Bad Hunter
'You know what they call people like you in Eastern Europe?'
“What do you mean, you don’t eat meat?” people ask me when they learn about my dietary preferences, giving me a look as if I’d just admitted to a cult association. “Not even chicken? Not even fish?”. As if chicken is a side dish and fish, well, that’s basically tofu that learned how to swim.
I became a vegetarian in May of 2021. I wish there was a particular moment when I hit myself on the chest with a fist and proclaimed, “That’s it! From now on, I am not eating animals! It’s the right thing to do!”
I’d offer statistics, mention global warming, the state in which animals are kept in captivity, cholesterol, and mercury in fish. I’d give you examples of people who lived to 200 by sticking with kale and recall TED talks about the benefits of going meat-free for the brain. I’d recall that one time, in my late teenage years, when I was forced to watch a chicken get slaughtered and tied upside down to a pole, blood dripping from its arteries into the bucket below. I’d sigh, squint, lower my voice, and say, “That was a turning point for me.”
But the truth is more prosaic.
The problem with vegetarians, it seems to me, is that if you live with one, you can’t not succumb to their dietary restrictions. The term itself is full of vanity and virtue signalling, with a speck of an eating disorder. Say to anyone you’re a vegetarian, and you’re guaranteed to make them uncomfortable as if your lifestyle choice is an insult to theirs. Unless, of course, they’re vegetarians themselves.
All of this is to say: that when my ex-wife and I moved in together, and I learned that she was a vegetarian, I quickly became one as well. As someone who is always the cook in a relationship, it was easier to stop eating meat than to cook twice.
In 2023, my vegetarianism turned into veganism, inspired by many Netflix documentaries with drone shots and deep-voiced narrators who seem to have graduated from infomercials. After a New Year’s Eve that I celebrated on the toilet, not shitting for ten days — which I can only attribute to my exclusive diet of beans and hummus — I decided to add fish to my daily regimen. I began calling myself Vegan Plus — sort of like vegan but with the benefits of an occasional salmon steak. Slowly, eggs and cheese were introduced, and Vegan Plus became pescatarian, which is where things stand at the point of writing this.
When Masha and I started living together, the tables turned, and I became the one selling the idea of a meat-free diet.
Every day, I’d cook vegetarian dishes for the both of us, filling the table with homemade hummus, avocado toasts, salads, bean burritos, and tempeh bowls. On several occasions, I’d go to the bedroom to find empty wrappers of ready-to-eat store-bought sausages lying on the floor. Staring at the sad crumpled plastic that still smelled of salami, I imagined Masha rushing to the store in between work calls, buying herself something meaty, and then chugging it down in secret.
“You know you can eat meat, right?” I keep telling Masha every time we are at the grocery store. “Go, buy something meaty for yourself! A steak! A burger! Lamb chops!”
But because she doesn’t cook, Masha has no choice but to become a Meat Eater Minus — existing mostly on what I make, sneaking a meatloaf here and there, sitting on the toilet behind closed doors, with running water in the sink, brushing her teeth afterwards.
A few years back, when I was working for my father’s company, the entire staff flew from London to Eastern Europe for something called an “off-site.”
For those who aren’t corporate slaves, an “off-site” is a point in time and place when the Zoom and Slack avatars evolve into real, three-dimensional humans. It’s an awkward moment, similar to meeting your Tinder date for the first time in real life. After about four minutes, you start to miss the freedom of being able to mute yourself and wear only the top half of your clothes. You also suddenly notice how tall everyone is.
Needless to say, I wasn’t invited.
On the last day, after a long series of meetings, the senior members of the team went to grab a bite to eat at a local restaurant in town.
The restaurant was packed with tables and groups of bulky, bald men with gold chains around their necks. The music blaring from the corner TV — which showed women dancing with minimal clothing and men looking serious and mysterious — was the kind that made your ears curl.
Some restaurant guests smoked cigarettes indoors, using empty espresso cups in place of an ashtray. Others bubbled their hookah pipes, emitting clouds of smoke into the yellow ceiling. A/C was an unaffordable — and, I’m sure, if you asked the manager, an unnecessary — luxury. It was that kind of place.
But the best detail was the menu. It had images of food featuring roasted chicken, thirteen variations of beef, strange-sounding concoctions made out of pork, and, for some reason, pizza. The back of the laminated cardboard they called a menu had the restaurant logo and a slogan that read, “What you call a vegetarian, we call a bad hunter.”
My father loved this.
Upon returning to London, we went to grab dinner at a Russian restaurant in central London, where he told me about the trip. As I finished explaining to the waiter that I wanted an Olivier salad with no meat in it, please, my father said, “You know what they call people like you in Eastern Europe?”
I touched my earring, scanned the tattoos on my left arm, and brushed my gel-thick hair. I half-expected to hear the word which, in my teenage — that is to say, Russian school — era was thought of as the worst possible insult to a young man.
“What? No,” my father said, frowning, and poured himself vodka from a decanter. “They call you a bad hunter.”
