On June 16th, forget the sausages, rashers, and the black & white puddings - eat your ''weggebobbles and fruit”, instead.

``Don't eat a beefsteak. If you do the eyes of that cow will pursue you through all eternity.''

This is not PETA's latest ad campaign; it's a line from James Joyce's 1922 classic, Ulysses.

Ulysses takes place on June 16, 1904, as Joyce's hapless hero, Leopold Bloom, walks around Dublin, overhears people on the street like the vegetarian quoted above, meets Stephen Dedalus, gets drunk and obstreperous, then comes home to his lusty wife, Molly.

And you're thinking, what does this have to do with me? Just look at the calendar. June 16, is Bloomsday, celebrated in Dublin with marathon readings of Joyce's epic. This happy occasion has caught on in South Florida, with Bloomsday happenings at Books and Books and John Martin's in Coral Gables.

Bloomsday involves a fair amount of beer. That's OK; it's vegetarian. Corned beef and cabbage is not. Nor is it Joyceian. Leopold Bloom ventures into a pub for lunch, smells ''pungent meatjuice,'' and sees someone eating ''chump chop from the grill. Bolting to get it over,'' he hears a man order ''One corned and cabbage'' and leaves. ``Couldn't eat a morsel here.''

This from a man who, we learn at the beginning of the novel, ``ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod's roes.''

But like all great characters in fiction, Bloom has a change of heart. After what he witnesses at the first pub, he heads for a second, where he orders a Gorgonzola sandwich, ''a nice salad'' and a glass of burgundy.

''After all there's a lot in that vegetarian fine flavour of things from the earth,'' he decides.

Celebrate Bloomsday with beer, by all means, but also with ''weggebobbles and fruit,'' as Bloom puts it. ``It's healthier.''

by Ellen Kanner
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Learn more about James Joyce