Meat 2025
First published on Liz’s Substack
After my sister’s funeral I ate pepperoni pizza. I’d been a vegetarian (okay, I confess, pescatarian) for about seven years at that point, but this felt trivial in the face of the enormous shift we were enduring. My black shirt was barely back on the hanger from my Nona’s funeral in the winter. Fuck it. It was good pizza, but I have to say, not that good. It was more about the principle: life is too short, eat the pizza.
I quit smoking in 2023 and similarly now, on a big night out, which happen infrequently and require almost a week’s solitude to recover, I have a tasty little cigarette. Just one, has to be pre-made, cannot be a roll-up. And then that’s it – I go back to my day-life of painting and decorating, swimming baths and petrol stations, but inside there is a flicker of rebellion that is being kept alight.
Throughout 2025, a year that has felt long and short, I have had a few brief encounters with meat. My brother ran the Seville Marathon for Jessie in February. Me and my partner got the train all the way and I was low-key traumatised by how disgusting marathons are. There is a lot of blood and other bodily fluids (and solids) that I did not expect. After my brother had finished his race, we visited a corner bodega that was busy enough to spill out onto the streets, cured meats hanging like boxing bags, and an air of sophistication I’m always impressed by as an English person. I decided to try a piece of Iberico ham which was in fact delicious.
Miraculously, I managed to walk across Ireland without eating any meat, unless you count the dried chicken soup which we added noodles and a boiled egg to, assuming that the powdered soup would be vegetarian like Bisto (it was not). Sidebar here: we also ate breakfast pizza in a pizza restaurant that was trying to fill a niche in the market that nobody asked for.
In June I went on a survival course (I wrote a bit about this earlier this year) where I prepared pigeon and rabbit and ate a little bit of both seeing as they had already died for me to pretend to be living in the post-apocalypse.
I sang Joanna Newsom’s Sadie at my friends’ wedding, which was a pleasure on a lot of fronts, but studying Newsom’s work was particularly poignant. The lyrics to this incredible song about a childhood dog: “til then we pray and suspend the notion that these lives do never end”. There was a Braai later in the evening and I couldn’t resist the beef sausage hot dogs.
There is talk of a goose on Christmas Day. Last Christmas was so devastating that I am amazed we managed to eat at all and I struggle to recall what I had on my plate, so deep was the pain of that table. This year, I endeavour to celebrate and perhaps I will have some goose.
Whatever your meat memories of 2025, I wish you a happy and healthy 2026.
Love liz
p.s to the animals I enjoyed eating this year, I am sorry