So, I finally bit the bullet and went vegetarian. I didn’t particularly want to go vegetarian, mind you, in no small part because, as I predicted, almost everyone reacts to my new no-meat policy with the genuinely stricken pity that usually greets a death in the family. “Oh my gaaahhhhhd, really? Oh, Sarah. That’s awful. [tight hug of sympathy] Let me know if there’s anything I can do.” I almost expect the condolence casseroles to start showing up at my apartment — casseroles I couldn’t eat anyway, because casserole recipes usually call for a livestock-based broth of some sort. Sigh.

I find it a bit odd that, in 2002, adopting a vegetarian diet still gets that kind of response — or any response, really. I guess I’d just kind of assumed that vegetarianism had gone completely mainstream by now, but apparently, the perception of the average vegetarian as a tie-dyed pinko with a twenty-year-old rusting Volvo covered with Greenpeace stickers in the driveway and flats of alfalfa sprouts cluttering her countertops, milling her own bulgur flour in a large pestle crafted out of a single piece of volcanic rock that she bought at Burning Man and singing along with a Phish bootleg, has not died. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, if that’s your thing, but I certainly don’t have any lofty philosophical Screw The Man reasons for removing animals from the menu. After reading Fast Food Nation, I came away from it not with a newfound horror of agribusiness or the meatpacking industry but rather with an unseemly craving for a super-sized sleeve of McDonald’s French fries. And a cheeseburger. Yes, “that ucky brown puck on a stale bun,” but I loved those ucky brown pucks on stale buns, man. On weekends, I used to tell cab drivers to stop at the twenty-four-hour McDonald’s down the avenue from my house on my way home, and I’d get the ucky-brown-puck value meal and stroll home stuffing my face with the best shoestring fries in the business.

I miss cheeseburgers. I miss cheeseburgers, and I miss Ma’s meatloaf, and I miss that cut of medium-well-done filet mignon with a nice fatty strip of bacon embracing it. I miss cheese steaks swimming in onions and watery ketchup and heavy grease. I miss beef…and I absolutely cannot eat beef, or beef by-products; I cannot eat anything cooked in the same pan or on the same grill as beef, or next to beef, or by anyone who has eaten beef in the last twelve hours, or rhyming with the word “beef.” My allergist can’t figure out why or how — the prevailing theory is that, during college, when I lived on stringy salads and frozen yogurt, my body grew unaccustomed to that particular protein, and no, it makes no sense to me either — but a few years ago, my digestive system developed what Dr. Ast delicately refers to as “a resistance” to red meat. “A resistance.” Well, yes…provided we interpret “resistance” in the “French resistance” sense of lurking around and blowing things up. A single bite of a steak sandwich takes only a few minutes to trigger an ominous rumbling in my transverse colon; my stomach senses the presence of beef, sends the entire digestive system to DefCon 1, and throws open every door between it and the exits while hollering for all hands to man battle stations, which occasions in turn a panicked dash to the nearest commode and a series of surround-sound detonations accompanied by terrified cursing, and I would compare the experience to the flight of Indiana Jones from that giant boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark, except that that sequence is fun to watch. And not completely revolting. Also, Indiana Jones escapes. I never escape. Or wear a hat.

For a while, I thought I could get away with giving up red meat only. Everyone should experience at least one steak dinner at Peter Luger in his or her lifetime, and I’d already done that, so it didn’t seem like much of a hardship to stop eating beef. But if you think it’s hard to explain that you don’t eat any meat anymore, try explaining that it’s only red meat you’ve foresworn. “Oh…kay. But…why?” Reasons don’t get much more compelling than “explosive diarrhea,” God knows, but you can’t really bust that one out at the dinner table, so I went with the vaguer “I have an allergy” justification, but I didn’t have much luck with that either, because nobody has ever heard of a red-meat allergy before, and unless I produced wheezing or a handful of livid hives, I’d get a skeptical moue and a “whatever you say, drama queen” shrug. Eventually, I began informing people that “it’s a condition of my conversion to Hinduism, actually,” and a lot of people just accepted that without comment, believe it or not, but the ones that didn’t would get all “okay, seriously, though, why?” and then we’d have to go through the whole “yes, I have an allergy to it, and no, you most certainly do not want to hear the symptoms, I assure you…okay, does the word ‘Kaopectate’ mean anything to you” thing again.

And on top of that, it didn’t work anyway. I happily ordered chicken and pork and fish for a few months, only to find out — too late, inevitably — that the kitchen had prepared the chicken (or pork, or fish) in the same grease they’d used to fry up the strip steak for Table 14, necessitating the same depressing faux-blasé speed-walk to the rear of the restaurant as busboys dived behind tables bellowing, “Take cover, SHE’S GONNA BLOW,” like, tell me about it, busboys — I’ve got the entire Foley team from Dumb & Dumber living up my butt right now. After the last incident, marooned once again in the ladies’ with nothing to read, I realized that before long, I would turn into The Girl With The Food Allergies, that grey girl with brittle hair who brings a Ziploc baggie of plain lettuce to your dinner party and nibbles the naked leaves in the manner of a traumatized gerbil the whole night, and when you bring out the flan for dessert, she shrinks away from the refined sugar and hisses like a vampire presented with a cross.

