Across the table, Jeff takes out his phone and I watch him do a quick Google search. Because if it’s indexed by Google, it must be fact.
‘Oh, I see, Pete. It says here the term “vegan” was coined in 1944. That’s what you must have seen last night.’
‘Yeah, as I said, it was invented in the 1940s,’ he says. ‘I said that, didn’t I?’
‘Well yeah,’ I say. ‘But, I mean, choosing only to eat plant-based foods wasn’t invented in the ’40s. Someone just chose to label it with that word in the ’40s.’
‘Isn’t that what I just said?’
‘I guess my point is —’
‘Eh? I was trying to say that your diet has been around forever,’ Dad says, starting to sound a wee bit agitated. And just like that, I see we’re trying to prove the same point after all as ‘within his lifetime’ means forever to him. ‘Well, that’s what the news said anyway but if you want to question it . . .’
The day I delivered to them the shocking, earth-shattering and almost utterly unforgivable revelation that I was vegan, it really pushed my parents’ unconditional love to the limit. I think they would have preferred it had I told them I was a serial killer. My father wept into his bowl of microwave-reheated sweet and sour pork and my mother sidled up to the fridge to slip a cheese slice or two into her mouth in an attempt to swallow her pain.
They listened patiently as Jeff (another member of the same brainwashed cult) and I explained the devastating environmental impacts of the meat industry, but then shrugged as if to say, ‘Sorry kids, but we won’t be around to see that.’ They even listened with (feigned) interest when we explained that some people have seen incredible health benefits giving up animal protein, ensuring cancer stays in remission, completely reversing diabetes, and reducing the effects of Crohn’s disease.
‘It might be worth making some changes to what we eat, too,’ Dad said after we first broke the news to him.
‘This one study says women in remission who continued eating dairy were something like seventy per cent more likely to have their cancer return,’ I persisted with Mum.
Surely, for a woman mortally petrified of The Big C’s return, it would be a no-brainer to replace dairy in her diet with any of the plant-based alternatives. In the same way that Dad believes in The Big Man just to hedge his eternal bets, Mum might have switched to vegan even if it decreased the chances of cancer returning by seven per cent. Surely at seventy per cent she’d have made the switch, just to be on the safe side. But they’ve been eating the same foods for close to eighty years and now some ‘new fad diet’ like veganism comes along and tells them consuming watery almond ‘mylk’ and steamed kale will cure them of all their ills? Come on, what do you take us for! Surely if it was that simple, our doctors would have prescribed new diets for us years ago?
I suppose a lot of my parents’ narrow palate is due to what they ate growing up. For both of them it was almost exclusively meat and three veg. And by that of course I mean very well-done meat, milky mashed potatoes, over-boiled carrots and mushy peas. It may then have all been smothered in a home-made lard-laden gravy. As kids, eating out for them was non-existent and then as newlyweds they were pretty broke, so exposure to those wonderful flavours brought to us by immigrants in Italian, Greek, Indian and Chinese restaurants remained inaccessible. In fact, I seem to remember the first time we tried Chinese was as a family when I was about eight or nine. We’re talking 1982 . . . making us not exactly ahead of the flavour curve.
But then as Mum and Dad started earning better money, we dined out more as a family and certainly that did include international cuisine, though most of the time it was to Australian restaurants such as the good old Black Stump with their corn on the cob (no, I don’t know how those cob holders found their way into our kitchen drawer) and charred steaks.
But as they’ve aged, Dad has reverted to the comfort food of his childhood it seems – meat and carbohydrates are the order of the day.
‘Yeah, they’ve got a few things on the menu for us,’ I get around to answering Dad’s question. ‘I always check in advance, don’t worry.’
‘You check the menu before you decide to book a table?’ Dad asks, as though I’ve just told him I have the pub’s carpets steam cleaned before I enter.
‘I can’t imagine anyone in my generation not checking the menu first,’ I say.
‘Hmph,’ he says again, this time because he is completely miffed. ‘They’ve got oysters for you,’ he continues.
‘We don’t eat oysters,’ Jeff says.
‘You can eat oysters can’t you, Skeet?’
‘No, darl,’ Mum kindly answers for me this time.
‘Thanks, Skeet,’ Dad says sarcastically.
‘We’re both having the veggie burger,’ Jeff says, promptly shutting down the possibility of further discussion. ‘What about you, Jude?’
‘I think I’ll have the crispy coated salt and pepper squid with the Thai red cabbage slaw and sweet chilli sauce, thanks. Just entrée size for me though.’
‘Dad? Are you going to have the bangers and mash?’ I ask.
‘Eh?’
‘SAUSAGES! For lunch?’
‘Maybe, Skeet. Did you know IGA sausages are the healthiest ones you can buy?’ he adds with a burst of excitement.
‘Is that so?’ I ask dubiously.
Is there even such a thing as a healthy sausage? That’s like saying you just heard a bad Cyndi Lauper song. I want to ask the details but I decide to humour him instead by saying nothing.
‘Yep!’ he continues anyways. ‘I sent your mother up the road to grab some but they were all out of stock. Weren’t they, darl?’
Mum says ‘Yes,’ in a whisper, but this time Dad chooses not to pick her up on it.
‘Seems the word got around,’ he adds.
‘Where did you hear this information, Dad?’
Obviously, he’d received his latest copy of Modern Scientist or Diabetes Daily and had double-checked the researchers’ data before proclaiming it as fact.
‘It was on your Current Affairs.’ He says this with a firm full stop. ‘Current Affairs’ isn’t necessarily the program of that (very similar) name; it may be any number of shows, including documentaries on obscure Foxtel channels.
‘Well, there’s no arguing with that, is there?’ Jeff dares.
‘Sausages for dinner every night, then,’ I say dismissively. Memories of Mum’s water-logged, powdery curried sausages raise bile up the back of my throat.
‘Well maybe not every night,’ Dad concedes. Though I’m sure if his son weren’t a pesky, interfering plant-based rebel, that’s the way he’d choose to have it.
