You can click an image and see a full-window popup dialog box containing a larger version of the image.
The larger version of the image isn’t loaded until it’s needed.
You can close the larger version with a close button. You can also use your browser’s back button.
You can click again to download the larger version/use your browser to zoom in further.
You can share/bookmark etc. the URL of a zoomed-in image and the recipient will see the same image (and return to the
image, in the right blog post, if they press the close button).
No HTTP round trip is required when opening/closing a lightbox: it’s functionally-instantaneous.2
No JavaScript is used at all.
Visitors can click on images to see a larger version, with a “close” button. No JavaScript needed.
Here’s how it works –
The Markup
<figureid="img3336"aria-describedby="caption-img3336"><ahref="#lightbox-img3336"role="button"><imgsrc="small-image.jpg"alt="Alt text is important."width="640"height="480"></a><figcaptionid="caption-img3336">
Here's the caption.
</figcaption></figure>
... (rest of blog post) ...
<dialogid="lightbox-img3336"class="lightbox"><ahref="large-image.jpg"><imgsrc="large-image.jpg"loading="lazy"alt="Alt text is important."></a><aclass="close"href="#img3336"title="Close image"role="button">×</a></dialog>
The HTML is pretty simple (and I automatically generate it, of course).
For each lightboxed image in a post, a <dialog> for that image is appended to the post. That dialog contains a larger copy of the image (set to
loading="lazy" so the browser have to download it until it’s needed), and a “close” button.
The image in the post contains an anchor link to the dialog; the close button in the dialog links back to the image in the post.3 I wrap the lightbox image itself in a link to the full version of the
image, which makes it easier for users to zoom in further using their browser’s own tools, if they like.
Even without CSS, this works (albeit with “scrolling” up and down to the larger image). But the clever bit’s yet to
come:
The Style
body:has(dialog:target) {
/* Prevent page scrolling when lightbox open (for browsers that support :has()) */position:fixed;
}
a[href^='#lightbox-'] {
/* Show 'zoom in' cursor over lightboxed images. */cursor: zoom-in;
}
.lightbox {
/* Lightboxes are hidden by-default, but occupy the full screen and top z-index layer when shown. */all:unset;
display:none;
position:fixed;
top:0;
left:0;
width:100%;
height:100%;
z-index:2;
background:#333;
}
.lightbox:target {
/* If the target of the URL points to the lightbox, it becomes visible. */display: flex;
}
.lightboximg {
/* Images fill the lightbox. */object-fit:contain;
height:100%;
width:100%;
}
/* ... extra CSS for styling the close button etc. ... */
Here’s where the magic happens.
Lightboxes are hidden by default (display: none), but configured to fill the window when shown.
They’re shown by the selector .lightbox:target, which is triggered by the id of the <dialog> being referenced by the anchor part of
the URL in your address bar!
Summary
It’s neither the most-elegant nor cleanest solution to the problem, but for me it hits a sweet spot between developer experience and user experience. I’m always disappointed when
somebody’s “lightbox” requires some heavyweight third-party JavaScript (often loaded from a CDN), because that seems to be the
epitome of the “take what the Web gives you for free, throw it away, and reimplement it badly in JavaScript” antipattern.
There’s things I’ve considered adding to my lightbox. Progressively-enhanced JavaScript that adds extra value and/or uses the Popover API where available, perhaps? View Transitions to animate the image “blowing up” to the larger size, while the full-size image loads in the
background? Optimistic preloading when hovering over the image4? “Previous/next” image links when lightboxing a gallery? There’s lots of potential to expand it
without breaking the core concept here.
I’d also like to take a deeper dive into the accessibility implications of this approach: I think it’s pretty good, but accessibility is a big topic and there’s always more to
learn.
In the meantime, why not try out my lightbox by clicking on this picture of my dog (photographed here staring longingly at the bacon sandwich picture above, perhaps).
I hope the idea’s of use to somebody else looking to achieve this kind of thing, too.
Footnotes
1 Where JavaScript is absolutely necessary, I (a) host it on the same domain, for
performance and privacy-respecting reasons, and (b) try to provide a functional alternative that doesn’t require JavaScript, ideally seamlessly.
2 In practice, the lightbox images get lazy-loaded, so there can be a short round
trip to fetch the image the first time. But after that, it’s instantaneous.
3 The pair – post image and lightbox image – work basically the same way as footnotes,
like this one.
4 I already do this with links in general using the excellent instant.page.
An increasing number of people are reportedly suffering from an allergy to the meat and other products of nonhuman mammals, reports Mosaic Science this week, and we’re increasingly confident that the cause is
a sensitivity to alpha-gal (Galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose), a carbohydrate produced in the bodies of virtually
all mammals except for us and our cousin apes, monkeys, and simians (and one of the reasons you can’t transplant tissue from pigs to humans, for example).
The lone star tick (You call that a star, tick? Looks like a blob to me!), one of several vectors for alpha-gal sensitivity.
The interesting thing is that the most-common cause of alpha-gal sensitivity appears to be the bite of one of a small number of species of tick. The most-likely hypothesis seems to be
that being bitten by such a tick after it’s bitten e.g. deer or cattle may introduce that species’ alpha-gal directly to your bloodstream. This exposure triggers an immune response
through all future exposure, even if it’s is more minor, e.g. consuming milk products or even skin contact with an animal.
That’s nuts, isn’t it? The Mosaic Science article describes the reaction of Tami McGraw, whose symptoms began in 2010:
[She] asked her doctor to order a little-known blood test that would show if her immune system was reacting to a component of mammal meat. The test result was so strongly positive,
her doctor called her at home to tell her to step away from the stove.
That should have been the end of her problems. Instead it launched her on an odyssey of discovering just how much mammal material is present in everyday life. One time, she took
capsules of liquid painkiller and woke up in the middle of the night, itching and covered in hives provoked by the drug’s gelatine covering.
