So I tried chorizo the other day. As a vegetarian for the past seven years, this was, shall we say, quite a strange experience. The occasion was my Spanish teacher’s birthday: she brought some chorizo to share with the class, in line with the custom here of giving, rather than receiving, on your birthday. Initially I abstained, but as she told us about the origins of the food I started thinking. And as the rest of the class tried not to spit out their mouthfuls at the teacher’s description of collecting the blood shooting from the pig’s neck, I sadistically reached for a taste.

It was pretty reg, if you ask me. I reckon I’d go for a big spinach salad any day. So, no, this isn’t my confession to coming out of the vegetarian closet and into the meat-eating world.

Then why did I try it? Partly out of curiosity, but mainly because eating it doesn’t contradict my reasons for being vegetarian. (Don’t fear - I haven’t been in Spain so long that I’m starting to classify cured meats as a magical non-meat food that vegetarians can dig into).

I don’t eat meat because I believe that the processes involved in producing the meat are repulsive. I’m not against killing animals to eat them – that’s part of the food chain. But I am against intensive factory farming which keeps animals in appalling conditions and stuffs them full of various kinds of rubbish, at the same time putting huge strain on the environment, especially with fertiliser run-off polluting rivers and lakes.

I also think that we eat excessive amounts of meat in modern western society. While distribution is a major factor in causing food shortages in other parts of the world, farming is another important factor. Raising animals uses up land that could be more productively used for vegetables or grain to feed hungry people: the amount of space and energy required to produce meat could be used to produce many times more calories from plant products.

There’s a really excellent set of short flash animation videos called The Meatrix that explain these ideas well. It doesn’t attempt to convert you to vegetarianism, but rather it talks about the need to think about sustainability in producing food. Check them out.

Getting back to the chorizo though. My teacher’s family grabbed a pig off its farm, and spent a long weekend making it into food. She explained that the extended family annually kills a pig and everyone pitches in to prepare the meats like spiced chorizo, cured ham and black pudding that will last for the winter. Okay, truth be told, I only assumed that my teacher’s family aren’t battery-pig farmers. But I liked knowing at least where the food came from and how it was made.

While it is kind of gross to think about collecting the blood to make black pudding, these are the realities of the meat that we eat. I say it’s better to be fully conscious of its origins than to tell ourselves that meat simply comes from a supermarket.

Other posts by Katie Llanos-Small