I could sympathize with The Girl With The Food Allergies now like never before — every elementary school class had one, and you liked her well enough, and of course you felt horrible for her because a life without cookies isn’t anything you wanted to contemplate, but oh, how you dreaded her birthday parties, because your parents raised you to act polite and clean your plate and so on, but you just didn’t know how long your handful of manners could hold out against a birthday cake comprised entirely of soy products and blobby carob chips, a lumpy sandy culinary atrocity which also introduced you to the concept of the limits of language when you tried to explain to your mom in the car on the way home that the cake simultaneously had a faintly a rancid taste and no taste at all — but I did not want to become The Girl With The Food Allergies. And I could feel it happening. Looking into the future, I could see myself whipping a Bible out of my messenger bag, wrenching the waiter’s hand down onto it, compelling him to swear that no part of my entrée had even thought about touching any cow innards, rampaging all Piper Laurie through the kitchen brandishing a plant mister filled with Imodium. “Wok! Got Satan’s power!” No, no, no. I could think of worse things to become — The Girl Who Orders Everything On The Side Up To And Including The Eggs That Went Into The Pasta Noodles In Her Alfredo, for example, or The Girl Who Dips The Tines Of Her Fork Into The Salad Dressing And Then Spears A Forkful Of Salad In Order To Conserve Calories And Also Evangelizes About This Obsessive-Compulsive Weight-Loss Technique To Anyone Who Will Listen — but I couldn’t live like that, so I figured I’d better just save myself the aggro and give up meat entirely.

It’s not so bad, really. I can think of so many other allergies — sorry, “resistances” — I could have wound up with that would have me contemplating suicide. A gluten allergy, for instance. First of all, I love me some bread. If I could never eat another bagel with lox in my life, or another Carr’s cheddar cracker, or another slice of yellow cake with chocolate frosting, or another sandwich or plate of pasta of any kind, I’d have to reconsider the whole going-on-living thing — and that’s just the stuff you know has gluten in it. Gluten lurks in everything. Going vegetarian is a relatively minor lifestyle change, especially for someone like me who barely cooks in the first place. Eliminating any hint of wheat, rye, barley, or spelt? Learning what “spelt” is in the first damn place? Cataclysmic pain in the ass. And what if I’d come up allergic to dairy? I don’t mean gassily lactose intolerant, because let’s face it — when it’s time to torment friends and family, nothing gets the job done like a Roquefort poon. I mean genuinely allergic. No dairy, no how. Ever. I can’t even imagine that. No more Oregon blackberry ice cream. No more sour cream on my black bean soup. No more cheese. I could barely type the words “no more cheese” just now. If I developed an allergy to dairy, they’d have to hospitalize me — for depression. Renouncing meat pales in comparison. I still eat cheese and eggs; I still eat sushi; I’ll sit down to the turkey leg on Thanksgiving.

And luckily, I like tofu. I know that liking tofu is like liking water, or Hootie & the Blowfish, but I like it. Maybe it’s the texture. I like veggie burgers, too, and while I have to draw the line at “tofurkey,” which is fun to say but difficult to swallow on account of it tasting like naugahyde, I don’t view vegetarian eating as a hardship. I can eat plenty of things, and I can count on one hand the foods I won’t touch, so unless I go to a steakhouse, I can always find something on the menu that I like. It seems to me that people who hate a lot of foods — or who can’t stand just one food, but it’s ubiquitous, like tomato — have it way worse than I do, because they spend their lives taking one bite of a dish and pushing it away all “I sense the evil presence of onion,” or picking at their meals and lining up offending orts on the edge of their plates. I met a guy recently who hates garlic. Garlic. I don’t get that at all, but if he doesn’t like it, he doesn’t, and that has to suck for him — everything is cooked with garlic in restaurants. What does he eat when he goes out for dinner? A bowl of cereal? It’s one thing not to like raisins; you can eat out every night and never get ambushed by a raisin. You can eat out every night and never touch anything that once had legs, either. But trying to avoid garlic? Good luck.

So, again, it’s really not that bad. It bothers other people more than it bothers me. I mean, if the condition reversed itself tomorrow, would I march straight over to Smith & Wollensky and order myself a veal chop and two New York sirloins? Yes. Would I then haul my impossibly bloated carcass to Molly’s for the shepherd’s pie with a side of venison, and spread a thick layer of pâté over the whole thing? Yes. Do I find myself suffering cravings for meaty foods that I never wanted back when I could actually eat them, like the new Chicken Kicker at Domino’s, a snack item that bears only the most tenuous relationship to actual poultry and also has one of those names that makes it impossible to order it without an exaggerated ironic “yes, I know I just said ‘Chicken Kicker’ out loud, so shut up” eye-roll? Yes. Will the fact that I probably ate my last veal chop years ago keep me up nights? No. You don’t have to clutch your forehead and offer your sympathies. I ate my fair share of pork roast back in the day, so enjoy yours and don’t worry about me. I can do a lot with a potato and a cheese grater. You don’t have to cook around me, either — if I come to your house for dinner and you bought steaks because you didn’t know I don’t eat meat anymore, serve the steaks. I’ll fill up on salad. And booze. And then I’ll throw “American Beauty” on the stereo and lecture you about how eating beef clogs your arteries and rapes the land.

Oh, of course I won’t really do that. Now open that bottle of red I brought over — it goes great with this here Romaine lettuce.

November 18, 2002

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