Read The Man Who Ate Everything Online
Authors: Jeffrey Steingarten
Tags: #Humor, #Non-Fiction, #Autobiography, #Memoir
One day we were all divided into teams, given a cold slice of pizza and a Hostess Twinkie, and asked to come up with an enticing description of each—the way waiters do when they try to sell you the day’s specials. My team did particularly well with the Twinkie: “a golden roll of classic lemon genoise, scooped out and filled with a delicate sweet cream.” The moral, I suppose, is that a good waiter can transform even a Twinkie into something worth
tipping for.
January 1989
My first love affair with vegetarianism ended on a dark and chilly night in 1975 on the corner of Eighth Street in Greenwich Village with a hot dog from Nathan’s Famous. For four years, I had been a lacto-ovo vegetarian, meaning that I allowed myself eggs and dairy products but no fish or shellfish, no chicken or other feathered things, no meat either red or pink. The question of insects never arose because, like most Americans (though unlike members of many other cultures), I have always reacted with revulsion to the idea of eating insects, despite their high nutritive value, crunchy texture, and wide availability. My bible was
Diet for a Small Planet,
by Frances Moore Lappe, published in 1971. The message of this Utopian, spiral-bound volume was that consuming meat is tantamount to consuming the environment. My other motivation was the conviction that meat is murder.
Eighteen omnivorous, Lucullan years later, I am a vegetarian again, much stricter this time, a full-fledged vegan, which is pronounced “VEE-g’n” and means that I avoid animal products entirely, including milk and eggs, butter and cheese. My first act as a vegan was to eat a carrot, and my second act was to make a list of sixty vegetarian and natural-food restaurants within a taxi ride from my house. Then I ordered some Archer Daniels Midland Harvest Burgers, the kind you see advertised on television. I’ve always wondered if they taste as good as they are made to look.
Everybody tells me that vegetarianism is a happening thing. Last year,
Vegetarian Times
magazine, to which I now subscribe, commissioned a study by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. About 6.7 percent of the adults they telephoned told the pollsters that they are vegetarians, way up from 3.7 percent in 1985. This works out to 12.4 million vegetarians nationwide, an apparent jump of 80 percent. Two-thirds of vegetarians are women. At this rate, I calculate, everybody will be a vegetarian by the year 2024, or at least everybody will say they’re a vegetarian by the year 2024. But then how can over half of them possibly be women? Maybe something is wrong with my calculations.
The problem with the Yankelovich survey is that many people who say they’re vegetarian have an extremely eccentric idea of what a vegetarian is. Forty percent of them report that they eat fish or poultry or both every week. Maybe I’m using the wrong dictionary, but it seems to me that somebody who eats chicken at least once a week and claims to be a vegetarian is the very definition of an impostor, a charlatan, a pretender, or a mountebank. The survey also discovered a hitherto-unrecognized category— the 10 percent of vegetarians who eat red meat at least once a week. I cannot decide whether to call them bovo-vegetarians or psycho-vegetarians.
The survey’s results are broadly consistent with recent trends in food consumption. From 1976 to 1990, the average American’s consumption of beef dropped from 94.5 pounds a year to 68, but an increase in poultry and fish more than made up for it. So the real trend is the rise of chicken, turkey, and cod, and of people who would like to think of themselves as vegetarians. Because vegetarianism is a happening thing.
Amazingly, only 4 percent of today’s vegetarians avoid animal products entirely, an inconsequential quarter of a percent of the total American adult population, or a mere five hundred thousand people from coast to coast. This is the group I joined a month ago, we few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
Most Americans go vegetarian for their health, giving “not sure” as their runner-up reason, distantly followed by the
environment and animal rights. Vegetarians do have fewer heart attacks, lower blood pressure, and trimmer figures than meat eaters. But as vegetarians tend to lead healthier lives in general, and exercise more than average, a vegetarian diet in itself may not have much advantage over an omnivorous diet low in saturated fat, full of fruits and vegetables, and moderate though not phobic when it comes to meat. As a lacto-ovo vegetarian in the 1970s, I more than made up for the presumed health advantages of a vegetarian diet by cooking with generous quantities of butter and cream, consuming cheese to my heart’s content, and keeping the ice-cream churn perpetually spinning. That is why I am a vegan this time around.
