On December 01, I celebrated my first anniversary of vegetarianism. This, as I mentioned several posts ago, is a gigantic achievement for me; and as this past year progressed, my life underwent gigantic changes. I waitressed for cash, took my cash on a European excursion for two months, found myself under a hairnet in a hospital cafeteria for the next two months, jetted off to the east coast for a much-needed getaway, settled into a cozy house in Fargo, and have been relearning how to live on my own. Relearning how to live on my own, I’ve found, includes relearning how to eat—and learning how to eat like a vegetarian.
This sounds like a scary book, How to Eat Like A Vegetarian and Other Things Your Mother Didn’t Teach You. I can almost see it in a forboden corner of Barnes & Noble, right next to the other books that know they’re not worth reading. Truth be told, I’ve a lot to learn. It turns out the practice is much more difficult than buying a jar of peanut butter and jelly, a loaf of bread, and container of multivitamins. It’s about motivation and dedication—and timing, to ensure that you eat your produce before it goes bad. This is where I struggle. As traveling would have it, throwing myself across the ocean yielded many, many meals of eggplant and fromage. And living now on a college budget sometimes means canned beans and a bag of lettuce (ramen noodles don’t make the cut—nothing with “powdered cooked chicken” gets in my basket).
There’s been progress, and many things I’ve learned. For example, if an ingredient in, say, Sage Dressing (a Hornbacher’s deli special if I ever saw one) is “Roasted and natural beef juices,” that product is indeed not veg-friendly. Sometimes you have to take the magnifying glass to a food, or employ your Inspector Gadget intuition. Soup might look safe, until you realize it’s chicken-based. Sauces with pureed bacon bits aren’t kosher. Beware of crab, krab, and yes, crabby krab salad. Whatever. Just yesterday I conversed with a deli customer about the spectrum of vegetarianism as he debated over which potato salad to purchase. A fellow vegetarian himself, he wasn’t aware that in addition to meat, some vegs exclude eggs from their diet (see lacto vegetarians). “Yeah, you mean a vegan,” he said. No, I don’t mean a vegan. (I believe there are many mistruths about veganism, as well as vegetarianism, which I won’t get into.)
So I’ve practiced at home, away from home, and across the ocean (where I ate my weight in eggplant). I’ve stuck around for one year, and am going to give myself a shameless pat on the back.
Pat, pat, pat. Okay, the moment’s over. Happy eatings, all.
approximatelyes.com 