Grass pollen allergy season has hit at last, and whilst my allergies aren’t as extreme as previous years, I’m still suffering with sinus pain. It’s hot now too, and at seven thirty at night I’m sweating a little still.
I went for a walk earlier to try to clear my head. In between ogling designer handbags and being hit on by predatory French men, I discovered that the olive trees have started to flower. The park actually smells like a jar of pickled olives. Olive trees live for five hundred years, and I imagine them growing long after I’ve gone. We’ve been cultivating olive trees for at least the last 8,000 years – the varieties we eat can only be grown from cuttings. Seeds revert back to small, large-stoned wild varieties. At least we have not bred them to sterility like bananas.
I had foie d’agneau (lamb’s liver) for tea. I pulled a large, tough vein out of the liver and left it on my plate. I studied the small, branching veins leading off the main trunk. I must have veins like this in my own liver. I imagined the clotted vein in my leg and wondered how much it has healed, whether the clot has calcified. Calcified veins are not something I want in my body.
Apparently humans can live off meat alone, as long as they eat the fat and the organs too, and make a broth from the bones and marrow. Native Americans of the North and the arctic regions are familiar with this. People forced to live off meat with little fat become ill after only a few days – it’s fat-hunger, and is known as “rabbit starvation“, with diarrhoea in about a week, headache, lassitude and vague discomfort. They can eat until their stomachs are distended, and still they will not be satisfied. Still trying to heal myself, I am now eating organ meats for the concentrated nutrition – tomorrow is coeur de boeuf.
I have been thinking a lot about vegetarianism, and how I justify eating meat now. I cannot quite put it into words. When I was first a vegetarian in my teens, my philosophy was based on need. It was okay for natives in the jungle to hunt monkeys, because they needed to, to survive. I did not need to eat meat. Now I understand that I did, that my noble intentions made me ill. That we are born into a savage world where the lion does not lie down with the lamb, that we must do the best for ourselves and the ones we care for, and that living by morality is merely a luxury in the battle against the forces of the natural world. If at the heart of me is a savage, then I will embrace that savage and run with her nature – reluctance only damages one’s own spirit, it cannot repair the world.