The day before becoming a vegan, I had my cholesterol tested, and yesterday I had my blood taken again. I expect the results tomorrow. Then I will know whether strict vegetarianism does me any good. People vary widely in how closely their serum cholesterol reacts to changes in their diet. If I am very diet-sensitive, my cholesterol should have dropped by about 15 percent—half the maximum benefit one can hope for after staying on a diet extremely low in saturated fat for several months. But t
he probl
em is this: If my cholesterol has fallen by as much as 15 percent, how can I justify eating meat ever again for the rest of my life? I can’t decide which way to root.
The food press has recently been full of statements like “Eating low on the food chain has tended to be pretty disastrous from the gastronomic point of view—but not any longer!” The evidence presented is always a photo of an exquisite and sumptuous vegetable feast created by one of the country’s top young chefs. I happily sample several of these every year, and the problem with them is usually the same. They may be lovely to look at, artfully cooked, and sometimes delicious, but you would not survive very long on meals like these, because they rarely contain any protein. For that you must consume large platefuls of unglamorous legumes and grains.
Strict vegetarians need to be careful in making their nutritional ends meet. Most would suffer deficiencies of vitamin B
I2
,
vitamin D, and iron if they did not take vitamin pills or eat fortified foods such as Total and Special K cereals. These three common deficiencies are the subject of intense controversy, but pregnant or lactating women, children, and the elderly should be particularly watchful. Early signs that your body is starved for B
12
can be dangerously masked (even until irreversible nerve damage occurs) by the plentiful folic acid in vegan diets.
An Immutable Law
From too much business they didn ‘t close.
—
A waiter at Ratner’s dairy restaurant on the Lower East Side, explaining
why its competitor Rappaport’s had gone out of business
Back in the palmy days of
Diet for a Small Planet,
protein was seen as the main thing to worry about. The average American diet serves up double the amount of protein we actually need (usually given as 0.36 grams for every pound of your weight, at least for adults, or about two ounces a day for a 180-pound man), but getting enough protein as a strict vegetarian does take a bit of planning. You won’t find much protein in a plate of delicate emerald greens dressed with balsamic vinegar or in a jewel-like mosaic of asparagus and beets. Lappe’s solution was to build complete proteins out of the partial proteins found in plants, either by supplementing them with dairy products and eggs (not an option for vegans) or by obsessively pairing plants rich in a few of the nine essential amino acids (protein building blocks that our bodies cannot produce) with those rich in the others. Nowadays, matching complementary proteins is easier than in 1971 because,
the experts tell us, essential amino acids can be matched up over the course of an entire day rather than at every meal. A few even claim that we needn’t worry about complementarity at all. But the simplest solution is to make dishes, like many of the best recipes in
Diet for a Small Planet,
that draw on the familiar third-world combinations of cornmeal and beans, pasta and beans, rice and soy, rice and lentils, and so forth—all somehow discovered long ago by cultures that depend on plants for much of their protein, and all quite delicious.
Most vegetarian, whole-food, health-food, and organic restaurants pay much greater attention to their ideology than to their cooking. Their dishes are typically artless, often drawing (promiscuously and sloppily) on real or imagined foreign dishes. American vegetarians eat vegetables because they hate meat. Europeans eat vegetables because they love vegetables. Nearly all the voluntary vegetarians in the world (those not vegetarians from poverty or religious belief) live in America and England. Neither group is known for its skills in the kitchen.
The first thing you notice about a restaurant’s menu is how high up the food chain the chef has dared to climb and which foods on the lower rungs he or she has chosen to exclude. All polio-vegetarian restaurants seem to allow fish (though some pesco-vegetarians avoid shellfish on the grounds that these are scavengers and bottom dwellers), but some oddly eliminate the ovos from which the polios came, not to mention the milk that flows like kindness from the polios’ barnyard neighbors. It is common to find ovos where lactos are excluded and vice versa.
