The most pressing question at the beginning of my ‘organic phase’ was: can I continue to drink Coke Light? I assumed I could. After all, Coke Light is made up exclusively of chemicals which renders the issue of organic content entirely redundant.
Karen Duve hardly qualifies as a health freak: Sausages and jellybabies were a permanent fixture in her shopping trolley, alongside bars of chocolate and 1-litre-bottles of curry-flavoured ketchup. Then she moved in together with someone, who quickly earned the nickname of Jiminy Cricket – after the personified conscience of the wooden puppet Pinocchio. For Jiminy would cry out in protest whenever Karen Duve reached for the Grilled Chicken dish for 2.99. Consequently, whenever she stood in front of the deep-freeze cabinet she was plagued by a catalogue of ethical questions: Should we really be eating animals? And if not animals, then what about plants? Where does human empathy begin, and why? What are we prepared to sacrifice out of consideration for our fellow creatures? And can we even derive some personal benefit from altering our eating habits?
Eventually Karen Duve decided to find out for herself: Since then she has been experimenting with different, ethically sound dietary regimes for two months at a time: organic, vegetarian, vegan and finally even fruitarian, i.e. eating only what the plants yield “voluntarily“. At the same time, she began analysing the underlying weltanschauung – which led inexorably to verbal battles with Jiminy Cricket.
Uncompromising, embellished with her typical bone-dry humour and free of any ideological constraints, in Eating Properly she explores the question of “How far can I indulge myself at the expense of others“?