When she bought an unfamiliar lip balm, the lanolin in it made her mouth peel and blister. She planned to spend an afternoon gardening, spreading fertiliser and planting flowers, but
passed out on the grass and had to be revived with an EpiPen. She had reacted to manure and bone meal that were enrichments in bagged compost she had bought.
Cats can eat bacon. But some cat owners can’t. More bacon for the cats? The plot thickens. Also: haven’t used this picture in
a while, have I?
Of course, this isn’t the only nor even the most-unusual (or most-severe) animal-induced allergy-to-a-different-animal we’re aware of. The hilariously-named but terribly-dangerous
Pork-Cat syndrome is caused, though we’re not sure how, by exposure to cats and
results in a severe allergy to pork. But what makes alpha-gal sensitivity really interesting is that it’s increasing in frequency at quite a dramatic rate. The culprit? Climate change.
Probably.
It’s impossible to talk to physicians encountering alpha-gal cases without hearing that something has changed to make the tick that transmits it more common – even though they don’t
know what that something might be.
…
“Climate change is likely playing a role in the northward expansion,” Ostfeld adds, but acknowledges that we don’t know what else could also be contributing.
An average serving of beef contributes almost 8kg of greenhouse gases, compared to around 1kg for chicken. Thanks, Beeb (click through for full article).
A little dated, perhaps: I’m sure that nobody needs to be told nowadays that one of the biggest things a Westerner can do to reduce their personal carbon footprint (after from breeding less or not at all, which I maintain is the biggest, or avoiding air
travel, which Statto argues for) is to reduce or refrain from consumption of meat (especially pork and beef) and dairy products.
Indeed, environmental impact was the biggest factor in my vegetarianism (now weekday-vegetarianism) for
the last eight years, and it’s an outlook that I’ve seen continue to grow in others over the same period.
Seeing these two stories side-by-side in my RSS reader put the Gaia hypothesis in my mind.
If you want a pop-culture-grade introduction to the Gaia hypothesis in the context of climate change, this SMBC comic does the job, and does so almost with fewer words than this
caption explaining that it does so.
If you’re not familiar with the Gaia hypothesis, the basic idea is this: by some mechanism, the Earth and all of the life on it act in synergy to maintain homeostasis. Organisms not
only co-evolve with one another but also with the planet itself, affecting their environment in a way that in turn affects their future evolution in a perpetual symbiotic relationship
of life and its habitat.
Its advocates point to negative feedback loops in nature such as plankton blooms affecting the weather in ways that inhibit
plankton blooms and to simplistic theoretical models like the Daisyworld Simulation
(cute video). A minority of its proponents go a step further and describe the Earth’s changes teleologically, implying a conscious Earth with an intention to
protect its ecosystems (yes, these hypotheses were born out of the late 1960s, why do you ask?). Regardless, the essence is the same: life’s effect on its environment affects the
environment’s hospitality to life, and vice-versa.
There’s an attractive symmetry to it, isn’t there, in light of the growth in alpha-gal allergies? Like:
Today – climate change causes ticks to spread more-widely and bite more humans.
Tomorrow – tick bites cause humans to consume less products farmed from mammals?
Both my appreciation and my rejection of Gaia Hypothesis can probably be traced to me playing way too much SimEarth as a
teenager. Here’s my Daisyworld in state of equilibrium, because I haven’t yet gotten bored and spawned dinosaurs to eat all of the daisies.
That’s not to say that I buy it, mind. The Gaia hypothesis has a number of problems, and – almost as bad – it encourages a complacent “it’ll all be okay, the Earth will fix itself”
mindset to climate change (which, even if it’s true, doesn’t bode well for the humans residing on it).
But it was a fun parallel to land in my news reader this morning, so I thought I’d share it with you. And, by proxy, make you just a little bit warier of ticks than you might have been
already. /shudders/
At a little over 590 thousand words and spanning 1,349 pages, Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy is almost-certainly among
the top ten longest single-volume English-language novels. It’s pretty fucking huge.
I’ll stick with the Kindle edition: I fear that merely holding the paperback would be exhausting.
I only discovered A Suitable Boy this week (and haven’t read it – although there are some good reviews that give me an inclination to) when, on a whim, I decided to try to get
a scale of how much I’d ever written on this blog and then decided I needed something tangible to use as a comparison. Because – give or take – that’s how much I’ve written here, too:
At 593,457 words, this blog wouldn’t fit into that book unless we printed it on the covers as well.
Of course, there’s some caveats that might make you feel that the total count should be lower:
It might include a few pieces of non-content code, here and there. I tried to strip them out for the calculation, but I wasn’t entirely successful.
It included some things which might be considered metadata, like image alt-text (on the other hand, sometimes I like to hide fun messages in my image alt-text, so perhaps they
should be considered content).
On the other hand, there are a few reasons that it perhaps ought to be higher:
Post titles (which sometimes contain part of the content) and pages outside of blog posts are not included in the word count.
I’ve removed all pictures for the purpose of the word count. Tempting though it was to make each worth a thousand words, that’d amount to about another one and a half million words,
which seemed a little excessive.
Another reason for not counting images was that it was harder than you’d think to detect repeat use of images that I’ve used too many times. Like this one.
Of course, my blog doesn’t really have a plot like A Suitable Boy (might compare well to the even wordier Atlas Shrugged, though…): it’s a mixture of mostly
autobiographical wittering interspersed with musings on technology and geekery and board games and magic and VR and stuff. I’m pretty sure that if I knew where my life would be now, 18
years ago (which is approximately when I first started blogging), I’d have, y’know, tried to tie it all together with an overarching theme and some character development or something.
Or perhaps throw in the odd plot twist or surprise: something with some drama to keep the reader occupied, rather than just using the web as a stream-of-conciousness diary of whatever
it is I’m thinking about that week. I could mention, for example, that there’ll be another addition to our house later this year. You heard it here first (unless you already heard it
from somewhere else first, in which case you heard it there first.)
Brought up in a world of tiny, bright, UHD colour touchscreens, Annabel seemed slightly underwhelmed by the magic of a sonograph picture of her future baby brother.
Still: by the end of this post I’ll have hit a nice, easy-to-remember 594,000 words.
