Lettuce Pray

We’ve a lot to thank hippies for – bringing flares back into fashion, being extremely resourceful with hemp, for example – but a flipside is their perpetutating of the stereotype that all vegetarians are peace-loving, out-of-it hippies who verge on the anaemic.

In modern Ireland, however, you will find very few vegetarians who match the long-hair caricature. What’s more, veggies are everywhere nowadays. Sean Hughes is one. And so was Spike Milligan. Who knows, your bank manager could even be one.
In light of international Vegetarian Awareness Month – October to you and I – Hot Press has spoken to some modern day lettuce-lovers who share their meat-free experience with us.

Mary Farrell,
Owner of Café Fresh, Dublin
I’ve been vegetarian for 20 years now. It was initially for political reasons – the land used to graze animals could be much better used growing crops. That was my main motivation, but also when I was younger I lived on a large animal farm and I didn’t always like what I saw there. Plus in the ‘80s there were lots of growth hormones and chemicals put into beef – I just didn’t understand how it could be good for people or why it had to be done. I don’t think there are health issues about a vegetarian diet either – certainly not in my experience!
Karla Healion
Hot Press
Being a vegetarian for the last 11 years is one of the things I’m most proud of in life. That said, I have noticed that a lot of my vegetarian friends are giving it up as they get older, and that is something that I’m painfully considering myself. This is simply for my health – you need to eat really excellently every single day as a vegetarian and maintaining that all day, every day is a tough thing to pull off.
James O'Brien
The Marshals
I come from West Cork. I ate what was put in front of me. I used to come home from school and say, ‘Mam, I don’t like ham’. The answer was: ‘Eat the ham, James, or you can starve’. So I ate meat nearly every day, which meant it took my parents a while to warm to the idea when I became vegetarian six years ago. I’d go home for a weekend and there would be a chicken leg on my plate. When I said I didn’t eat it, my dad would be like: ‘Ah, he’ll wait until we’re all in bed and then sneak down to eat all the leftovers in the fridge’!
The main reason I gave up meat was because of all the diseases that were going around at the time: BSE and the like. A secondary reason was because of the way that live animals are shipped; I really didn’t agree with the way they’re all packed in.
I don’t think I would go back to eating meat, but in the last couple of weeks I’ve had to start eating fish again. The band’s schedule is becoming more and more hectic, and it’s tough to be constantly tired and to tour and with a major restriction on your diet – there’s not a whole variety of food when you’re eating at service stations non-stop for a month.
Shilpa Ganatra
Hot Press
The last carnivorous meal I had was a KFC Zinger Burger. I remember it fondly. I’d actually been vegetarian a couple months before I got the 3am munchies and lost all willpower. But since that incident, about three years back, I’ve been behaving myself.
It’s gotten easier now; at first, I didn’t like many vegetables, but after doing all you could possibly do with peppers and sweetcorn, I eventually learnt to like everything else! The only problem comes when you’re eating out and the restaurant doesn’t have the faintest idea about vegetarianism. Potatoes drowned in greasy cheese and garnished with spinach (‘potato and spinach bake’ it’s called) and priced at full whack doesn’t quite cut it.
Denis Cotter
Co-owner and head chef of Café Paradiso, Cork
I became vegetarian before I became a chef. There was no defining moment when I realised I’d made the change – it happened over time.
Some of the reasons that people give for becoming vegetarian can be quite trivial, say for dieting or because it’s fashionable. But the reason you stick with it is because it becomes part of your ethical make-up, which is how I consider it. My catalyst was a girlfriend I had in the early ‘20s who was vegetarian. Soon after we split up, I found that I was a veggie too, though I didn’t give up fish until I was 25 because my job at the time meant I had to eat out a lot, and this was in the mid-80s when we weren’t catered for. The meat was easy to give up; I wasn’t too keen on the stuff anyway. It was the fish that was difficult. I especially like cooking with it, but that’s no longer part of the equation for me.
Liam Madden
Founder of irishvegetarian.com
I made the change four years ago because I read a book called Eating Right For Your Type. It turned out that my type suited a mainly-vegetarian diet, but once I began eating that way, I found out a bit more about it – and then it became a matter of principle rather than anything else.
Ireland has only accepted vegetarianism as a mainstream diet quite recently, so when I started, I found it pretty difficult to hunt out where you could get a good range of veggie food or special supplements, for example. I started www.irishvegetarianism.com three years ago.
John Carmody
Founder of Animal Rights Action Network
I feel it’s my duty to let as many people as possible know how animals are treated. I show my friends videos of what happens in slaughterhouses, and most of them turn vegetarian on that basis. But I don’t like to use the word ‘converting’ – that implies that it’s a cult, but it’s actually just changing to a diet that just makes common sense. My feeling is that if I wouldn’t eat a dog or a cat, why would I eat a cow or a chicken?