Is it just me or have there been a lot more vegetables in the news lately? 

Why, just the other day I was reading Mark Bittman's blog about the government's new Dietary Guidelines, and he echoed the delightful Michael Pollan's line (from his excellent book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto): "eat food, not too much, mostly plants."


I thought about going vegetarian for about a week last summer, as Friends of the Blog may recall.  The catalyst?  My mother, of all people, who had called out of the blue from Indiana one day to declare: “I’m a vegetarian”.

Now, you'd have to know my mother, but I almost fell off my chair.

Since my father died seven years ago I’ve gotten used to strange calls at all hours from my mother – everything from “have you tried chatroulette yet? It’s a hoot!” to “What kind of name is Amanda? It doesn’t even sound real!” But this one takes the cake. I mean, what do you say? No one wants their parents to grow up to be vegetarians. It’s a hard life.

You have to understand, I didn’t even see an actual vegetable until I was well into my twenties. I thought they came in cans, like peaches. Well, that’s not entirely true. I grew up, literally, among the cornfields of Indiana. But I didn’t know they were vegetables. I just thought they were plants.

Like meat-eaters who don’t see the pig in their pork chops, or the cow in the hamburger patty, I just never really connected the dots. Didn’t have to. You know, when you grow up on a diet of Happy Meals. McDonald’s fries?  Who’d ever guess they came from a vegetable? They’re fries. They come from… fries.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always liked vegetables, in that “plain sister” way. They’re like the minor characters in a sitcom. Foils for the main dish, which is always meat. Who would ever have tuned into “Good Times” if J.J. wasn’t on? You could do without Wanda and Cleatus, but without J.J., who would flash that big smile and utter that immortal – here it comes, here it comes, wait for it, wait for it – “DYN-O-MITE!” It would not be “Good Times” without J.J. – dyn-o-mite – Walker.

Good times, indeed.
Aside from that, meat just made good sense to a working class family. You come home from a hard day in the salt mines, as my father used to say, you want something somebody had to kill for you. You want it rare, bloody, and man-sized. You’re a hunter, not some pansy gatherer, plucking berries and sweet pees off the vine to nibble on. (Yes, they tried to trick us into thinking vegetables could be man-sized too – ho, ho, ho, Green Giant, and all that – but we knew. We knew.)

I have to say, I was happy for my mother when she started online dating, even if it was through chatroulette. (Hey, you gotta start somewhere.) I was just glad she was getting on with her life. But this. This was a betrayal. A betrayal of our roots. I had had my rebellious phase, but I had never betrayed my roots. Not like this. The social cost was too high. Not least the constant mockery I knew I would have to endure. And my mother would lead the charge. After all, this is the woman who mocked me in college in front of my beard on the mere suspicion that I had dabbled in vegetarianism — it was basically vegetarianism by association.

In fact, I remember that j’accuse! Moment. My folks came to visit me at college and we went to a Cajun restaurant. A Cajun restaurant! The cuisine was unfamiliar to them, and there was some Creole on the menu. My parents’ eyes narrowed as they scoured it for something they could recognize and pronounce. But it was Cajun cuisine! Gumbos loaded with andouille sausage. Natchitoches meat pies stuffed with spicy beef.

My mother slapped down the menu and sniffed: “What is this? What are you trying to prove?”

I was totally taken aback. “I hear they make a great gumbo burger,” I stammered.

“What are you?” Her voice lowered to a growl, her eyes narrowed to slits. “Some kind of… vegetarian?”

True story.

Over the years I came to understand that in the peculiar vernacular of my family “vegetarian” was code for “pretentious weirdo”. Why not just say “pretentious weirdo”, you ask? Because only pretentious weirdos use the word “pretentious”. Anyone could call you a vegetarian, though.

Anyway, it had almost nothing to do with eating habits, and even less to do with ingredients. As with the Cajun restaurant, it wasn’t enough that each dish was loaded with meat. If meat didn’t look like meat, wasn’t clearly labeled in American English as meat, or didn’t taste like what we’d come to expect meat to taste like, it was actually demoted to a vegetable. Same went for small portions. Chicken nuggets? A vegetable.

Is it really all that surprising it took me so long to understand what exactly a vegetable was? And always, when I thought I’d finally cracked it, someone would come up with something like, “you know, tomatoes are a fruit.” And the whole house of cards collapsed.

Before I could get it sorted out I started meeting actual vegetarians. Even if I didn’t know exactly what they ate, I knew what they were: pretentious weirdos.

In college there was a guy in my dorm named Soren who went so far as to become a vegan – the first I had ever heard that such a thing existed. We can all guess what a vegetarian is – even if we’ve never heard of one — but a vegan? 

It sounds like something from a pulp science fiction novel , doesn’t it? Well, not far from it, it’s actually a totally made-up word. In 1944 Donald Watson, founder of the original Vegan Society, came up with it by taking the first three and last two letters of "vegetarian," - "because,” he said, “veganism starts with vegetarianism and carries it through to its logical conclusion.”

Let me just say, there is something off-putting about made-up words. They’re unnatural, first of all. Words are supposed to just happen. Otherwise we’d all be making them up, and no one would know what anyone else was talking about. And that’s just the sort of thing that appealed to Soren, who could often be found of a Saturday night doing naked yoga in the group shower.

I didn’t dare tell my mother about veganism. 