The entire infrastructure of our civilization – our entire species – is something that you can’t help but take for granted. Let’s make a cheese & pickle sandwich.
This is a bacon sandwich: not the same thing at all, but I haven’t used the picture in a while and I felt like I ought to. Click the delicious-looking sandwich to see more articles in
which it appears.
How to make a Cheese & Pickle Sandwich
Find a grass whose seed, when crushed, yields a powdery flour rich in carbohydrates and proteins – any of the dozens of species of wheat will do, but there are plenty others besides. If
you’re genuinely starting from scratch, you might find that it’s first worth your while cultivating and selectively breeding the cereal to improve its yield. Separate off the dry
outer chaff from the seeds and grind them. You’ll also need some yeast, which you can acquire from the environment by letting water in which you’ve boiled vegetables sit in the warm for
a few days, or by extracting it from the skins of fruits: alternatively, you can make use of yeast spores in the atmosphere by working slowly in the vicinity of fermenting sugars;
e.g. somebody brewing alcohol. Combine the flour with some water and the yeast to make a dough, let it rise, then put it in a hot box for a while to bake it. There’s your bread.
Insert into a hot box and wait.
Meanwhile, domesticate some cattle. You’ll need to have started this quite a while earlier. Specifically, you’re going to need cows that have recently weaned a calf, so they’re still
lactating. Manipulate the teats of the cow to extract its milk, then heat it gently while stirring it. Assuming that you don’t have the resources to identify and separate lactococcus
bacteria, you’ll want to be careful not to heat the milk enough that it kills any such bacteria already in it. Add an edible acid (lemon juice will do, assuming you’ve got access to
lemons; alternatively you could use vinegar, which you’ll be needing later on anyway) to cause the milk to begin separating into curds (the solid part) and whey (the liquid part) –
alternatively, if you’ve got spare unweaned calves that you can kill and harvest the stomachs of, you can use rennet. If you’ve got the hang of processing cotton, you can weave yourself
a square of cheesecloth and use this as a filter. Once you’ve reduced the curds as far as possible, wrap it and squeeze it in a press (you can make this by putting weight on it) for a
few days, turning occasionally. Then, cover it in an airtight seal of wax (you can get this by melting honeycombs taken from a beehive), and leave it for a month or two. There’s your
cheese.
This cheese is still curd: it’s edible, but won’t yet have that distinct mature/acidic flavour.
Harvest some fruit and vegetables, such as – depending on availability – swede, carrots, dates, onions, cauliflower, apples, courgettes, and tomatoes, and dice them. Boil
together in vinegar with cloves, mustard, and sugar added until the hardest parts (typically the swede) are firm but not crunchy. Heat a sterile, airtight container, add the mixture,
and seal. Leave for a couple of weeks. Oh: you don’t have vinegar? No problem: first you’re going to need alcohol, which you can produce from fruit – apples are probably easiest; grapes
are another popular choice – and yeast: just combine the two and give it a few weeks. Now, to turn that into vinegar, keep it at just over room temperature for
several more weeks, stirring regularly to aerate it. Seriously: if you thought that learning to milk a cow was hard, you should have given up long before now. Anyway:
there’s your pickle.
You’re really getting there, now. We’re almost ready to make a sandwich.
You’ll also want some butter, but by this point you’re used to a little work. Assuming you don’t have access to a centrifuge, the traditional thing to do next is to leave it
sitting in a shallow pan for about 24 hours, then skimming off the top – congratulations, you’ve got cream (the remaining milk is now what you would call skimmed milk; I suggest you
have yourself a cool glass of it while you start working on the next bit). Put the cream into a bowl with a pinch of salt and work it, keeping it as cool as possible while you do so, as
if you were trying to make whipped cream… but keep going! If you whip it for long enough it’ll gradually become more and more solid: drain it of the excess liquid (this is buttermilk),
and then form it into a ball or block. Hurrah: you’ve got butter!
Ready for the spready?
Finally, you can assemble your sandwich. Slide the bread, spread butter onto the slices, and put slices of the cheese and a spoonful of pickle in between them. That wasn’t so hard, now,
was it?
Why, Dan, why?
You’ll be forgiven if you’re wondering why I’ve just shared with you the most drawn-out recipe imaginable, for something so simple as a cheese & pickle sandwich.
Was it worth it? If you were bored by reading the process, you’d be really bored by the time you’d actually followed the recipe.
It’s just this: think about how much was involved in that process (and I didn’t even talk about making the tools you’d need). How complex is that process, compared
to everything eaten by every other animal on the planet. Otters use rocks to get into shellfish, and chimpanzees use sticks to pull termites out of
nests, but apart from these – and a few other exceptions – virtually no other species we’ve ever come across does anything more than picking or hunting for their food, and then
eating it. We, on the other hand – even for our simplest processed foods – put a monumental amount of effort into making them the way they are.
And as if that weren’t complex enough, we go even further. We make different kinds of bread and cheese with different kinds of flour and milk, different processes, different ages; we
make different brands of pickle and butter, and then argue on the Internet about which one is the best. We make sandwiches with egg mayonnaise (boiled eggs… in an emulsion of egg yolks
and oil), with roasted or cured meats of different kinds of animals, with hummus (a remarkably complicated ingredient in its own right).
Just be glad I didn’t tell you how to make a Baked Alaska.
When you make yourself a sandwich, you’re standing upon the shoulders of the hundreds of generations that preceded you, and all of their peers. A collective knowledge passed down
over millennia. In reality, nobody milks a cow because they want to make a sandwich: but that separation is only possible because of the enormous infrastructure we’ve built up in order
to support the production and distribution of dairy goods.
We are, indeed, a very strange species.
But if you actually do have a go at making a sandwich based on this recipe, let me know how you get on.
This is the first in a series of four blog posts which ought to have been published during January 2013,
but ran late because I didn’t want to publish any of them before the first one.
2012 was one of the hardest years of my life.
