Why paul mccartney won't touch a big mac (part 2)

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The difficult thing was that immediately there was a hole in the middle of the plate every time you came to have a meal. Gradually Linda started to fill it with spaghetti or a bit of quiche, then egg dishes and cheese pies and it started to get really good and tasty.

Plus I brought in a lot of the English stuff; mashed potatoes and rice pudding.

Anyway, litte by little she just sort of filled in and we never noticed not having meat. Then the next big eye-opener for us was when we went on holiday to Barbados and we went into a department store and discovered these tinned sausages that were totally vegetarian.

And once we started looking for them we discovered a whole range of these vegetarian products, similar to the ones that Linda is now marketing under her own brand-name. Then what happens is that you really get into it and start becoming activist because you realise that what you're doing is helping to save these poor animals from getting shunted into a slaughterhouse. And so the spiritual side of your life changes. It was all brought into focus by our youngest daughter Stella coming home from school one day and saying how they'd been having this debate about eating meat and she said, "Mum, when we were talking about it I had a really clear conscience". I thought that's really strong, that, being able to give your kid a clear conscience. So now it's all changed for us; it started out almost like a childish thing because we both really loved animals it was almost Disney at first, a love of the Disney bunny rabbits. It was really odd your children have these toys of little rabbits and then suddenly Daddy's chopping them up. There is always that terrible point in your life when you have to give up on niceness and go for real sort of horror. In fact, when I was a real little kid, when I used to go off looking for frogs and sticklebacks, I actually used to be very aware that when I grew up all this would have to end. But things are changing - it's a lot easier to be a veggie these days.

Like when we were kids, vegetarians were people in saris. And then in the sixties, you'd send out for a sandwich from a vegetarian restaurant, and this piece of dried bread with a bit of lettuce on it would come back and you'd be thinking "Oooer, dear me, I'm not sure that I'd ever go vegetarian". But the way we eat now is so kind of passionate, so sort of luscious the way that Linda cooks, that you wouldn't hardly ever know you were a vegetarian in our house. Because we've got it down now to an art and I think that's the secret - the more you stick with it, the more you find little pleasures.

Submitted By SAM LEFKOWITZ On 10-28-95

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