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The “River Cottage Christmas Feast” Made Me Sick
I went vegetarian not because of a cute pig or a brave believer, but over gluttony so disgusting I was turned off for life
My meat-free life began from the horror and disgust at seeing a meal so meaty, so decadent, and so terrifying that I never wanted to eat another animal again.
A bit of background: As a child, I found that song “There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly” deeply disturbing. The image of a woman progressively getting fatter and fatter while a barnyard full of animals “wriggled and jiggled inside her” chilled my younger self to the core. Every verse of the song ends with a cheery “perhaps she’ll die,” before the song ends with the harrowing death knell of: “There was an old lady who swallowed a horse… She died, of course!”
Yikes.
Growing up, I thought I had gotten over this fear, just as I had gotten over my childhood fear of the dark. I was wrong. This became apparent to me one Christmas when I caught an episode of the long-running UK food show, River Cottage. Beginning in 1999, River Cottage was a UK TV show that saw London-based chef Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall leave the rat race of the capital to become a self-sufficient farmer in the British countryside, and each episode saw him…