If you’re a vegetarian, people assume it means you eat like a cow — that is, grass. But I have enough overweight vegetarian friends to know: that not eating meat isn’t the same as eating healthy. After all, French Fries – sorry, chips – is a vegan dish.
My friends are surprised when I tell them I can’t stand broccoli, aubergines, kale, mushrooms, and most things in the “vegetarian section” of most restaurant menus.
“What do you eat then?” they ask.
They are even more surprised when I tell them I love fake meat — things like THIS ISN’T CHICKEN and Beyond Meat burgers.
“Isn’t it hypocritical to eat ‘meat’ when you don’t eat meat?”
To which I can only say, “Isn’t it hypocritical to own light bulbs and not make a fire in your living room? To live in apartments and not caves? Drive cars and not horses? Go to the grocery store to buy produce instead of killing and roasting ducks in Hyde Park?”
Still, to come up with a better way of explaining why I don’t eat KFC or carefully take the pepperoni off my pizza slices, I began saying, “Animals are my friends,” with an air of arrogance only reserved for vegetarians, hurrying to add, “But it’s not like I am judging anyone.”
My uncle, when he learned about my vegetarianism, was more direct than my father. Instead of talking about my hunting skills, he watched as I unwrapped my Sainsbury’s NO CHICKEN chicken wrap and said “I say, if you don’t eat meat, then you’re a complete and total idiot.” He said it in such a tone he might as well have been talking about the weather – casual, almost bored.
A speech followed on how vegetarianism – alongside LGBTQ+, global warming, and electric cars – is merely capitalistic propaganda that exists so that someone can make money.
Looking back, I see that my decision to go vegetarian was the moment when the number of people who invited me to lunch was reduced to just one: my sister Kate.
She is the one who constantly tries — and fails — to stick with vegetarianism. She was only five when she said, “I love animals. They are so cute.” She then wistfully looked down at her forkful of steak and sighed. “But they are so delicious.”
It was the third month of our relationship, and I woke up in the middle of the night to find Masha staring at her phone. The sneaky fox that I am, I stole a glance at her phone and saw a Google search for two words: “sudden hunger.”
She caught my gaze, and we locked eyes for several seconds, saying nothing.
“What’s sudden hunger?” I asked.
I should have known better.
If I don’t eat anything for the first couple of hours after waking up, Masha typically gets out of bed and rushes straight to the kitchen to grab a snack. It could be anything — a banana, last week’s McDonald’s, leftover curry sauce, a quarter of a Sainsbury’s sandwich that is about to give birth to new life. The important thing for her, it seems, is to fill up the stomach. Like a Snickers advert, Masha is not herself when she is hungry. In fact, on some mornings, I don’t recognize the person I live with at all.
“Maybe you should have that sudden hunger thing checked out,” I once told her in the early morning, as she got up to go to the kitchen, with the sincerity and worry of a good boyfriend. “I don’t think that’s normal.”
I meant to say it could be a sign of gastritis or blood sugar imbalance. Not that I am a doctor.
“Maybe,” Masha replied, putting her arms through a robe, on her way to the kitchen. From the living room, I heard her muttering, “Maybe you should mind your own fucking business.”
Thirty seconds later, she returned crunching a cucumber and said, “Sorry, babe. What were you saying?”
If 23andMe is right and those of us who have slightly more Neanderthal genes are more prone to being angry when hungry, then Masha is a purebred Neanderthal.
At one point in late 2024, after moving to southeast London, we discovered a hot dog machine in the nearest grocery store. It’s a contraption the height of a person with childish writing that says, INSTANT DOGS, FRESH. The levers at the bottom allow hungry customers to pick between three types of sausage. On the right, there are ketchup and mayo dispensers.
When I first saw it, I tried imagining how its internal mechanisms worked — more importantly, what the word “fresh” meant. Images of half-alive stray dogs, trapped inside the box, on their way to being slaughtered by rotating knives before being put on a bun came to mind. This is to say, I’d much rather drink my piss than eat whatever the machine wanted to dispense for £2.15 — and not just because I am a bad hunter. It’s because who’d want a hot dog from a machine?
Masha laid her eyes on the machine the second she saw it.
“Good,” she muttered, squinting, walking around it to assess it from different angles, touching it from side to side, like a farmer checks its cattle for ticks or whatever it is farmers check their cattle for.
“Very good,” she concluded, with a deep nod, looking like a seasoned antique dealer choosing a new piece.
Several days after discovering the hot dog machine, I’d watch with one eye from behind a sleeping mask as the slender silhouette of a hungry beast slipped into her clothes under the pale dawn light.
I’d lie still, pretending to be asleep, deciding to wait until she returned from across the road, a steaming machine-made breakfast hot dog in hand, knowing full well that I could now safely wish a good morning to the woman I love.
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P.S. Sorry for not narrating this essay myself. I have a crazy case of flu and lost my voice. Hope to feel better next week.