• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
Walking Commentary

Walking Commentary

Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023

  • Home
  • About Me
  • Contact Me
  • ManRom Completed
  • Chapbooks
  • Scarves

Vegetarianism

March 11, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

One of the few disappointments in relocating to Dublin is the lack of decent vegetarian restaurants. That’s possibly because living in London has spoiled me. In London, it seems that vegetarians and vegans cook for vegetarians and vegans. In Dublin, there are just a couple of such places, Cornucopia the best known. Let’s not name many names but once you get out into the suburbs, the vegetarian still needs to select several vegetable dishes in order to eat with their carnivorous friends.

I’ve not been vegetarian long. And I’d like to be vegan but I really can’t do without cheese and honey. My conversion came by way of a treadmill test that exposed a rattle in my heart. Statins were the answer, like everyone else. Then my GP thought I’d be unlikely to maintain favourable cholesterol levels if I ditched statins. They had radically reduced my LDL in just two months. Success. Problem was the side effects from each of two different courses of statins: I simply couldn’t live with them. Statins gave me some insight into my future difficulties with arthritis coupled with sleeping disorder, lassitude (if not depression) and as if that wasn’t enough, I also had muscle aches and pains. I’m a geophysicist so I know correlation isn’t causation. What I can say is that I didn’t have these symptoms before statins. And three days after I stopped taking them, all of the symptoms had diminished and were finally gone within a week.

How Not to Die was my answer to the GP. Great recipes with a consistent and sustainable selection that keeps the food interesting. Worked brilliantly. Three and six-monthly blood tests confirmed it.

Then we relocated back to Dublin where it got harder to be a vegetarian. Harder to find the ingredients on a consistent basis. Harder to dine out with friends. Harder to avoid compromises when visiting places in Longford or Offaly for example. To be clear, vegans can eat Pringles all day long but I want control for salt, fat, starch and sugar if I’m going to maintain low LDL.

The World Resources Institute indicates that eating less meat could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 15-35 percent, and adopting a vegetarian diet would lower it more. That’s not my driver yet it’s a very good reason to be vegetarian.

A terrifying thought for Irish farmers. And yet, surely there’s opportunity too. There are brilliant recipes for turnips, celeriac. beets and such things as thrive here. Just before Xmas, the Irish Times had a brilliant recipe for cauliflower by Paul Flynn of The Tannery in Waterford. So good was it that we used for Xmas Day and quite a few times more besides. And we fed it to carnivores who loved it equally. If it’s time to invest in a few books, let me say that Nigel Slater published two excellent books last year. We regularly use the Mildred’s book too.

Filed Under: ManRom2021 Tagged With: booklink, cookery, food, michael greger‎, mildreds, nigel slater, paul flynn, statins, vegetarianism

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Subscribe

Check your inbox or spam folder to confirm your subscription.

Recent Comments

  • Lia Mills on 39
  • Lia Mills on Symbionts
  • Simon Robinson on immaterial WITNESS
  • Lia Mills on immaterial WITNESS
  • Ann Marie Hourihane on Flight from Rome

Categories

  • Anchoritism
  • Chapbooks
  • Fake Memoir
  • ManRom2021
  • Rome2023

Tags

albert einstein bbc birds bird watching booklink bracket books ireland brian greene burma cancer chapbook colum mccann computing Covid-19 cycling dog dun laoghaire fabhappy flowers geology geophysics hans rosling ireland irish times issued lia mills london movies nobel prize pandemic PEN international photo photography photos photozines plants poetry popular rome simonscarves the uplift kit travel ungrievable volcano walking walkingcommentary

Recent Posts

  • 39
  • Symbionts
  • Éigse na Brídeoige 2023
  • Cook’s Book
  • immaterial WITNESS

Archives

  • June 2024 (1)
  • February 2024 (1)
  • January 2024 (1)
  • December 2023 (1)
  • November 2023 (1)
  • October 2023 (14)
  • September 2023 (20)
  • August 2023 (1)
  • July 2023 (1)
  • June 2023 (1)
  • May 2023 (1)
  • April 2023 (1)
  • March 2023 (1)
  • February 2023 (1)
  • January 2023 (1)
  • December 2022 (1)
  • November 2022 (2)
  • October 2022 (1)
  • September 2022 (1)
  • August 2022 (1)
  • July 2022 (1)
  • June 2022 (1)
  • May 2022 (1)
  • April 2022 (1)
  • March 2022 (1)
  • February 2022 (1)
  • January 2022 (2)
  • December 2021 (2)
  • November 2021 (1)
  • October 2021 (1)
  • September 2021 (2)
  • August 2021 (1)
  • July 2021 (2)
  • May 2021 (9)
  • April 2021 (30)
  • March 2021 (31)
  • February 2021 (28)
  • January 2021 (31)
  • December 2020 (31)
  • November 2020 (30)
  • October 2020 (31)
  • September 2020 (30)
  • August 2020 (31)
  • July 2020 (31)
  • June 2020 (30)
  • May 2020 (31)
  • April 2020 (30)
  • March 2020 (31)

Footer

  • Home
  • About Me
  • Contact Me
  • ManRom Completed
  • Chapbooks
  • Scarves

Subscribe

Check your inbox or spam folder to confirm your subscription.

Copyright © 2025 · Revolution Pro on Genesis Framework