I've had a slightly horrified reaction to the notion that I would flirt with veganism. To be clear, this is definitely a fling: I love me some cheese. It's just that every year, I try to give up some major dietary group for lent. I used to give up sugar, but in recent years I've sort of lost my sweet tooth, so this doesn't mean too much. Then I switched to meat, but since I switched to humanely raised meat, I don't eat enough of it for the dietary loss to register. So: milk and eggs. Odds are I'll last about two days.
Though lines like this, from a review of a vegan cookbook, ought to give me strength:
They say they came up with the list of just over 100 recipes and wrote the headnotes, such as: “‘Chicken’ Noodle Soup: Just like Mom used to make — minus the pieces of decomposing, rotting chicken carcass.”
Still, I don't think I'll buy the actual book:
The cookbook makes little use of traditional Asian meat substitutes (there is one recipe each for seitan and tempeh) but there is a lot of frozen Italian “sausage” and vegan creamer sprinkled around. Recipes without those foods were tastier, such as spaghetti squash with spicy braised greens, raisins and nuts, a huge hit at my table because of its subtle infusion of chipotle chilies.The authors go beyond veganism at many points, rejecting olive oil for cooking in favor of coconut oil (they believe heating olive oil makes it dangerous to health) and disallowing non-whole-grain foods like semolina pasta and white rice.
I wouldn't give up semolina pasta if it gave you cancer while you were eating it. And I abhor fake meat. If you really want anonymous grade-z vegetable matter pulverized into tiny pieces, assaulted with various chemicals, and then processed into something that at leas superficially resembles a chicken muscle, I suggest you have the processing done by a chicken. It may be cruel, but at least the chicken will produce something edible. The longest meal I ever spent was a Thanksgiving far from home at which someone's awfully thoughtful sister-in-law made a Tofurkey specially for me. One cannot, when presented by a beaming hostess with one's very own Tofurkey, do anything except manfully carve two or three thick slices and hoover them down with a delighted smile. I would have enjoyed chewing my way through the aluminum siding of their tract home quite as much. Which probably would have taken less time.
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Yanno, the Eastern Orthodox fasting rule for Lent forbids meat (including fish), eggs, dairy, and olive oil. So my wife and I wind up being vegan for a good six weeks every year, and they're the hardest culinary weeks of my life. At least there are several "fish ok" days sprinkled here and there.
Posted by JS Bangs | January 2, 2008 7:10 PM