My retweet of JTA’s sentiments, shortly after midnight on New Year’s Eve, pretty much covers my feeling of the year, too.
It was a year of unceasing disasters and difficulties: every time some tragedy had befallen me, my friends, or family, some additional calamity was lined-up to follow in its wake. In an
environment like this, even the not-quite-so-sad things – like the death of Puddles, our family dog, in May – were magnified, and the ongoing challenges of the year – like the
neverending difficulties with my dad’s estate – became overwhelming.
My sister Becky with Puddles, both younger and more-foolish than they eventually became. I don’t know why Puddles is wearing a t-shirt.
The sudden and unexpected death of my dad while training for his Arctic trek, was clearly the event which had the
most-significant impact on me. I’ve written about the experience at length, both here on my blog and elsewhere (for example, I made a self-post to Reddit on the day after the accident, urging readers to “call somebody
you love today”).
My dad, climbing Aladdin’s Mirror in the Cairngorms.
In the week of his death, my sister Becky was suffering from an awful toothache which was stopping her from eating,
sleeping, or generally functioning at all (I tried to help her out by offering some oil of cloves (which functions as a dental contact anesthetic), but she must have misunderstood my instruction about applying it to the
tooth without swallowing it, because she spent most of that evening throwing up (seriously: don’t ever swallow clove oil).
My dad’s clothes for his funeral. My sisters and I decided that he ought to be dressed as he would be for a one of his summer hikes, right down to the combination of sandals and socks
(the funeral director needed reassurance that yes, he really did routinely wear both at the same time).
Little did she know, worse was yet to come: when she finally went to the dentist, he botched her operation, leaving her
with a jaw infection. The infection spread, causing septicæmia of her face and neck and requiring that she was hospitalised. On the day of our dad’s funeral, she needed to insist that the “stop gap” surgery that she was given was done under local, rather
than general, anasthetic, so that she could make it – albeit in a wheelchair and unable to talk – to the funeral.
Five weeks later, my dad finally reached the North Pole,
his ashes carried by another member of his team. At about the same time, Ruth‘s grandmother passed away, swamping the
already-emotional Earthlings with yet another sad period. That same month,
my friend S****** suffered a serious injury, a traumatic and distressing experience in the middle of a long and difficult period of her life, and an event which caused significant
ripples in the lives of her circle of friends.
The notice of Ruth’s grandmother’s death, as it appeared in the online version of her local newspaper.
Shortly afterwards, Paul moved out from Earth, in a situation that was anticipated (we’d said when we first moved in
together that it would be only for a couple of years, while we all found our feet in Oxford and decided on what we’d be doing next, as far as our living situations were concerned), but
still felt occasionally hostile: when Paul left town six months later, his last blog post stated that Oxford could “get lost”, and that he’d “hated hated 90% of the time” he’d lived here. Despite
reassurances to the contrary, it was sometimes hard – especially in such a difficult year – to think that this message wasn’t directed at Oxford so much as at his friends there.
As the summer came to an end, my workload on my various courses increased dramatically, stretching into my so-called “free time”: this, coupled with delays resulting from all of the
illness, injury, and death that had happened already, threw back the release date of Milestone: Jethrik, the latest update to Three Rings. Coupled with the stress of the 10th Birthday Party Conference – which thankfully JTA handled most of – even the rare periods during which nobody was ill or dying were filled with sleepless nights and anxiety. And of
course as soon as all of the preparation was out of the way and
the conference was done, there were still plenty of long days ahead, catching up on everything that had been temporarily put on the back burner.
My sister Sarah and I at the christening of a bus named after my dad. Click the picture for the full story.
When I was first appointed executor of my dad’s estate, I said to
myself that I could have the whole thing wrapped-up and resolved within six months… eight on the outside. But as things dragged on – it took almost six months until the investigation
was finished and the coroner’s report filed, so we could get a death
certificate, for example – they just got more and more bogged-down. Problems with my dad’s will made it harder than expected to get started (for example, I’m the executor and a beneficiary of the will, yet nowhere on it am
I directly mentioned by name, address, or relationship… which means that I’ve had to prove that I am the person mentioned in the will every single time I present it, and that’s
not always easy!), and further administrative hiccups
have slowed down the process every step of the way.
On the first anniversary of my dad’s death, I cycled up a hill to watch the sunset with a bottle of Guinness and a Mars bar. And sent this Tweet.
You know what would have made the whole thing easier? A bacon sandwich. And black
pudding for breakfast. And a nice big bit of freshly-battered cod. And some roast chicken. I found that 2012 was a harder year than 2011 in which to be a vegetarian. I guess that a nice steak would have
taken the edge off: a little bit of a luxury, and some escapism. Instead, I probably drank a lot more than I ought to have. Perhaps we should encourage recovering alcoholic, when things
are tough, to hit the sausage instead of the bottle.
It’s been a while, old friend. A while since I used this delicious-looking photograph in my blog, I mean! This is the sixth time… can you find them all?
Becky’s health problems weren’t done for the year, after she started getting incredibly intense and painful headaches. At first, I was worried that she was lined-up for a similar diagnosis to mine, of the other year (luckily, I’ve been symptom-free for a year
and a quarter now, although medical science is at a loss to explain why), but as I heard more about her symptoms, I became convinced that this wasn’t the case. In any case, she found
herself back in the operating room, for the second serious bit of surgery of the year (the operation was a success, thankfully).
The “F” is for “Fuck me you’re going to put a scalpel WHERE?”
I had my own surgery, of course, when I had a vasectomy; something I’d been
planning for some time. That actually went quite well, at least as far as can be
ascertained at this point (part three of that series of posts will be coming soon), but it allows me to segue into the topic of reproduction…
Because while I’d been waiting to get snipped, Ruth and JTA had managed to conceive. We found this out right as we were running around sorting out the Three Rings Conference, and Ruth
took to calling the fœtus “Jethrik”, after the Three Rings milestone. I was even more delighted still when I heard that the expected birth date would be 24th July: Samaritans‘ Annual Awareness Day (“24/7”).
