a country where the failure of a crop was at the root of the greatest catastrophe in our history.
My indifference, though not as strong as it once was — if indifference can ever be strong — is informed by a learnt-in-the-cradle love of good, ethically-produced meat.
The fact that one of history’s greatest murderers — Hitler — was an evangelising vegetarian is also a marginal influence. This may not be entirely rational linkage but it fits for me.
Many years ago, decades if I’m honest, this indifference inspired my only adventure as an entrepreneur though, at the time, I had not the slightest idea that I was one. Time has confirmed that I am not.
I had 500 t-shirts (all either L, XL or XXL, no faffing around with tidy sizes) customised.
The image was strong — two, unmuzzled greyhounds turning a hare on a coursing field.
The legend was simple, with a simple hook: Ban Hare Coursing, Use Vegetarians.
My target market was the fancy at the three-day National Coursing Meeting in Clonmel.
My stall was the back of a well-travelled, leaking Renault 4 — the original SUV — and the t-shirts were gone in a day.
Only the limits of the R4 and pre-mobile communications prevented me getting another batch to Clonmel. An Irish Versace lost? Maybe, maybe not.
But, before you, in temper, decapitate your child with a handy bag of frozen French beans, please try to remember that way back then Political Correctness was more likely a joint favourite in the Hotel Minella Oaks than a civilising influence on a young, innocentish, hustler trying to pay his car insurance.
And if irony can facilitate vengeance then vegetarianism’s moment has arrived. It is about to save the world.
Report after report warns that the world’s population will, by mid-century, have outstripped traditional agriculture’s ability to provide a western, meat-based diet for us all.
We won’t have the water, the land needed grow animal feeds and then, later in the cycle, the land needed to rear animals and absorb their waste.
Some sources, the UN included, have suggested that we are on the cusp of having to redefine the diet that helped homo sapiens scramble to the top of evolution’s greasy pole. All of that seems plausible so we, DW and I, went to the Quay Co-op to taste the future.
The food is served in a bright, airy room overlooking the Lee. There are no menus and you queue, carvery-style, for your food.
DW, who I suspect would happily live as a vegetarian with just the occasional something dead, chose wild mushroom risotto, with potato wedges and a salad.
House rules may have precluded the butter and Parmesan that backbone a risotto’s luxurious, deep-pile richness but even if they were used they were terribly underused. Truth is that the dish was so very gloopy, so stodgy-grey we couldn’t believe they were.
My main plate was a tart of broccoli and red peppers and if it was entirely grand it was unprepossessing and as anonymous as traffic lights. A salad, though visually varied, tasted flat but strangely over-zested.
The potatoes, described as being roasted with coconut, were egg-box dead and should have been consigned to the compost heap days earlier. Desserts, a trifle and a strawberry and apple crumble, resonated purity but were not remotely celebratory.
Maybe different criteria apply when considering a cause rather than an enterprise. In the Quay Co-Op the friendliness and enthusiasm usual amongst those serving a principle rather than time was obvious, but it was a pity that the food was so dull that only a committed vegetarian might enjoy it.
And that’s a real pity because there is so much more to a philosophy we all may have to embrace.
Lunch, two courses, coffee and tea and a fizzy elderflower pressé came to €35.65.
Nine to nine, Monday to Saturday.
Food: 5/10
Service: 8/10
Ambiance: 8/10
Value: 6/10
