Meat flavoured meat

Recently I've been lacking on the time front, as well as the imaginative and creative front as well. Therefore leading to a slight decline in the amount and quality of cede posts. Enjoy...

In general, South Africa is not the easiest place to be a vegetarian. I'm sure there's worse and in the last 5 years here I guess it has gotten a lot better but still. Thankfully I'm in Cape Town where the selection of non-meat foods is pretty good but I'm still surprised almost on a daily basis with what a meat culture it is.

Biltong, some form of dried beef, much like beef jerky but it doesn't quite resemble meat as much, you find it hanging in all the grocery stores, biltong booths set up and even the stalls on the side of the road. You have several flavours of biltong such as Peri Peri, biltong flavour biltong, chicken flavour biltong and so on. You don't just find meat flavoured biltong you also find meat flavoured with biltong and other meat flavouring. One of my favorites that I have seen (wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole even if I did eat meat) is biltong flavoured braai (bbq) sauce, that's right your pound of steak wouldn't be the same with that extra meat flavouring. Anything you want you can get in a meat flavour, such as crisps, we have these in Canada but not to the same extent, it is actually easier to find meat flavoured crisps/ crackers than non-meat flavoured. Any Afrikaner that finds out I'm a vegetarian always asks 'or so you only eat chicken and fish'. They tend to be very astonished when I tell them no, and than there is usually some stammering involved and the inevitable questions 'but but wait, what do you eat, why?'

A few more questions I get a on regular basis... 'where are you from', when I response, 'do you speak french', 'are you from Vancouver or Montreal' (take that Toronto... see not everybody thinks your the center of Canada- most don't even know about you - ha). On finding out I'm Nova Scotian, 'that's really north isn't it', 'wow it's really cold there right'.