One of the many pregnancy tests Ruth took, “just to be sure” (in case the last few were false positives). Photo from Ruth’s blog.
As potential prospective parents, they did everything right. Ruth stuck strictly to a perfectly balanced diet for her stage of pregnancy; they told only a minimum of people, because –
as everybody knows – the first trimester’s the riskiest period. I remember when Ruth told her grandfather (who had become very unwell towards the end of 2012 and died early this year:
another sad family tragedy) about the pregnancy, that it was only after careful consideration – balancing how nice it would be for him to know that the next generation of his
family was on the way before his death – that she went ahead and did so. And as the end of the first trimester, and the end of the year, approached, I genuinely believed that the string
of bad luck that had been 2012 was over.
In Ruth’s blog post, she’s used kittens to make a sad story a little softer, and so I have too.
But it wasn’t to be. Just as soon as we were looking forward to New Year, and planning to not so much “see in 2013” as to “kick out 2012”, Ruth had a little bleeding. Swiftly followed
by abdominal cramps. She spent most of New Year’s Eve at the hospital, where they’d determined that she’d suffered a miscarriage, probably a few weeks earlier.
Ruth’s written about it. JTA’s written about it, too. And I’d recommend they read their account rather than mine: they’ve
both written more, and better, about the subject than I could. But I shan’t pretend that it wasn’t hard: in truth, it was heartbreaking. At the times that I could persuade myself that
my grief was “acceptable” (and that I shouldn’t be, say, looking after Ruth), I cried a lot. For me, “Jethrik” represented a happy ending to a miserable year: some good news at last for
the people I was closest to. Perhaps, then, I attached too much importance to it, but it seemed inconceivable to me – no pun intended – that for all of the effort they’d put in, that
things wouldn’t just go perfectly. For me, it was all connected: Ruth wasn’t pregnant by me, but I still found myself wishing that my dad could have lived to have seen it, and when the
pregnancy went wrong, it made me realise how much I’d been pinning on it.
I don’t have a positive pick-me-up line to put here. But it feels like I should.
A few days before the miscarriage became apparent, Ruth and her dad survey the back garden of the house he’s rebuilding.
And so there we were, at the tail of 2012: the year that began awfully, ended awfully, and was pretty awful in the middle. I can’t say there weren’t good bits, but they were somewhat
drowned out by all of the shit that happened. Fuck off, 2012.
Here’s to 2013.
Edit, 16th March 2013: By Becky’s request, removed an unflattering photo of her and some of the ickier details of her health problems this year.
Edit, 11th July 2016: At her request, my friend S******’s personal details have been obfuscated in this post so that they are no longer readily available to
search engines.
Edit, 26th September 2016: At her request, my friend S******’s photo was removed from this post, too.
I’ve been a vegetarian for a year
and a bit, now, and it’s not significantly easier than it was to begin with. There are lots of meats that I miss. And there are some meats that I expected to miss, that I don’t. Here’s
my experience:
This is how my subconscious communicates with me, too. Click for the original comic.
The things I miss the most:
Fish finger sandwiches. I know they’re not to everybody’s taste, but these things are just delicious.
Chicken in convenient things. What do you mean, I can’t have the dupiaza unless it’s with chicken? You do other dishes with vegetables!
Having a wide variety of choice. If I grab myself a lazy pre-made sandwich from the supermarket, my choices are – at best – limited to cheese-and-tomato or egg mayo.
There are plenty of great veggie sandwich fillings: like falafel and hummus, roasted peppers, brie and pickle, curried tofu and lettuce, carrot and rocket, or even QuornTM. But I’ve had to get used
to many supermarkets giving me a choice of one or two (and this is also the case in a shocking number of restaurants, too).
This is the fourth time I’ve used this photo on my blog, and it isn’t getting any easier. Man, that’s a tasty-looking sandwich.
And things I don’t miss as much as I expected to:
Bacon. I’ve had the ocassional craving for crispy, well-done bacon. This is odd, because as a meat-eater I generally preferred my bacon barely cooked at all. But I’ve
not missed bacon as much as I’d feared, and that’s great, because JTA‘s still liable to cook it, and the smell
might otherwise have been intolerable.
Steak. I occasionally feel like I’m missing out, but this is more-often because I’m stuck with a limited choice on a restaurant menu than that the steak in itself
looked particularly tasty. I guess I wasn’t as attached to lumps of beef or mutton as I suspected!
Cooking with meat. I expected to have some difficulties here: I cook a variety of different things, some of them well. And of those, the vast majority had a meat
component. Meat-substitutes aren’t always suitable (even where they are adequate), so I’ve had to discover a stack of new things that I can put together in the kitchen. But this
turned out to be simpler than I thought… perhaps in part thanks to the number of vegetarians I’ve lived with or dated over the years.
The webcomic-o-sphere loves bacon. Click for the original comic.
So there we go. There are things I miss more than I thought, and there are things I’ve missed less. And there’s not a particularly strong pattern between them.
If you’ve restricted your diet (e.g. by choosing to be vegetarian), what do you miss? Or if you haven’t, what do you think you’d miss the most? I think we all know how Adam feels, at least…
There’s something that I just don’t understand about vegetarians. It’s something that I didn’t understand when I mercilessly teased them, and it’s something that I still don’t
understand now that I am one:
Quorn ‘Roast Chicken Style Slices’. No chickens were harmed in the making of this chicken.
You know the stuff I’m talking about: stuff made out of mycoprotein
or TVP or soya that’s specifically designed to emulate real meat in flavour (sometimes
effectively) and texture (rarely so). Browse the chilled and frozen aisles of your local supermarket for their “vegetarian” section and you’ll find meatfree (although rarely vegan)
alternatives to chicken, turkey, beef and pork, presented here in descending order of how convincing they are as a substitute.
Tesco ‘vegetarian’ hot dogs. There’s actually a distinct possibility that these contain MORE meat than their non-vegetarian counterparts.
