emmugh

After almost ten years of vegetarianism I’ve started eating meat again. I’m doing it slowly: two small lamb chops, a bite of pork floating in ramen, a few slices of cured salami or ham. Although my body seems to crave it I often find the taste terrible, sour and gamey. It turns heavy in my stomach. But I’m eating meat again because if I don’t make drastic changes to my diet and begin to regularly eat protein and carbohydrates, my doctor says that my body will continue to feed on my own lean muscle for nutrition. It will soon eat away at cardiovascular muscle for nourishment, and the irreversible damage I’ve done to my own body will worsen.

I write down everything I eat in a notebook. 11.52am banana. 4.44pm half a pot of non-fat yoghurt. I mark food items that I think are unhealthy with a little asterisk, and I can put a tick next to days I feel I’ve fed myself as I would if I were caring for someone else. I filled the title page – “JAMES BUTLER FOOD DIARY” – with stickers to make the exercise less depressing, small farm animals from a sticker pad. But now when I hand the notebook to my psychologist or dietician I press the title page down, hoping they miss the smiling cows and ducks, and turn straight to the pages littered with little stars. The idea of them seeing the stickers makes me feel childish. Not just because of what they are, but because I am an adult paying professionals to teach me to eat.

PULL QUOTE: The idea of them seeing the stickers makes me feel childish. Not just because of what they are, but because I am an adult paying professionals to teach me to eat.

In Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, Yeong-hye, a young woman “completely unremarkable in every way,” becomes vegetarian after a violent dream. Yeong-hye throws away all the meat in the fridge, enraging her husband and extended family. She becomes erratic and gaunt, consumed by visceral dreams of murder and physical torture. “Why am I changing like this?” she thinks, in a rare disclosure of her interiority. “Why are my edges all sharpening—what am I going to gouge?”