There’s a book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb called Skin in the Game. It’s wrong about many things, featuring an account of Prince Andrew’s place in UK culture that was hilariously misjudged even before we realised what his place truly was, but has a theory about families and their eating habits that used to sound right. When one person restricts their diet – goes vegan or keto or whatever – the whole unit defaults to that restriction. It’s just easier, when three people will eat anything, to build your menu around the one person who will only eat some things. The parable was supposed to illustrate a broader point, that the intolerant minority will always come to triumph over the more tolerant majority.
Let’s not dwell on his mental leap, because one of my kids just went vegetarian and I now know that even the starting block is untrue. For about a fortnight, we all went veggie and nobody noticed. It’s not as if we were living a traditional, Harvester-buffet, meat-centrepiece, side-salad life before all this. I passed off black beans as a luxury food item, squash lasagne as classic Italian cuisine. Besides, meat substitutes have moved on a lot, and now they can make pretty much anything taste like pork so long as it has first been rolled into a ball.