Let’s be clear here: it’s not that I don’t see the point in faux meat. It has a few clear benefits: for a start, it makes vegetarianism more-approachable to omnivores who
are considering it for the first time. I’ve tried meat substitutes on a number of occasions over the last couple of decades, and they’ve really improved over that time: even a
meat-lover like me can be (partially) placated by the selection of substitutes available.
Man, this photo of a BLT looks more delicious every time I use it on my blog. Why do I torture myself this way?
And while I slightly buy-in to the argument
that the existence of these fake meats “glorifies” meat-eating, perhaps even to the extent as to under-sell vegetarianism as a poor substitute for the “real thing”, I don’t think
that this is in itself the biggest problem with the fake meat industry. There’s a far bigger issue in question:
Why are we stopping here?
A dodo. Apparently it tasted somewhat like turkey, only tougher: there are dozens of accounts of its preparation and consumption.
If we’re really trying here to make “fake meats”, then why are we setting our targets in-line with the commonly-eaten “real meats”? Why stop at chicken and turkey when we might as well
make dodo-flavoured nut roasts and Quorn slices? Sure, they’re extinct, so
we’ll probably never have real dodo meat: but there’s no reason that the manufacturers of artificial meats can’t have a go. There are dozens of accounts of the preparation and
consumption of dodos, so we’d surely be able to emulate their flavour at least as well as we do the meats that we already produce substitutes for.
A tin of unicorn meat: a good source of sparkles! Also cures poison, detects virgins, etc.
Why stop there? We might as well have tins of unicorn meat, too, a meal already familiar to those of us who’ve played more than our fair share of NetHack. How about dragons, or griffins, or the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary? If we’re going to make it up as we go along when we make artificial bacon, we
might as well make it up as we go along when we make basilisk-burgers and salamander-sausages, too.
There’s a reason, of course, that we don’t see these more-imaginative meat substitutes. Many of the most loyal fake-meat customers are the kinds of people who don’t like to
think about the connection between, for example, “chicken” (the foodstuff), and “chicken” (the clucking bird). To be fair, a lot of meat-eaters don’t like to think about this
either, but I get the impression that it’s more-common among vegetarians.
But seriously, though: I think they’re missing a trick, here. Who wouldn’t love to eat artificial pegasus-pâté?
[disclaimer: this post appears just days after some friends of mine announce their pregnancy;
this is a complete coincidence (this post was written and scheduled some time ago) and of course I’m delighted for the new parents-to-be]
In October, the world population is expected to reach seven billion. Seven fucking billion. I remember
being a child and the media reports around the time that we hit five billion: that was in the late 1980s. When my parents were growing up, we hadn’t even hit three billion. For the
first nine or ten thousand years of human civilisation between the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution, the world population was consistently below a billion. Let’s
visualise that for a moment:
World population for the last 12,000 years.
How big is our island?
Am I the only one who gets really bothered by graphs that look like this? Does it not cause alarm?
We have runaway population growth and finite natural resources. Those two things can’t coexist together forever. Let’s have a look at another graph:
Reindeer population on St. Matthew Island, from the comic of the same name.
This one is taken from a wonderful comic called St. Matthew
Island, about the real island. It charts the
population explosion of a herd of reindeer introduced to the island in the 1940s and then left to their own devices in a safe and predator-free environment. Their population ballooned
until they were consuming all of their available resources. As it continued to expand, a tipping point was reached, and catastrophe struck: without sufficient food, mass starvation set
in and the population crashed down from about 6,000 to only 43. By the 1980s, even these few had died out.
There are now no reindeer on St. Matthew Island. And it looks like this 40-year story could serve as a model for the larger, multi-century, world-wide population explosion that humans
are having.
Game Theory
Humans are – in theory at least – smart enough to see what’s coming. If we continue to expand in this way, we risk enormous hardship (likely) and possible extinction (perhaps). Yet
still the vast majority of us choose to breed, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that this is Not A Good Thing.
But even people smart enough to know better seem to continue to be procreating. And perhaps they’re right to: for most people, there is – for obvious evolutionary reasons – a biological
urge to pass on one’s genes to the next generation. During a period of population explosion, the risk that your genetic material will be “drowned out” by the material of those
practically unrelated to you. Sure: there might be a complete ecological collapse in 10, 100 or 1000 years… but the best way to ensure that your genes survive it is to put them into as
many individuals as possible: surely some of them will make it, right? Just like buying several lottery tickets improves your chances of hitting the jackpot.
A stack of lottery tickets. If I buy enough, I’m sure to win, right?
On a political level, too, a similar application of game theory applies: if the other countries are going to have more people, then our country needs more people
too! Very few countries penalise families for having multiple children (in fact, to the contrary), and those that do don’t do so very effectively. This leads to a “population arms
race”, and no nation can afford to fall behind its rivals: it needs a young workforce ready to pay taxes, produce goods, pay for the upkeep of the retired… and conceive yet more
children.
The same tired arguments
Mostly, though, I hear the same tired arguments for breeding [PDF]: cultural conditioning
and social expectations, a desire to “pass on” a name (needless to say, I have a different idea about names
than many people), a xenophobic belief that the world needs “more people like us” but “less like them”, and worry that you might regret it later (curious how few people seem to consider
the reverse of this argument).
For me, the genetic problem is easy enough to fix: if your children’s genes are valuable to you because of their direct relationship (50%) to your genes, then presumably your brother’s
(50%) and your niece’s (25%) are valuable to you to: more so than that of somebody on the other side of the world? I just draw the boundary in a different place – all of us humans share
well over 99% of our DNA with one another anyway: we’re all one big family! We only share a lower percentage with other primates, a lower percentage still with other mammals, and
so on (although we still share quite a lot even with plants).
The similarity between you and your children is only marginally more – almost insignificantly so – than the similarity between you and every other human that has ever
lived.
If you’re looking for a “family” that carries your genetic material: you’re living in one… with almost seven billion brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles and aunts! If you can expand your
thinking to include the non-human animals, too, well: good for you (I can’t quite stretch that far!). But if you’re looking to help your family survive… can you expand that thinking
into a loyalty to your species, instead, and make the effort to reduce population growth for the benefit of all of us?
