“We typically crisscross cities from the end of railway terminals, we like to go to places not visited by other tourists. You get to know a city by going to places like this, not central squares. Buckingham Palace is also necessary, but you need to go elsewhere to get to know the city”

I agree completely and do the same when I’m on holiday. It must be genetic as my Dad is similar. He too ran into a bit of trouble with the authorities on holiday in Greece one time. He got caught sneaking around some railway sidings, taking pictures. A guard ran out, shouting at him to stop. Perhaps London police aren’t so bad after all, then? Not quite.

My Dad was in Greece in the 1970s – when it was under a military dictatorship.

With this happy memory in mind, I leapt at the chance when the Gateway asked for a volunteer to go on a meat diet. Every day could be steak day!

The carnivore diet is a simple one: every meal—breakfast, lunch, and dinner—has to have meat as a significant component. I blindly accepted the challenge, thinking that it would be the merest of doddles.

I was wrong.

The first few days started well. I had spaghetti bolognese for breakfast one day and a bacon sandwich the next. Dinner the first night was a steak (of course) and pork chops were had on the day after. Lunches were provided by the meatier options of the Subway menu.

The carnivore is well catered to on campus. There’s always a meat-based option—from a meaty sandwich to a good-old healthy burger or burrito from one of the fast food joints in HUB and SUB.

But while availability wasn’t a problem, the price was. My food expenditures doubled. I winced as the cashier tolled up a bill of over three figures for my weekly shop. The mound of meat on the conveyor belt wasn’t just a nutritional hindrance—it was a financial one too. Meat isn’t cheap, and if you’re living off it for two weeks, your wallet takes a beating.

By the middle of the first week, the novelty began to wear off. At breakfast, my body was screaming for food that would get energy into it quickly. It wanted fruit or cereal; instead it got more chicken. I wanted to recreate the steak for breakfast experience, but my body wouldn’t let me. Reliving it would have just polluted my happy memories.

Seven days in, I compromised and switched to two meals a day: brunch and afternoon tea. I hoped that this way, my body wouldn’t be so overloaded with protein and thus I would be able to take a crap without 20 minutes of vein-bursting effort. It worked—almost. I didn’t feel so wretched and sluggish, but I still desperately wanted something light and energy filled in the morning.

Starting the day with meat (every single morning) is like trying to set off on a bike in its highest gear. By the afternoon, your body is flying along quite nicely, but it’s very hard to get going.

Since finishing the diet I have (unsurprisingly) started eating a lot less meat. I can barely look at a steak—once the bringer of so much joy in my life—without being reminded of the leaden feeling a meat diet constantly entails. My meat mojo is gone. It seems that you really can have too much of a good thing.

(This piece originally appeared in The Gateway and can also be viewed here)

Had it not been for Israel’s attack on Gaza in December the talk probably would not have been so popular. In the fevered atmosphere, Norman Finklestein – a polemicist and ardent critic of Israel – was a major draw. Finklestein did not disappoint. His contempt for Israel manifested itself in a calmly spoken, but passionately felt condemnation of Israeli actions in the West Bank.

He called Israel a ‘Satanic State’ and asked the audience to remember the ‘incinerated’ children of Gaza, ‘since Israel has made their whole business out of provoking passions from the Nazi holocaust’. The people clapped. He was even given a standing ovation.

But it dawned on me as I was walking out, surrounded by people nodding in righteous anger: what had changed? Hundreds of people had come together and merely had their prejudices confirmed. Those who disagreed with Israeli policy still disagreed, while the few supporters of Israel present shrugged their shoulders at another anti-Israel evangelical. Put simply, the polemical nature of Finklestein’s arguments rendered it useless.

Finklestein had not helped his cause because his argument did not allow moderates with unformed opinions to be taken in. The overly emotive rhetoric left little room for any thoughtful analysis of the situation. Calling Israel a ‘Satanic State’ will cause some to nod in approval and others to anger, but it leaves the rest cold. Finklestein simply preached to the choir, convincing no one other than the already convinced.

With an issue already as heated as the Israel-Palestine conflict, polemics are simply unnecessary. A rant will never convince, it will merely reinforce. A lesson that George Monbiot – an upcoming speaker during U of A’s international week – would do well to learn.

Monbiot, an outspoken environmentalist, does little to help his cause simply due to his penchant for ridiculous, over the top statements that can be dismissed out of hand. In 1999, Monbiot wrote that ‘flying across the Atlantic is as unacceptable, in terms of its impact on human well-being, as child abuse’. Rather than engaging frequent flyers in a debate over the impact of their actions, he compares them to paedophiles.

Statements such as these do nothing to win over sceptics. Even more damagingly they cause those who may agree with Monbiot’s sentiments – that tran-Atlantic flight is unjustifiably damaging to the environment – to actively disengage with the environmentalist movement as a whole, simply because loudmouths such as Monbiot are its most vocal exponents.

The same goes for Finklestein. Israel is not a ‘Satanic State’, and saying so was simply a Reagenesque platitude designed to pander to an anti-Israeli audience. Israel needs to be criticised for many of its actions in the recent conflict, but criticism must be thoughtful, rather than emotive.

Men like George Monbiot and Norman Finklestein should be a credit to their respective movements, but instead they are a liability. They drag the debate to the fringes of the extreme and in doing so leave behind the majority of public opinion. Whereas they could use their intelligence and charisma to engage, they use it to exclude and alienate those less radical than themselves. Some might say that, without men like these, their respective causes might not be heard. These men might be heard, but they are not listened to.

(This originally appeared in The Gateway and has also be published on Lazy Students)