Not even every plant food is welcome. Many restaurants do not offer alcohol, whether fermented from barley or hops or grapes. Some do not even let you bring your own. Others eschew the dark, aromatic liquor of the roasted coffee bean, and most banish the purest, whitest forms of sugar and flour. Restaurants following strict Buddhist rules also eliminate onions, scallions, and garlic, which are thought to inflame the passions, while most macrobiotic restaurants flee from members of the nightshade
family, such as eggplants and tomatoes. One man’s poison is another man’s essential amino acid.
China, Japan, and India—unlike the United States and the countries of northern Europe—have strict native vegetarian cuisines of long standing and great sophistication. The exquisite Japanese
shojin ryori,
or Buddhist temple cooking, does not seem to have immigrated to this country; its principal protein combination is rice paired with the myriad forms of soybean curd. Unlike
shojin ryori,
Chinese Buddhist cooking specializes in what you might call facsimile food, astounding imitations of traditional meat and poultry dishes in which wheat gluten, tofu, textured soybean protein, arrowroot, and chopped yams simulate animal flesh; bean curd and potatoes stand in for fish, fresh walnuts for crab, cabbage for chicken. Versions ranging from crude to creative (with or without onions and garlic) can be found in at least seven New York City restaurants. As 80 percent of the population of India is vegetarian (according to estimates I have read), its cuisine is rich in plant protein combinations, especially if one is willing to supplement the rice-lentils-wheat-chickpea quartet with a teeny bit of
raita,
made with yogurt. I was unable to find a truly admirable vegetarian Indian restaurant in any of the five boroughs.
And so my month of dining at two-thirds of New York City’s vegetarian restaurants was, on the whole, excruciating. The intricate vegetarian cuisines of Japan, China, and India should make it obvious that when you eliminate most of the possibilities that nature offers—all animal flesh, plus eggs and milk and nearly everything else that is white, including onions and garlic—you must show greater artistry in the kitchen rather than less. The more foods you avoid, the more imagination and skill you need to keep your life palatable, not to mention scrumptious.
Today’s supermarkets and health-food stores are full of imitation meat, usually lower in fat and calories than the real thing (but often higher in salt, to make up for the savory taste of animal protein). In addition to an endless variety of burgers made
from grains, nuts, or soybeans, you can find faux hot dogs that at least look right (one cleverly called a Not Dog), simulated breakfast sausage, and phony bacon complete with stripes.
Though the Archer Daniels Midland Harvest Burger is not quite as good as it looks, I managed with a little imagination to extract several satisfying meals from the product. You can apparently buy frozen preformed patties at some health-food stores, but I ordered a variety of its dry mixes direct from the company by dialing (800) 8-FLAVOR—Burger ‘n Loaf (original or Italian), Chili Fixin’s, Sloppy Joe Fixin’s, and Taco Filling ‘n Dip. All contain little granules of concentrated soy protein with various flavorings and lots of preservatives.
To make a Harvest Burger you empty a foil bag labeled “Burger ‘n Loaf” into a bowl, add a cup and a quarter of water, wait fifteen minutes, and form the thick tan-and-gray mixture into patties (fewer patties than the label calls for if you want a mock hamburger that exceeds 3.2 ounces). I tried panfrying, microwaving, baking, and broiling. All the results resembled overdone hamburgers, edible, even tasty, but not juicy; the broiled version was best because it had a charred flavor reminiscent of grilled beef. In a hamburger bun with lots of ketchup and a pile of natural-flavor Wise potato chips washed down with a tall glass of diet Coke, the broiled Harvest Burger was good enough to eat. Harvest Burgers contain no cholesterol and very little saturated fat, but as with raw soybeans, nearly 30 percent of their calories come from fat.
All the other Archer Daniels Midland imitation-beef creations are fun to mix and eat. You add tomato sauce to the sloppy joe mix and tomato sauce and beans (canned) to the chili package; then you cook them for fifteen minutes. Despite the dried and artificial flavors evident in both products, the results were savory and quick and, because of the heavy spicing, quite like the ground-meat originals.