Nice Pear: a monthly feminist foodletter | Issue #029 | May 2021
Hello!
This newsletter is a week late again. Blame the bank holiday! Blame my ever-increasing workload! Blame my terrible time-keeping skills!
In personal news: My husband bought a static caravan on the East Coast this month! It needs a little work doing inside (so look out for some trailer reno content coming to an Instagram feed near you this summer), and it’s not quite the #VanLife I’d hoped for, but it gives us a way to get out of the hot flat while we can’t move house (thanks, cladding scandal).
This weeks’ essay is a short one, and somewhat Yorkshire-coast inspired
On fish as food
At a family party in late 2018, a cousin asked me what I can eat.
She was finalising the set menu for her upcoming wedding and, on hearing I was vegetarian, she said “okay, we’ve got an option for that,” with satisfaction, “you can have the fish”.
I was raised vegetarian and slowly descended into veganism around four years ago. Already, at the time the question was asked, it was a toss-up between announcing myself ‘vegan’ or ‘vegetarian’, and I opted for the latter for our hosts’ convenience more than for my own preference. By the time the wedding rolled around in 2019, I was staunchly vegan - the cheese and eggs of my youth replaced with nutritional yeast and tofu.
Even as a vegetarian though, I have never eaten fish.
“That’s pescetarian, actually” I respond in an almost-Partridge tone of pedantry, whenever I’m offered seafood after mentioning my dietary preference.
I’ve never understood the reasoning behind the assumption.
Though I now have a better understanding of how the egg and dairy industries are intrinsically tied to meat agriculture, to the destruction of the environment and to the suffering of animals, it is easy to see how the two could be divorced.
Animal byproducts - milk, cheese, eggs - don’t necessarily or immediately kill the animal they came from. It’s not a worldview I still hold, but it’s one I can understand, theoretically.
Seafood though isn’t a byproduct. It’s a real animal that used to swim around and live its’ life until (to paraphrase Sebastien) “One day when the boss get hungry // Guess who's gon' be on the plate”
In Vox’s report on this very topic, it is suggested that this cognitive dissonance when it comes to recognising fish as animals may be their almost-total difference to humans. You can’t look into the deep brown eyes of a cow and honestly say that it feels nothing. Fish, on the other hand, “live underwater, so we rarely interact with them. They can’t vocalize or make facial expressions”.
This distinction happens with birds, too - everyone knows now that vegetarians don’t eat chicken, but a strange thing often happens when I tell people that I’m veggie: they start to insist that they ‘don’t eat much meat, barely any red meat at all’ and that, in fact, they ‘mostly just eat chicken’.
This again seems a strange distinction to me. My mother used to rescue ex-battery hens and let them wander around the garden. It is clear that chickens have personalities and preferences, and that they feel pain. Anyone cutting down their meat consumption is A Good Thing in my book, but the hierarchy of which animals it is ‘better’ to exploit and consume has always baffled me.
Beef and lamb do produce more carbon emissions than, for example, chicken or farmed fish. The insinuation that to eat a chicken or a fish is somehow morally better than eating a cow or a sheep doesn’t ring true though - industrial agriculture isn’t good for any animal.
While most people can see a bird or a mammal in distress and recognise that as pain (even if they rationalise that away with paradoxical claims of ‘humane slaughter’ when it comes to their own meals), it is harder for us to immediately recognise pain in fish.
The Guardian’s long-read on this topic brings together multiple research sources and experts to uncover more about fish’s capacity for feeling: “various fish show long-term memory, social bonding, parenting, learned traditions, tool use, and even inter-species cooperation,” argues the piece, “anatomy, neurochemistry and behaviour all indicate that fish experience sensations including wellbeing, pain, and fear.”
Fish are animals, too. If you must eat them, consider giving the same thought to their welfare as you do to that of free-range hens and pasture-grazed cows. Some animal welfare regulations in the UK still don’t apply to fish.
This essay started, in my head and then in my notes app, as an explanation of my seaside fish & chips order. Many chippies now serve veggie options - a beanburger, perhaps or ‘tofish’ (a fish substitute made from tofu and seaweed) if we’re somewhere fancy.
My go-to order though is just chips & double peas (which, as well as being completely cruelty-free, produce just 0.36kg of carbon per 100g of protein, compared to fish’s 3.5g and beef’s 25g ) - to-go, so I can eat it on the seafront.
👇 Scroll on down for Things to Read & Things to Eat 👇
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Photo by Gustav Lundborg from Pexels
Things to read
As we’ve reopened here in the UK, the true impact of Brexit is becoming more apparent in our bars and restaurants.
I’m perpetually asking this question posed in Alicia Kennedy’s On Meat pt. II: “What would convince people to openly be more vegetarian, more vegan?”
Something a lot of us are going through right now (myself included): “we’re all on the verge of re-entry and that brings up all the body feelings, especially since bodies have changed and this is happening with the onset of warmer weather (more swimsuits, more visible skin). It makes sense that the siren song of dieting is so loud right now.” from an essay in Virginia Sole-Smith’s Burnt Toast.
For me, it’s not only about being bigger than I was last year, and being unable to fit into my favourite sundresses. I also have an added layer of shame as a 30-something in the ‘20s that I didn’t have as a 20-something in the 10’s(and certainly not as a teen in the mid-2000s). This extra layer tells me that I shouldn’t care what size my body is, tells me that by caring I’m being fatphobic and that by making any effort to change it I’m giving in to the patriarchal, euro-centric beauty standards perpetuated by capitalism to keep women meek. But I’ve spent over 15 years thinking that doing the work of losing 20lb would be easier and faster than doing the work of learning to love my body as it is. That’s a hard mindset to unlearn - especially at a moment when going outside leaves us feeling especially exposed, and when my body is the biggest it has ever been.
This is just a really interesting long-read on the solution to save the world’s olive oil supply. As though we haven’t had enough of pandemics for a lifetime, there is now a disease threatening Italy’s olive trees. This story somehow manages to make tree grafts exciting - and draws some interesting parallels to COVID-deniers and conspiracy theorists.
This essay on the pressure to cook as a new mother, by Sophie Heawood in Healthyish, is deeply relatable - even as someone without children:
“still takes me by surprise, for example, that after you buy food once, you also have to buy it again. This system seems deeply flawed.”
First, read this on the growing market for fruit and vegetables that have been cultivated to be unusual, then read this on how sustainable (or otherwise) ugly produce boxes really are.
In vegan news 🌱:
The UK now recognises animals as sentient beings. While this is a good step direction for animal rights, the rules don’t go anywhere near as far as they could, still not banning the use of cages for poultry, or crates for pigs.
The latest in the race to get cell-cultured meat products into the hands of consumers
Where to find me
Nothing published in May, except this mojito cake recipe I veganised on the blog. Currently working on a few big stories that will hopefully drop in June.
In May I sent 14 pitches, got 5 rejections, and 2 commissions.
As always, you can find me @ZoePickburn on Twitter, Insta, and other social media, and you can say hello@zoepickburn.com with stories, commissions & foodie chit chat.
Thanks!
Zoe
Freelance writer & journo | Food blogger (she/her)
If you enjoy Nice Pear & want to support it (or any of the other content I create online) you can always become a paying subscriber, buy me a virtual cuppa, or throw some change in the tip jar.