My family tree. Have you met my great aunt baboon? Oh; sorry – that’s my sister before she brushes her hair on a morning…
The other argument I frequently see is the “replacement” argument: that it’s ethically okay for a breeding pair of humans to have exactly two children to “replace” them. This argument
has (at least) three flaws:
The replacement is not instantaneous. If a couple, aged 30, have 2 children, and live to age 80, then there are 50 years during which there are four humans taking up space,
food, water and energy. The problem is compounded even further when we factor in the fact that life spans continue to increase. If you live longer than your parents, and your children
live longer than you, then “replacement” breeding actually results in a continuous increase in total population.
Even ignoring the above, “replacement” breeding strategies only actually works if they’re universal. Given that many humans will probably continue to engage super-replacement level
reproduction, we’re likely to need a huge number of humans to engage in sub-replacement level or no reproduction in order to balance it out.
It makes the assumption that current population levels represent a sustainable situation. That might or might not be true – various studies peg the maximum capacity
for the planet at anywhere between one and a hundred billion individuals, with the majority concluding a value somewhere between four and ten billion. Given the gravity of the
situation, I’d rather err on the side of caution.
Child sandwiches
“Do you not like children, then?” I’m sometimes asked, as if this were the only explanation for my notion. And recently, I’ve found a new analogy to help explain
myself: children are like bacon sandwiches.
I’m sure I’m overusing this picture of a BLT.
Children are like bacon sandwiches for five major reasons:
Like most (but not all) people, I like them.
I’d love to have them some day.
But I choose not to, principally because it would be ethically wrong.
I don’t want to prevent others from having them (although I don’t encourage it either), because their freedom is more important than that they agree with me. However, I’d like
everybody to carefully consider their actions.
They taste best when they’re grilled until they’re just barely-crispy. Mmm.
The reasons are similar, though: I care about other humans (and, to a much lesser degree, about other living things, especially those which are “closer” family), and I’d rather not be
responsible, even a little, for the kind of widespread starvation that was doubtless experienced by the reindeer of St. Matthew Island. Given the way that humans will go to war over
limited resources and our capacity to cause destruction and suffering, we might even envy the reindeer – who “only” had to starve to death – before we’re done.
To those of you that don’t know already, I have a confession to make. After years of picking holes in and finding flaws in their various ethical or other arguments and of mocking their
dietary choices, I’ve become… a vegetarian.
This cow, which was not harmed in the making of this blog post, was just as shocked as you are by the news of my vegetarianism.
Okay, this probably wasn’t actually a shock to anybody. Between the observations of the barbeque food I’ve been enjoying
recently and the fact that I willingly chose falafel over hog roast a month or so ago, it’s quite possible that you’re saying “well, duh” at this so-called revelation.
That’s why I thought it’d be far more-interesting for me to talk about the principal reason for this change.
You don’t eat what, now?
For some, however, this change has been a gradual one, beginning with dropping beef from my diet in January, and other red meats in March (making me, technically-speaking, a
lacto–ovo–melo–pollo–pescetarian, which is quite a mouthful). Poultry and fish
disappeared from my diet in April and May.
For a brief stint, I tried to remove milk, too, aiming for ovo-vegetarianism, but it turns out that – while oatmilk is a perfectly reasonable alternative to the white stuff, and there
are some great soya-based dairy-free deserts – there really are no adequate vegan substitutes for cheese… and I’m just not quite capable of coping without it.
Things Dan eats.
Why, Dan? WHY?
My decision to adopt a vegetarian diet is based on a few different influences, but the principal one amongst these is one of environmentalism and sustainability. Over the last few years
it’s become increasingly apparent to me that the Western Pattern Diet has a hugely damaging effect in the following areas:
Water usage sustainability – studies consistently show[1][2] that it takes an order of magnitude more water to produce beef than wheat, rice, or maize, by weight of food produced. Other meats fare
somewhat better, being only three or four times less water-efficient per unit of weight of food, but are still unacceptably water-expensive, to me. Milk and eggs are really quite
water-efficient, being (respectively) about as efficient as soybeans/rice (depending on the region they’re grown in) and maize (note, of course, that beef and dairy cattle are almost
always separate breeds[3], so the counter-argument that beef is a by-product of milk production or vice-versa is
not valid).
Climatic impact – intensive modern livestock farming has an appreciable negative impact on global climate, contributing over a third of the world’s methane[4], probably the most-significant of the
greenhouse gases[5].
Food scarcity – despite worldwide crop yields increasing faster than population growth[6], year
on year, food security is becoming a growing issue owing to desertification of equatorial regions, increased uptake of the wasteful Western Pattern Diet, and an increase in the
production of biofuels. A still-growing population, the depletion of fish stocks, and a rapid increase by developed nations in biofuel demands as oil supplies
dwindle will only aggravate these issues. While a widely-adopted vegetarian/vegan diet would not in itself alleviate these problems (many of which are caused by political and
economic constraints), it would help to ensure that it is possible to feed our booming population in the decades to come.
Overfishing – most of those reasons, of course, are only applicable to the farming of mammals and birds, but it’s hard to deny that there are huge problems with our consumption of fish, too[7]. We’re already reaching the point where the consumption of many species of fish is ethically very dubious, and an increasing number of
species are threatened with extinction. To ensure that fish stocks remain available for future generations, we need either extremely restrictive multinational agreements on fishing
quotas (unlikely), or dramatic reductions in the demand for fish.
In short, I could probably best be described as an economic environmentalist vegetarian: I’m concerned primarily with making sure that our agricultural practices are
sustainable for the benefit of humans, whether currently existing or future. More on that, little doubt, in the Frequently Anticipated Questions, below.
So… how’re you finding it?
Man, I miss bacon.