That was obviously the terminal stage of pretentiousness. If you wanted to cure it you had to catch it early. And the symptoms weren’t subtle. No one wakes up one day all the sudden vegetarian, much less vegan. First they start wearing funny clothes – scarves, bracelets, berets. Then they’re smoking those clove cigarettes, and holding them funny, and not inhaling. They might even adopt one of those Madonna accents, where you pronounce words in your own language like they’re foreign. When it reaches your tongue, that’s when you have to worry.

I was raised a working class omnivore, and I have always been one. All my life I had been led to believe that vegetarianism was a sure sign of class pretensions, if not outright elitism. Especially when supposedly done as an act of conscience. Poor people had morals. Rich people had conscience. Vegetarianism was precisely the kind of “act of conscience” someone with too much time and money on their hands would be into.

Of the many working class prejudices I had carried with me into my comfortably middle class life, the bias against vegetarianism is probably the most stubborn. I knew the arguments for it, I had heard them over many a meal, and the problem for me – the real sticking point – was not the powerful moral objection to eating meat but the fact that I find it annoying dinner conversation. And frankly people who are willing to ruin a meal – one of the greatest social pleasures, one of the hallmarks of civilization – to make a point, commit the greater sin.

But then hunters dine differently than gatherers, don't they?  I mean, you don't forage sitting down, do you? Gatherers are nervous types, constantly sniffing and sifting and poking and pricking.  Hunters stalk, kill, hack their prey to bits, bring it back to base camp, light a big fire, break out the brews and barbeque sauce, put on some tunes, and party.  

The problem, in other words, is that I’ve never really met a vegetarian I could really party with.

To this day, the extent to which we go to cater to those who may or may not have legitimate food aversions irritates me.  Just eat it.  If you break out in hives, you break out in hives.  See, I immensely enjoy food – all kinds – and I think I am better for having taken what was on my plate and tucked in, caution to the wind. This has allowed me to travel the world with the confidence borne of an iron gut, while my picky brother, whose meal is ruined if his peas touch his carrots, has largely stayed at home, and now complains of IBS and acid reflux.

In fact I could never have lived abroad – on the Hungarian Puszta, no less – if I had had even the slightest qualms about eating meat. It is still common to spread lard on toast and call it a day there. The diet is absurdly rich and retrograde – or it was when I was there – and I ate and drank liberally. Those of my American colleagues who did not were viewed with suspicion. Because refusing food and drink is to refuse culture.

Diet is a social phenomenon.  Eating together — how we eat, who or what we eat, who gets to eat who and how much — how we hunt, how we gather, how we plant and harvest – how we cook — this is the fundament of civilization. We wander continents in search of food. Where we find sustenance, we stay, we build homes and towns and cities. Supermarkets and fast-food chains. 

And meat and culture are inextricably entwined.  It is not a simple matter to reject meat culture.  And so it is that, as factory farms and genetic modification make eating meat in America all the more morally insupportable, I still find myself cringing at the thought of joining the vegetarians, who seem a singularly humorless lot. 

I know all about Tolstoy and Einstein, Gandhi and the Dalai Lama, and while they're not exactly a barrel of laughs, if they were on the guest list I'd be happy to forego meat for the honor to dine with them.  But just because you're a vegetarian doesn't make you an Einstein or a Gandhi, a point a lot of vegetarians seem to struggle with.  And I don't know that I would want to dine with even Einstein every night.

Because frankly, I like my carnivorous friends.  Not just eating with my carniverous friends, either.  I just like hunters more than gatherers when it comes down to it.  Back in the day, in what anthropologists call the Ancestral Environment, I would totally have been the Hunting Party Ho.  Are you kidding me?  You vegetarians need to man up if they want me join your little forays into the bramble. 

I know all you do the whole time you're picking berries is bitch about the hunters. 

I mean, have a look at Carol J. Adams’ Living Among Meat Eaters: The Vegetarian's Survival Handbook.  If that's what you're all about, count me out.  The book opens with a flurry of quotes from vegetarians who’ve been picked on by flesh-eating schoolmates, carnivorous aunts and uncles, and cruel, kreophagist flight attendants.

Adams tells her persecuted readers:

To you, your vegetarianism is a natural progression in eating habits and philosophy. To nonvegetarians, it represents a profound disjunction. Most meat eaters experience it as a judgment on them as well and get defensive. Vegetarians sigh and say to themselves, here we go again.

The list of pet peeves is long.

• “People who ask, ‘what do you eat?’”
• “Trying to convince my father that I’m not going to die.”
• “People who think I eat fish.”
• “People who ask, ‘But do you eat animal crackers?’”

For vegans it’s even worse:

• “Microsoft Word redlines veganism.”
• “it’s not easy to find a vegan friend.”

What Adams frames as vegetarian persecution – “meat eaters don’t listen to you…. You say you are happy and yet you are encouraged to try something ‘just this time.’” — is simply a habit of hospitality that particularly modern people can find pushy and off-putting.

The real contradiction in Adams’ account is obvious. She tells her readers meat-eaters feel judged and then encourages her readers to judge them:

These pet peeves tell us that there is something more going on than simply repetitive interpersonal reactions. They reveal that meat-eaters fee that your change of diet is about them….

I fact, becoming a vegetarian often reveals more about your friends, family, and society at large than it does about yourself. Why? You changed, They didn’t.

Jeez.  Whatever happened to breaking bread?  Make lunch, not war.

Yes, I get it.  Today's vegetarians are heirs to an ancient culture of bullying by meat-eaters.  The oft-heard command of "eat your vegetables!" was once met with a jawbone upside the head.  This probably explains the often humorless, pass-aggressive face of vegetarianism.

All that aside, I can't wait to try that line "but do you eat animal crackers?" on my mom next time I see her.  That'll really get her goat!