A Vegetarian for Lent

have you seen Mrs. Robinson's profile? she's just trying to make you noivous

That's a relief!

Thomas, if you go to a veggies and carb diet, be sure to take a multi-vitamin, and i advise drinking lots of fruit juice. If the body thinks it's starving, it will take muscle and organ tissue, rather than fat tissue--fat is the last line of defense in starvation. So you need to get your minerals and vitamins, and you need to keep your blood sugar up. If you're diabetic, or have a diabetic tendency, you'd want to ask your Doc about a safe way to keep your blood sugar up.

Thanks! I am already taking multivitamins/multiminerals every day, so, not much of a change here. Getting my blood sugar up is not a problem for me. Actually it's persistently too high. The switch in my diet seems to bring it much closer to normal, so a bit of "starvation" is just what I need. Low blood sugar is usually a problem of diabetics who take insulin -- which I don't, yet.

http://bitten.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/recipe-of-the-day-fried-onion-rings/

I recently sent this one to myself. mmmmm onion rings

onion rings with a lightly baked, well-seasoned vegetarian

sounds perfect for Lent

mebbe with a side salad

Quiet, you're making me hungry. (I think I've saved that, ehBeth, but it bears checking out again)



(Key reason for vitamins/vegetarians is B12; I'm not a vegetarian though I often don't eat meat. I suppose I should take pills for minerals but I drink mineral water with high mineral content, gerolsteiner if I can get it. That may all be bushwah, but I'm something of a pill hater.)

I think if you go around slaughtering and baking vegetarians, the law will have something to say about it . . .

and who's going to be telling the law?

Certainly not the lightly baked, well-seasoned vegetarian.

Touche!

Something interesting happened at lunch today. I ordered what I thought was a soup with vegetarian dumplings. But what actually was in the soup was just dumplings, with meat in it. I had eaten this restaurant's non-vegetarian dumplings many times before; they were perfectly good for what they were. So I was mildly surprised to find out I no longer like what they were. I found the unexpected taste of meat today ever so slightly off-putting, and didn't finish the dumplings.

In other words, it appears that my reaction to a vegetarian diet is identical to Setanta's. Should I be worried?

Not uniformly, I promise.

Nah!

It's just that your taste buds have become sensitive & more discerning via your vego experience, Thomas.

I know what you mean, though. During my vegetarian years, the taste of any "accidental" meat in a soup or stew, say, made the food taste .. well, off. Which makes sense, I guess. It is dead meat, afterall!

I certainly hope so. Even though it's taste is "off" as you say, I much prefer that to live meat crawling around on my plate.

Oh absolutely, Thomas!

Live meat is just the worst!

Because the first three weeks had been ridiculously easy, I decided to make things more interesting in the fourth. Hence, the food I ate over the last week was not just vegetarian; it was vegan. In the culinary sense, that still didn't make my life notably harder. But in other ways it did. Here's a run-down of the lessons I learned.

1. Economics: Isn't one of vegetarianism's selling points the efficiency it brings to the food chain? That it lets us eat our corn and soy without passing them through chicken and pigs first? Well, I don't know who gains from this efficiency, but it sure isn't me. $7.50 for a mediocre-tasting deep-frozen pizza, just because it doesn't contain cheese and is therefore vegan? Puleeze. 4.50 for a monstrosity called "smart dogs", a vegetarian hot-dog-substitute made with soy instead of meat, using the same artificial flavors? That's more expensive than hot dogs -- ridiculous! Somewhere in the supply chain for vegetarian food, there must be some major ripoff, some major inefficiency or both.

2. Substitutes: I am not going to be a friend of vegan substitutes for animal product. They taste just similar enough to remind you of the real thing, but always fall short enough of it to frustrate you. This is true of the already-mentioned smart dogs, but also soy-yogurt, soy milk, and soy burger patties. I'm not going to eat any of those again.

3. Psychology: The economics and the substitutes are hurdles I could overcome if need be. But there is something else that really, really puts me off about the vegan diet. It's the paranoid, micro-managing control-freak I would turn into, if I kept up veganism. I don't like asking waitresses at every turn: Are you using gelatine for this meal, or are you making it with Agar-Agar? Does this sauce contain any dairy products? Restaurants are not criminal enterprises. I have no desire to interrogate them on every visit.

My current take: Vegetarianism has been a big hit for me so far, and I might just keep it up after Easter. But Veganism is definitely not for me. I shall ditch it beginning today, and never look back.

You appear to be getting your information from the wrong sources, Thomas. No vegan would even consider the notion of meat subsititutes*. Veganism is a very, very serious commitment. I would have loved to have become a vegan during a certain period of my life, but sadly, I lacked the moral fibre! (Though my head & heart could fully understand the reasons why some chose this path. I am completely in awe of people who can make such a commitment. )

*Neither does a serious vegetarian consider meat substitutes, for that matter.

That is vegan fanaticism. Cheese was probably originally discovered because milk was stored in animal stomachs, and modern cheese making relies upon the use of inexpensive casein derived from the slaughter of animals. It would do no violence to a vegan's moral principles to eat cheese made without animal casein, and such cheese is available (and hard as a rock, and pretty bland with a taste which i suspect library paste of having). I've found myself a few times in situations in which it was polite to eat vegan with acquaintances, and had to choke down the "vegetable casein" cheese. One of the reason that vegan diets are expensive is that they require special processing, or special processing products which cost more--that, in addition to the simple capitalist exploitation of those who want something out of the ordinary run of things.

I agree with Olga. Meat substitutes are not the hallmark of veganism. You need to get more creative, Thomas. Come on, man! You can do it. Concentrate on whole grains and vegetables. Get a copy of Diet for a Small Planet and learn to combine foods to create complete proteins. You don't need no stinkin' soy cheese.

Completely agree about substitutes. I've never been purposely vegetarian but I have been functionally vegetarian (by living someplace where I paid for room & board and the board was vegetarian and I had no extra money) and E.G. was vegetarian for a long time and knows how to whip something up.

The one "substitute" I really like and buy because I like the taste is MorningStar Farms Tomato and Basil Pizza Burgers. (Vegetarian.) With a few slices of avocado and a nice toasted bun, really good.

As a general note, both for vegetarianism and weight loss -- how much do you cook, Thomas? Most of your comments are about restaurants and pre-prepared food. I've found that it's much easier to put good vegetarian meals together from scratch, and also was just reading that home cooking -- pretty much ANY home cooking, even fried chicken -- is going to be healthier than what you find in restaurants or frozen meals, by a large margin. Can try to find that article back (maybe you read it, it was in the NYT).