I try not to eat much meat at all but damn I love smoked eel. My german uncle used to catch it in the river across from our house and smoke them - I developed a taste then.

BUT saying that, there's very few meats I can bring myself to eat these days - it's a moral quagmire for me. Take octopus for example. I LOVE pickled octopus - I used to get a small tub when I went to the melbourne markets. It made me think of Greece (where I have yet to to go) and the Greeks who make up a huge population of Melbourne. I grew up in quite the cosmopolitian climate, as they'd call it here - so many migrants from all over the world bring amazing food. Yet once I learnt how bloody intelligent octopus are I haven't been able to eat it since. I never will. And then I think, well, every creature has it's own intelligence, so why I am putting my taste buds over - well, yes, ahimsa. Do no harm.

So more and more I'm moving away from the idea of meat, even 'fake' meat with it's high salt content and production costs. It's the texture really - mushrooms, eggplant, tofu, tempeh - they'll give me that bite and umami taste with the typical seasonings I'd use with it. So I dont' feel I miss meat at all, and feel like I have this big obligation to the world to be one of the few that doesn't eat meat.

Lab grown, well, I don't really have an issue with it - though I'd like to know more about it first! I would certainly like to try it - I just went and read an article about it! I guess many ethicists might also question where life actually begins and if using embyronic stem cells is problematic? However it seems the far, far lesser evil than mass extinction, damage of the planet, cruelty to animals and so on...

Dairy, however - now I don't eat a lot of it, but still - ! I think I've been vegetarian my whole life, so I don't feel the need to be vegan, even though I'm probably eating vegan 80 percent of the time.

Gah! I'm so hungry. Tempeh noodles it is.