Nº 4 – Stories from life

The other day, the butcher asked us in astonishment if we vegetarians would ever eat meat again. I answered his question with a counter question: who is man’s best friend? The dog, he said. No – the cat, my wife answered. No – the dog, I replied. Either way, we avoid quarrelling, accepting our different opinions and taking each other as we are. In any case, we no longer buy dog and cat food in cans or plastic packaging. We agree on that. This reduces our garbage at least by a quarter. So what do we do instead? The poor animals have to eat something, don’t they?

Since the beginning of this month, we’ve been going to the butcher’s twice a week with our glass Tupperware (from Ikea), buying an entire chicken and a lot of cooked ham. In Portugal, there’s this stuff called fiambre. It’s glued-together meat scraps, stuff that usually ends up in the garbage, and it is cosmetically enhanced for customers. Botox from the butcher’s kitchen…

This saves us buying cat food in sealed plastic bags with some mixed sauces, food chemistry and a little waste meat, which stinks like my dog’s emergency. Our behaviour today is win-win. It doesn’t stink anymore, we don’t throw anything away and the animals are happy about something that they’ve only ever seen on human plates (with rice). And what’s more, the chicken costs less than two euros a kilo – and the fiambre is not even five euros – which is cheaper than all of the canned food in the world. We will save money and avoid scenes of horror in the future. The aim of reducing our garbage has made us creative, and our creativity knows no bounds. In next week’s story, I’ll write more about waste avoidance. By the way, we still eat no meat…

I believe that we have to start with ourselves if we are going to effectively slow down climate change. And Madrid doesn’t give us any solutions…