When I was in my early 20s, I became a vegetarian. At first I did it for health reasons. I slowly cut back on red meat, to see how I would feel without it, then meat altogether. I was 20, so I felt fine. Possibly more energetic, though at the time I was a hyper college student, taking 12 units in school, working full time, and swimming on the swim team for hours each day. It would have been hard to feel more energetic. Of course, it could have been my popcorn and diet coke crash diets, too.
During that time I moved from meat-eating Modesto to the groovy veggie haven of Santa Cruz, and found it easier and easier to be a vegetarian. Being poor and fending for myself foodwise didn't hurt either. I'm not saying I ate great food. My roommate and I lived on $100 per month each for groceries. There was a whole lot of ramen going on. Ramen with frozen peas, ramen with frozen peas and corn, or just corn, or with an egg and some soy sauce, or with cabbage and fish flakes. Mac and cheese in vast quantities, also with variations of peas, corn, and/or salsa. And not the blue box mac and cheese, either, no, that would have been a couple of blocks too far upmarket. Think more like 25 cents a box.
I started identifying with the reasons other people were vegetarians. I didn't want to eat animals either. As someone who could simultaneously espouse the virtues of tofu AND sneer at oatmeal-complected whining vegans because I could still wear leather shoes, I felt superior.
I am having some fuzzy memories of eating large, meat-laden sandwiches, so I know I strayed from time to time. I considered myself a mostly vegetarian. When I was working in a deli, any sandwiches that didn't get picked up at the end of the night were fair game-- and free. Begging vegetarians can't be choosers. The rest of the time, it was Vegetarian Vegetable soup and leftover heels of bread in the toaster oven at home.
Have you ever heard Wolfgang Puck say "vegetable"? He says, "wegetubble". Mike and I laughed ourselves silly watching him cook a wegetarian meal on TV once because he repeated it so many times. But that's not what I got on this keyboard to write about.
I was a happy mostly-vegetarian. I was in step with the times and the local people. I was one of them, and I had access to great fresh veggie stuff at wonderful markets like New Leaf and Staff of Life. I'm remembering delicious whole-grain fig bars right now, and my mouth is watering.
Then I moved back to Modesto. Against my better judgement. I didn't know what else to do, I guess. I worked for a weird little wine bar close to the house I grew up in, about 20 years before I knew spit about wine, and I helped the chef (he of the famous Cobbler Dough) prepare each day's food. There was no actual kitchen, as I recall. I forget now how we actually made it all happen.
One day, I was peeling and deveining shrimp. As I handled each one, I started thinking about how each little shrimp had been swimming along in its little shrimp paradise, and wondering how they might have felt as they were scooped up and were frozen or cooked en masse. I started to cry. I don't know if I was crying because I felt for the shrimp, or if I felt for myself as a vegetarian in a strange land. I couldn't stop cleaning the shrimp, because it was my job, and it was what I was asked to do, and I needed the job, because I was stuck in Modesto and I couldn't get out. Like a shrimp...in a net. So I did what anyone else would do after I mopped myself up off the shell-strewn floor and put my time card in the slot. I went out for a hamburger. A fast food hamburger. A McDonald's Quarter Pounder. With cheese. And I ate it. And I liked it.
And why is that on my mind today? Because if you are against everything, you stand for nothing. When I reached the point when I was crying over spilled shrimp, being vegetarian wasn't me anymore. I don't want to become militant or didactic about my current healthy food trend, but I think I already have. I don't want to be the person at the party who rolls her eyes at the margarine and sneers, "I can't believe it's not butter. I mean, I can't believe it's not butter," under her breath. But I already did. It was rude. I thought it would be dryly funny, but it came out spoiled and bitchy and mean. My dining companion had the good grace to ignore me.
I want to embrace food, and people, and share time with people I like. They don't have to be great cooks. We don't have to eat artisinal, house-cured, homemade, virtuously organic, local anything. One of my favorite people made me a grilled cheese sandwich once, with white bread and those cellophane-wrapped cheese slices. She's not a foodie, and I like her anyway. I am still glad that organic food has become both trendy and good business, and that more people are taking the time to choose foods that are real and that do the least harm to the earth and to themselves.
I used to watch a lot of re-runs after school, and besides learning to do that thing that Ginger from Gilligan's Island could do with her nose, I also watched Barbara Billingsly wear aprons and pearls and provide a perfect life, complete with after-school pb-and-j's and home-cooked meals to a well-mannered family in a perfectly clean TV house. And that's what I thought I should aim for.
I began, like Martha Stewart, to think that all that perfect-ness was the only way to show you really cared, and that if you weren't making the effort, you were failing. So all of this virtue-collecting has snowballed to the point that I'm irritating myself a little bit, and I need to relax about it. Maybe have a Twinkie or something. Ok, not a Twinkie, that would be gross.
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