No meat on the menu at this festive feast

Amid the orgy of meat-eating that goes with Christmas, I found glimmers of hope.

For her Christmas Day lunch, my helper Grace says there was no meat on the menu when she hosted her sisters, cousins, nephews, nieces and grandchildren at her home in Soshanguve.

Grace isn’t a meat-eater herself, and neither is her nephew Jacob, who has apparently detested the taste and smell of meat since childhood. “When someone is braaiing meat, he feels sick and has to go inside the house,” she tells me.

Her other relatives, though, are people who definitely like meat.

But nobody grumbled when Grace served salad and vegetables and another nephew, Nhlanhla, brought along a huge pot of tasty soya mince that he’d cooked himself. In fact, everyone tucked in happily and said how delicious everything was.

Next door, Grace’s friend Lena was having a braai with meat but popped in briefly to see what her neighbours were having. She was invited to try the soya dish and said approvingly that it tasted like mince.

Grace was also telling me about the conversation she’d had with her 11-year-old grandson Thulani when he arrived from Nelspruit for the December holidays and asked why she doesn’t cook or eat meat. Roughly translated (from the Afrikaans she and I speak to each other), she told him: “The cows, pigs and chickens also want to live, just like we do.” Her grandson said earnestly that he liked cows and agreed that they do not want to die.

This meat-free Christmas in Soshanguve contrasted oddly with the festive celebrations that I attended, where lots of meat was served.

On Christmas Eve, it was lamb and beef on the spit. On Family Day, it was gammon and turkey. At the latter, no one was particularly interested in the “meat balls” I’d made. One person tried them and said they were “quite nice”, but another, a teenager, left them untouched on his plate after realising they were made of beans and rice.

The upside is that people went to quite a lot of trouble to cater for us non-meat-eaters.

On Christmas Eve, there were three of us (a fifth of the gathering) and our hosts had made special vegetarian snacks and really delectable veggie dishes. On Family Day, I was the only plant-eater but there was vegan potato salad alongside the standard version (and I had my own dish of meat balls virtually to myself).

It was a bitter-sweet Christmas. Maybe next year I’ll spend it with Grace.