Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Camping

I survived my first camping trip as a vegetarian this past weekend. The only part that was bad, really was that I couldn't share the cooking with my friend that we went with. Usually, we will bring our own stuff for breakfast, lunch and snacks, and we will trade off on the dinners. This time we did our dinners separately, too.

I brought a bunch of sandwich stuff for lunches, and for dinners, I brought Quorn hot dogs, since the boy loves hot dogs (which, as an aside, I thought were gross even when I ate meat), and Tofurkey Italian Sausages for me. I threw the hot dogs and Italian sausages on the grill over our fire for dinner the first night. Predictably, the boy loved the hot dogs, but the girl just ate the (whole wheat) bun. My Italian Sausage was awesome!

I also got some vegetable masala burgers from Trader Joe's. Oh my goodness are those things yummy! We camp with electricity, so I was able to microwave them, but they would have probably been good wrapped in aluminum foil on the grill. I brought along Thai Garlic Chili sauce to put on top, because nearly everything is better with hot sauce. Lots of fruit rounded out our choices.

Camping without meat was easier than I feared. Our biggest problem was what to do Saturday night after a day of wet snow made all the wood wet and fireproof. We cheated and went for the fast food--chicken nuggets from McDonald's for the kids, and bean burritoes with no cheese for me. Still, we would have been fine if the weather had cooperated. Truthfully, we could have coped with just the microwave, but my friend didn't want to throw her chicken in the microwave, and hey, we were on a mini-vacation.

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Hysterical raw food song

One of my online friends shared this YouTube video that her husband made about raw food living, set to the tune of I Will Survive.

My friend reports that, although she does eat meat, her husband is not actually planning to dump her, and although he is definitely vegetarian ("he is a rabid vegetarian"), he isn't actually into raw food exclusively. Just in case anyone is concerned about the exact truth. Enjoy!

Thursday, March 01, 2007

Eating at Other Peoples' Houses

When I decided to go back to vegetarianism, I made a decision to continue to eat fish, to make it easier to eat at other people’s houses. Also, at restaurants. But I really don’t want to eat a lot of fish, I am only doing it to be semi-flexible. I am just astonished, though, at how many people have not one single meatless meal in their repertoire of dinners.

I really don’t think we eat a lot of exotic food. Sure, I make some interesting Thai or Indian dishes, but more often we eat foods like pizza, pasta, some kind beans and rice, soups, salads, sandwiches, chili, bean burritos and other foods that seem pretty standard to me. I am a little more biased toward including lots of veggies in my meals than a lot of people I know, but that’s not a huge difference.

I do have a friend who makes an effort to eat less meat. She makes a lot of casseroles with a small amount of meat and more veggies to fill them out. But she has some meat every single night. That just seems so weird to me. When I did eat meat, I still made meatless meals once or twice per week.

I don’t want to tell anyone how to eat, mainly because I like having friends. But I really don’t understand what is so difficult about an occasional meatless meal. Every time we go over to my parents’ house for dinner, there is a fraught conversation about what to make for dinner. I hate this conversation. This past Sunday, my dad went ahead and got food on his own—ribs for everyone else, plus a piece of salmon for me. If I am going to have something different than everyone else anyway, I would rather pass on the fish, so I stopped and picked up something else on the way. Besides, I’d had salmon the night before at my friend’s house, and I didn’t want to eat it again.

Why is this so difficult? How did people get to the point where there is not one single thing they can think to make for dinner if the meat is removed? I blame meat marketers, personally. They have sold us a bill of goods that says that eating meat is a sign of wealth, and that a meal is not complete without it. I don’t really have a problem with people eating some meat, but this insistence that a meal is not a meal without it seems kind of creepy to me. I find myself wanting to ask people, “Don’t you care about your health? What about the environment?”

Of course, I don’t, because I genuinely like these people, and I don’t really feel that eating meat makes someone a bad person. But I keep coming back to my original question: How can people not have a single dinner idea that is meatless?