A BLT; one of many culinary delights that I’m now denied. /sob/
Giving up beef, it turned out, was reasonably easy. Ditto lamb. But bacon: that’s something I miss. When my co-worker Liz had a bacon, mushroom and cheese jacket potato at an office lunch the other week, I could have almost drowned in my own drool. I find myself
envying those vegetarians I know who don’t eat meat because they don’t like it: those guys have it so easy…
Chicken’s been challenging, too, because it’s always been a go-to base ingredient for me, and I’ve had to learn to substitute other sources of protein into my diet. Thankfully, I’ve
been in a strong position: many years of cooking for vegetarians, at one point or another, has given me a pretty good understanding of what’s good for what and a decent repertoire of
already-vegetarian dishes.
I tried to give up milk and milk products after realising that the ecological impact of milk production – while significantly less than beef, for a variety reasons – is still higher
than I’d like. Sadly, it turns out that milk turns up in just about everything, and cheese and cream are remarkably hard to do without. Maybe some day I’ll give that another
go.
On the up-side, though, I’ve discovered a reasonable number of things that I didn’t think I liked, that actually I do… or at least, that are perfectly adequate substitutes for meat
products.
I also routinely slip up on the likes of isinglass (used in the production of many of my favourite beers), and gelatine (which appears in a surprising number of things), and I try not
to kick up a fuss where food is being prepared for several people, of which I’m only one, in a non-compatible way. For example, I tolerate the addition of Worcester sauce (containing
anchovies) as an ingredient where a meal is being prepared for several people – it’d be incredibly inconvenient to require a separation of the food at this point during cooking, and I’m
happy to compromise a little where the chef’s convenience collides with my ethics.
Frequently Anticipated Questions
In order that I jump the gun and answer you before you ask:
You consume products made using isinglass, gelatine, and occasional small quantities of fish sauce… you’re not a vegetarian at all!
I guess not. But the label’s for my convenience, not yours. I use the word vegetarian because it’s the simplest-common-denominator. If I ask in a restaurant “what have you got that’s
vegetarian, or would be but that it contains trace amounts of isinglass, is made using gelatine, has Worcester sauce in, etc.” I’d never get my meal. Plus, the staff would be confused.
To take a mathematical model: the set of things that better-vegetarians-than-I eat is completely contained within the set of things that I eat, and the two are very nearly the same, so
to call myself a vegetarian is closer to a convenient rounding error than a lie.
Also; that wasn’t a question.
Do you expect to make a significant difference?
No. But, like many moral decisions, this isn’t about making a significant difference but about doing the right thing.
If there’s a riot in your town and an out-of-control crowd begins damaging and looting the shops in the high street, you might be tempted to go out and steal a nice laptop or television
yourself, too. Regardless of whether or not you do so, you won’t make a significant difference – Currys will be just as empty in the morning whether you partake of a little ransacking
or not. But that doesn’t change the fact that it would be wrong of you to rob them.
On the other hand, over the course of the rest of my life I’m liable, under ideal circumstances, to make a miniscule but measurable net decrease in the demand for meat products, which
might, under ideal circumstances, have an impact on meat production, thereby coming some way to achieving my ideals. Moreover, I’d like to think that my dietary choices go some way to
making those dietary choices more palatable (hah!) for others, which may influence others to reduce their meat consumption too.
If the aim is to reduce meat consumption, why not simply eat less meat?
Because I can’t trust everybody else to play along.
My gut feeling is that this would work (although I haven’t read any research to either confirm or deny that suspicion): that if we all just cut down our meat consumption so that we were
eating meat only once every few weeks, that we’d have a huge impact on sustainability for the future. But I can’t make everybody do this. The best I can do is to do so myself.
However, if I go just a little bit further and stop eating meat altogether, then I also help to “make up” for other people’s meat-heavy diets.
For every animal you don’t eat, I’m going to eat two!
Well, I hope you enjoy it, because you’ll probably not live too long after consuming all the saturated fats of all of the animals I don’t eat.
You mentioned that the economic/ecological reasons were the principal cause for your vegetarianism. Are there other reasons, too, like the health and longevity benefits or the cost
saving?
Yes. But they’re not the principal reasons.
Incidentally, removing meat from my diet made it far easier for me to lose the second of my three 10kg weight loss goals (as part of my ongoing effort to get down from 110kg to 80kg;
I’m currently at about 89kg), because it’s far easier to avoid fats when you’re already avoiding meat.
How does JTA feel, being the only non-vegetarian in the house?
He’s not… so much. These days, Ruth eats a reasonable amount of a select few different varieties of meat,
and Paul… well, I’m not sure I can keep up with our favourite pepperoni-eating vegetarian, but I think that
right now he’s abstaining from meat entirely, but I’m not sure.
I have a hypothesis that perhaps the world can only tolerate a certain number of vegetarians at once, so as I became one, Ruth had to stop.
What about sustainably-farmed fish/synthetic meat/a survival situation/some other hypothetical situation?
I’m pragmatic, first and foremost, so if somebody wants to demonstrate that a particular farmed fish is environmentally sound, to my satisfaction, then great: it’s back on the menu! I’m
not going out of my way to look for any, though, because I was never a big seafood fan to begin with! It’s not a high priority for me to make my life more complicated by coming up with
some kind of complex list of what’s okay and what’s not, when the simple rule “no meat” seems to be perfectly workable.
Survival situation: sure, I’d chow down on whatever was available to stay alive. I’m not stupid!
And synthetic meat? If it was economically-sound, environmentally-friendly, safe, and tasty… sounds like a win to me. Fetch me a plate!
Isn’t this quite a turnaround for somebody who was once quoted on the BBC as describing vegetarianism as an “eating disorder”?
Yes, I suppose it is. I’ve always prided myself, though, on what I call “correctness over consistency”: that is, I’d like to think that I’m able to do the right thing, even
where it means contradicting my previous attitudes or behaviour. I believe that we’d all do a lot better if people were less attached than they are, on average, to appearing consistent,
especially when they’re faced with new information. There’s no shame in saying “I was wrong then,” so long as you can show that you’re learning.
But yes, I’ve been quite mean to many vegetarians for many years, as if I needed reminding. And so yes, this really is quite a turnaround. And I’m proud to be capable of that.
