Real life: my boyfriend refuses to give up meat when my parents (vegans) come over for dinner
Melanie and Dirk have been together for years and are very happy. Except when Mel’s parents come over for dinner. Because they’re vegan, and Dirk refuses to give up meat during these dinners. “Real men eat meat!”
It all started with the vegan ‘Parmesan’ cheese I bought for the pesto. Dirk happened to be standing next to me when I took off the foil. “You don’t actually think I’m going to eat that stuff?!” I have to admit: the smell didn’t do much for me either.
To put it bluntly, it smelled like the vomit from our cat that I mopped up a few days ago. But my parents eat vegan, so real Parmesan wasn’t an option.
Anti-meat lobby
This was the starting signal for Dirk to completely let loose. About ‘pushy vegans’, about ‘driving our farmers out of business’, about ‘the anti-meat lobby’, about that ‘woke shit that means men aren’t allowed to be men anymore’. I got the full force of it, and in the slipstream of it all, my parents were dragged through the mud too. The fact that my younger brother is gay was their fault. Apparently, that kind of ‘backward diet’ creates ‘sissies’. “Real men eat meat!” he raged at me.
Grilled ribeye
The fact that my parents eat vegan because my father has IBS, and spends more time on the toilet than the average person, apparently didn’t matter. Meat had nothing to do with it. ‘The whole problem with those vegans is that they want to impose their lifestyle on others like Jehovah’s Witnesses’ and ‘what we should do is eat meat when they come over for dinner. And no, not chicken breast, but an actual ribeye, bam, straight off the grill.’ It wasn’t even really about my parents, but about the whole principle.
Everything vegan
At his office, where most of his colleagues are millennials, the catering is vegan these days too. In his words, there’s just barely no special room somewhere in the basement where you can secretly wolf down your filet américain sandwich. Together with other vilified meat eaters.
Besides: when we go to my parents’ for dinner, they don’t buy a steak for him either, do they? So he’s stuck eating ‘that damn hummus’ again. Out of the corner of my eye, I glance at the tin of chickpeas on the counter. I wanted to make two versions of it, one with pastrami, the way Karsu makes it. But ‘those few shavings of meat’ weren’t going to save his mood. He grabbed his coat from the chair and slammed the door behind him.
Meat Loaf’s favorite song
Not long afterward, I heard him singing – ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Light….’ – as he took the barbecue out of the shed. The same tune sounded from my phone a little later. Set by Dirk, it was his favorite Meat Loaf song. ‘Send this to your parents.’
The photo showed Dirk demonstratively sinking his teeth into a slab of raw meat.
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