Until about ten years ago if you were a vegetarian having a conversation with a meat-eater you could to expect them to say — when they discover that you are a vegetarian:

``Oh, but don't cabbages have feelings..?''

Nowadays people tend to not come out with this sort of crap quite so much, but they certainly used to. For me this was always a signal that i should not expect to have a sensible conversation with this interlocutor about vegetarianism ... or (probably) anything else for that matter — sadly. A kind of watershed. I call these experiences CHF moments — as in: Cabbages have feelings.

Of course it's not just vegetarians who experience CHF moments: they are an inevitable part of the human condition, and we will go on having them as long as there are ... brexiteers, vaccine-conspiracists, climate change deniers ....

I once had a conversation with a French graduate student in Cambridge, and he was giving me the usual froggie stuff about how they have the best cuisine in the world God help us. Naturally i replied that French cuisine is suitable only for people who wish to eat inter alia suitably prepared body parts of dead animals. The poor young man had a full-on CHF moment in front of me right then and there.

Of course there is nothing wrong with French cuisine as far as it goes. But how are we to square this hemispheric inattention to vegetarianism with the claim to all-embracing French expertise in cuisine? Easy! Vegetarian cuisine is not cuisine; it is an aberration, a cult. Frenchmen talking to vegetarians inevitably experience CHF moments, as my young colleague did, of course. These CHF moments are annoying for them of course, but the alternative would be for them to admit that there are lacunae in their expertise in cuisine, and that is not to be borne.

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