Easter has now passed, so my Lenten vegetarianism is technically at an end. Having said that, I'm yet to eat any meat. The Olden and Golden section at What's new, pussycat? had an amusing story about a veggie restaurant with lots of interesting comments. Basically the restuarant menu seemed to make everything out of tofu, cunningly shaped and flavoured to be like various meaty things. I really don't understand the point. You can make really nice veggie meals without trying to make them taste like meat - its what I live off. Having said that I do like quite a few of the quorn things you can get. You can get Quorn chicken slices and tikka chicken bits that do - remarkably - taste a lot like chicken. Quorn ham, on the other hand, tastes nothing like ham, but has a nice taste anyway.

I do disagree with one of the comments, which said that eating veggie burgers was buying into the meat idea and was essentially cryptocanivorous. That seems to be saying that the real vegetarian should only eat vegetables as they come. I am reminded of a scene from the second series of Blackadder, where Blackadder's puritan aunt Lady Whiteadder refuses to have her turnip mashed. To mash it would be to defile God's good turnip, so she has it raw. I like veggie burgers. They usually have lots of chopped vegetables bound together with potato and a nice breadcrumb coating. Nothing like meat, and they don't try to be. They're just one more tasty and convenient way of eating vegetables. So what if the original idea for a burger involves meat? If that's cryptocarnivorous, then presumably so is vegetable paella, vegetable curry, roasted vegetables, etc.

So what is to become of my diet now that Easter is gone? I've decided that I don't believe in the intrinsic wrongness of eating meat. Most (or a large number) of animals on this planet survive by eating other animals, and we are part of the cycle of nature as much as anything else. On the other hand I am having moral difficulties with raising millions of animals in often pretty squalid conditions for no other purpose than to slaughter them to satisfy our desire for meat. So my ideal is a protest vegetarianism. I'm not going to promise not to eat meat, but for the most part I wont.