Adventures With Food

It's a new record: for just over ten months I've been on a pescetarian diet, and with a few exceptions I've stuck to it. In fact, there have been four times in the past ten months that I've eaten land-based meat: the accidental meatball (mentioned in the comments here, my Olive Garden memory lapse*, the surprise potatoes**, and last Thanksgiving (which was the only one of these that was premeditated). I've never been able to do this for more than a couple days before, and I think that my success this time is due to taking it in small steps. Allowing myself fish and seafood has made the transition easier.

Another thing that's made this easier is Asian food. We've improvised a lot of our meals, altered them from the way we've eaten our whole lives: spaghetti with no meat, chili with a lot of beans, grilled veggie sandwiches. More helpful, though, has been our increasing reliance on East Asian and South Asian food, especially Indian.

Some time ago Anskov suggested a cookbook written by his friend Suvir Saran. I used some of my birthday money to pick up a copy last week, because when we looked through it in the store we liked the recipes and it seemed like something even I could use (read: simple).
Last night I made the Simple Lentil Dal with Cumin and Dried Red Chiles*** on page 27. It turned out pretty well, even though I'm a three-assed monkey in the kitchen, and even though I did some things that endangered the project's success.

First of all, I didn't include the chilies because a) Michele can't eat really spicy stuff and I wanted to start safe, and b) we didn't see any dried red chilies in any of the stores we were in yesterday. Also, I used ancho pepper instead of cayenne due to a miscommunication Michele and I had a few weeks ago. As a result, the dish was much blander than Mr. Saran must have intended. It was still good, though, and as soon as I stop sabotoging the recipe I'm sure it will turn out better.

The second problem I had derives from my multi-ass monkitude. I burned the tarka before mixing it in, so I'm sure that threw the flavor off. Char instead of spice, and all that. In my defense, there's very little time to think when the tarka is cooking, so it's easy for a three-assed monkey to mess it up.

It's good that I'm figuring this out now, because in two months it will have been a year since I gave up land meat. On that anniversary I plan to go full vegetarian. If my actions can match my convictions as well this time around, that is.

* I ordered the potato soup with my meal, forgetting it has sausage in it. I ate it anyway, because I didn't want it to go to waste, and I didn't want to hassle the waitress for my screw-up.

** For Michele's birthday we went to a German restaurant that had almost no veggie options. I got mushroom soup and an order of home fries. The soup was great and the potatoes were phenomenal--and included bacon crumbles. I didn't realize until three bites in, and again didn't want to waste it.

*** I know that's spelled wrong, but that's the way it is in the book. I know he doesn't want me to mix in South American countries.

Where's the Beef?

When I started to take a serious interest in philosophy, sometime in the mid-nineties, my focus wasn’t all that good. I didn’t know where to start reading, or even what my specific interests within philosophy were. I tried reading about religion, language, logic, ethics, and politics. I found that I was interested enough in all of the fields that I could pick any and read until I knew everything. That kind of naïveté is also an indication of how much I needed to read. Know everything. Heh.

One of the books that made an impact on me early on was Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics:

Singer’s an Australian ethicist and animal-rights activist who has become infamous in America for taking some startling positions regarding abortion, such as the idea that any country (such as the U.S.) that routinely advocates the slaughter of animals for food can’t make coherent anti-abortion laws, since animals are more person-like than fetuses are.

Whether I agreed with Singer or not, he got me thinking. Two of the most fundamental parts of what I considered my identity were the simplicity of my meat-and-potatoes upbringing (heavy on the meat, please) and my love for animals. You’d think these two inclinations would clash, but until reading Singer I hadn’t given much thought to the fact that a hamburger was shredded cow muscle. I knew it, intellectually, like I know the capitol of Minnesota is St. Paul, but I hadn’t considered the implications carefully. Once I read Singer, though, I was forced to take responsibility for that awareness.

From that point on I’ve been considering vegetarianism. I’ve never taken a serious stab at it because of that other fundamental component of my identity: I’m a carnivore. Not only was I raised a meat-eater, I enjoy it. Something about the texture, the moisture, the flavor excites me on a primal level. Even full of knowledge, the idea of tearing muscle fibers with my teeth, liquefied animal fat running down my chin as I grind the flesh in my molars and swallow it in a thick gob, satisfies me in a way that chewing a mouthful of corn never can.

But it’s still just a matter of preference. I can survive without eating meat, and my conscience has been unsettled since I first considered this. So I’ve tried on occasion, halfheartedly, to avoid meat. Every time, though, the cravings have become so intense they’ve overridden my conscience and my consciousness, and I’ve gorged myself as only a dedicated gourmand can.

A couple of weeks ago Jess emailed me with news about a wedding she attended, and she told me about the people she saw there. One of those people was Greg, another Mankato MFA who’d relocated to Michigan. She said he’d gone vegan. That shocked me, because Greg and I used to sit in the office and talk about food instead of getting work done. Greg was more serious about food than I was, more gourmet than gourmand, and he wasn’t shy about meat. And now he was vegan, and had been so long enough to have dropped about fifty pounds. I could never be vegan, giving up eggs and milk and cheese, but that kind of dedication really impresses me.

Jess’s email was the last trigger I needed, I guess. Michele has also been trying to avoid meat (for some of the same reasons, and for others that I don’t share), so we decided to try a version of vegetarianism: pescetarianism. It’s like vegetarianism, but the diet includes fish and shellfish.

For the last couple of weeks we've bought no meat and prepared no meat-based meals. I finished the last of the sliced turkey yesterday, and now we have no meat in the apartment.

I don’t see pescetarianism as ethically superior to eating meat—it’s morally indistinguishable from it, as far as I’m concerned. But it is a step in a more ethically-coherent direction. If I can handle this, it should be a short step to eliminating meat altogether. And then my conscience can rest.

All I can do is try, right?