Meat market

A vegetarian family works out the bacon-fish from the sausage animal

By RUCHI LAMBA

There is virtually nothing I dislike about Australia, but for years the one thing I could not get accustomed to, was Australian cuisine.

I have always been a vegetarian. It was one of those things which was never discussed in the family. Meat was just never cooked in our house, or the houses of those we visited in India. At least, they wouldn’t cook it before us anyway. You don’t miss something you have never had, and no one in my family had ever had meat. Meateaters, or “non-vegetarians” were a separate class - and a minority as far as I was concerned. And the concept of eating meat disgusted me, until I came to Australia.

I had some Bengali and Maharashtrian friends who ate a lot of fish, and the Punjabis were fond of their murga-shurgas kebabs and tikkas. But since most of my friends were Gujratis or Tamils, I pretty much grew up knowing little about food which did not grow from the ground.

Australia was a learning experience. The grazing cows were bred for their meat, not milk. And wool is not the only thing farmers raise sheep for either.

“It’s not just sheep and cows they eat here,” Singh Uncle told my parents at a dinner at our house one night, when we had newly arrived.

“They eat horses, and pigs and snakes and frogs,” he elaborated. “No, not horses,” interrupted his wife, Singh Aunty. “They use them for their races - especially that big one in Melbourne”.

“Yes, ok, maybe not horses,” murmured Singh Uncle.

“And the snakes and frogs were also introduced by the Chineseyou never heard about the British eating them, did you?”

“But, they do eat frogs in France, especially the legs. Quite a delicacy, I’m told”.

This was all very disturbing for my parents, who were hoping the Singhs would refrain from discussing this topic at dinner. I could see dad having trouble swallowing his morsels, while