In praise of the veggie bacon burger
In 1990 I was supplementing my non-existent student grant behind the grill at Brighton’s legendary burger chain Grubbs. 1990 was also the time of the BSE crisis. If you’re too young to remember (and you probably are) this was when cattle in the UK began to suffer from a terrible neurodegenerative disorder, caused by the widespread practise of feeding the infected brains and spines of cattle to other cattle. (As a sidenote, this was when I decided to become a vegetarian.)
There was a lot of debate as to whether the disease could spread to humans, a fear that the Government Minister John Gummer attempted to quell by awkwardly feeding his young daughter a burger in front of the media’s clicking cameras. (Soon the first cases of vCJD would emerge, and 177 people would eventually die.)
Anyway, behind the grill we noticed a strange phenomenon turning up on order slips — the veggie bacon burger. Combining Grubbs’ pioneering non-meat patty with very-definitely-meat bacon, to create some kind of vegetarian/carnivore hybrid. No-one had ever asked for one before, and suddenly they were all the rage. They didn’t make sense to either meat-eaters or vegetarians — except that, in the context of that crisis, they absolutely did.
At some level the veggie bacon burger was a genius bit of creative adaptation. Not to opt for some kind of dramatic lifestyle switch, or to join a culture war, or buy a special cookbook, but just to be flexible. Swap a bad thing out for something better.
Don’t you think that’s the kind of thinking this climate crisis demands? Every pub and burger chain now offers a plant-based burger at the bottom of the menu (I saw a hot dog stand on Brighton seafront the other day offering both vegan and ‘normal’ hot dogs), but I’ve never seen them demonstrate the creativity and flexible thinking that hungry, post-pub Brightonians did in 1990.
Maybe it’s time to embrace mixing it up, blurring the lines, making healthy compromises. In all areas of our lives, not just food but transport, clothes, energy, packaging and more. It might be a far better way to get to the rapid, scaled change we need — but right now those choices need to be on the menu. The veggie bacon burger never was, and still isn’t. But it should be.
