Paul Hetzler
The Advocate

Sometimes, the more information we get about the ripple effects our food choices have on the environment, not to mention our health, the more complex the issue seems to be. We know that buying local produce uses less energy than food shipped across the country or imported from abroad. And, we’re told that eating a largely plant-based diet is better for us and has a far smaller carbon footprint as compared with traditional western fare.

But when it comes to what diet is best for each individual, it’s not always a black-and-white situation. I’m sure there are a lot more than 50 shades of grey in this argument.

For example, a well-managed beef operation can actually help support and maintain native grassland ecosystems in prairie regions, and pastured poultry is generally an ecologically sound option. And then there’s the fact that highly processed meat substitutes are energy-intensive to make, and can be full of salt, sugar and other additives.

It turns out that in the Middle Ages, some wealthy Europeans had a strange obsession with vegetable-based meat. Well, before New World crops got established in Europe, the main food issue was malnutrition and starvation among the masses. Today, about 60 per cent of food grown in Europe was developed by First Nations agronomists. As corn, potatoes, sunflowers, beans, tomatoes, amaranth, chestnuts, squash and other New World crops spread across Eurasia, it helped push starvation a few centimetres away from everyone’s doorstep.

In part due to this reprieve from famine, a coterie of well-to-do Europeans gathered scholars around them to discuss whether a sheep that grows on a vine is a vegetable or an animal, or if birds that develop inside pods growing on trees were OK to consume on meat-free Christian fast days. For hundreds of years, a succession of learned men debated this kind of thing, rather than more apt questions such as “Are we just silly, or are we totally nuts?”

The idea that one could plant a garden of vine-lambs or an orchard of tree-pod birds, maybe even grow cabbage-patch kids, didn’t seem to bother guys who fancied themselves the smartest folks in the world. They hired explorers to hunt far and wide for veggie-meat, starting with sheep.

The origins of the vegetable-lamb tale are a bit woolly, but may date back as far as 2,500 years ago. The widely travelled Greek historian Herodotus is said to have mentioned it in 442 BC. But he was 17 at the time, so who knows which exotic plants he saw, and which he ingested or smoked. Evidently, a Jewish fable also makes reference to a livestock-on-a-stick “vegetimal.”

From the 14th century through the late 1700s, Europeans made forays into poorly mapped regions of central and northern Asia to locate this vegetable sheep.

Upon return, scholars would generally gush about the new species they almost found. It was dubbed the Scythian or Tartary lamb after the regions the travellers believed they had visited. It was also called the Barometz, with various spellings, thought to be from a word for lamb in one of the languages they encountered.

In the 1357 memoir The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the author (a pseudonym) writes that he regaled King Edward III of England with a description of a gourd-like fruit that one sliced open to reveal a flesh-and-blood lamb that could be eaten as any normal lamb. I have to wonder if it was seedless, or if you had to chew carefully and spit out sheep-seeds like a watermelon.

Later explorers depicted the lamb growing on a stalk or vine that connected to its navel, a sort of earthy umbilicus. The lamb could graze around the plant, but if the umbilicus-stalk broke, it would die. I assume these men also located a now-extinct carnivore of exceeding stupidity that could not figure out how to hunt sheep that were tied to the ground.

Alas, the Tartary lamb was never located, but certain Christian monks reported that they found, and ate, a type of bird they observed growing on trees. In their defence, these guys fasted a lot and ate little, so it could be that their asceticism led to hallucinations.

In the 11th and 12th centuries, a number of clerics in remote, barren monasteries in the northern British Isles swore they saw trees whose pods dropped into the ocean and turned into “bernacae” (barnacle) geese. They figured that logically, these geese could be eaten on mandatory fast days when real, non-plant meat was forbidden. Pope Innocent III eventually ruled that although some geese apparently did grow on trees, they were still off-limits on Fridays and other meatless days. But because Popes do not tend to visit rocky clifftop enclaves to check on their flocks, “meatless” goose dinners continued in some areas into the 20th century.

The real-life barnacle goose, Branta leucopsis, breeds in the Scottish Hebrides as well as on Ireland’s northwest coast, in Greenland, and other North Atlantic locations. They are more secretive than other geese and waterfowl in their breeding habits, favouring high cliffs for their nest sites. As a result, fledged juveniles seem to come out of nowhere and appear on the water.

“Green lambs” are real things, too. Native to the Malay Peninsula in southeast Asia, Cibotium barometz, or the golden woolly fern, has a chunky and unusually tomentose (woolly) surface rhizome that can be roasted, and its starchy insides eaten. There are no bones. Or seeds. Related ferns with similar features grow elsewhere, including New Zealand, and have also reportedly been used for food.

Were they not fiction, vegetable lambs and geese would go a long way toward reducing world hunger, greenhouse gas emissions, and maybe domestic squabbles. I respect and support my vegan spouse, and she does not try to “recruit” me away from omnivorism. I eat more legumes than before I was married, but continue to enjoy moderate amounts of local meat.

Hey, even Mary had a little lamb now and then, or so we are told.