Background

I love meat. So does my family. I grew up in a tiny town in the central North Island of New Zealand. When I mention rural New Zealand, what immediately springs to mind? SHEEP.

Yes, sheep. One of my most annoying memories of childhood is of this woman at a Palmerston North inter-school debating tournaments asking my team-mates and me if we had had to get up really early in order to milk the cows before coming to the competition. As if you could farm cows up there. Cows need flat land, not hill country. This is why most of the farmers in the district run sheep on their land.

Although I grew up on a section in the township, my childhood was still pretty rural. My father killed virtually all the meat that we ate. He is the only person I know who takes annual leave from his real job in order to go and spend a few weeks doing hard physical labour at his friends' farms. As a result of this, we had a never-ending supply of mutton and hogget.

It was only when I left home to go to university that I started to realise that it's not typical to come home from school to see several sheep carcases strung up in the garage dripping blood all over the concrete. Or to walk into the kitchen and find my dad butchering half a mutton into chops and roasts with a saw. Meals were roast mutton on a Monday, stewed mutton in the crockpot on Tuesday, homemade mutton sausages with sage and garlic from Dad's garden on Wednesdays. Fish and chips on Sundays when it was Dad's turn to cook. I can't remember what we had on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, but you can be sure that it wasn't meat free.

So, meat played a certain role in my childhood and will probably always be quite nostalgic for me. I don't want to exaggerate, but it's hard to imagine a life without it. I'm not even sure if I will tell my parents about my experiment. I don't fancy their reaction if I ever became a proper vegetarian. That would be even more awkward than the Christmas they announced they were going to the cemetery to pick out a burial plot. At least I won't be offended if the rest of my family doesn't want to join in.