The crowd with feathered hair and jean jackets seated at the diner table were snapped out of their laughing reverie by the sound of the doorbell ringing…

Joanie scampered downstairs [because, um, the diner is on the second floor?] to find a big box from Niman Ranch on the doorstep. Wow–Joanie must be a psychic online shopper, because just the day before she’d been thinking of ordering a side of beef from this very place. In fact, though, the box was a gift from a member of the cast from Season 1.

Normally, in sitcom land, this would cause a flashback to that very character from Season 1 doing something totally hilarious, but I don’t think I’ve written anything about Chris on this blog. She was my college roommate for all four years, and now she lives in Geneva, where she eats her weight in cheese and duck daily. And she clearly knows me very well, to send me a box of oxtail and sausage as a get-well present.

So instead, we have to flash back to more issues re: meat. To set the tone, consider Meat Comes from Animals: Deal With It, or Eat Vegetables, or closer to home, Peter’s response to a vegetarian.

I’m also counting down the days to the release of Michael Pollan’s new book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. It doesn’t come out till April, but Pollan is a smart guy, elegant writer and excellent journalist, particularly on the issues of industrial food. While you’re waiting, I highly recommend reading The Botany of Desire: highbrow research on GM potatoes, along with lowbrow musings on Amsterdam hydroponic weed.

End of commercial break. Back to the show:

Joanie breaks open the box and ogles the cross-sections of oxtails. “Cool! And to think there was a time I wouldn’t have eaten these…”

“Gosh, that was a really funny time…” says one of the wiseacre boys, and there goes the screen again…When it straightens up, we’re in Albuquerque, NM, circa 1990:

February 1, 2005

I Was a Teenage Vegetarian

I’ve been harboring a horrible, horrible secret: For several years, I did not eat meat.

I realize that may be difficult for many to imagine—especially if you could see me now, just starting to drool slightly at the thought of next weekend’s lamb roast.

But the odd thing is that there’s a whole category of people in my life who ask, “Wait—are you still a vegetarian?” before every meal. So I guess I must’ve been pretty fervent at the time, but I can’t even really remember why I’d given up the pleasures of the flesh.

It had something to do with reading Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet, which posits that meat-eating is untenable because it’s an inefficient use of land. I was very into efficiency at that point—it informed a lot of my young thinking, including on such knotty subjects as the death penalty. (Whatever I said at NM Girls State, strike it from the record!) I would’ve made a tidy little fascist if I’d grown up in a different environment, but luckily some hippie humanitarianness rubbed off, and now I channel my love of efficiency into daily OCD rituals instead of public policy.

I was also raised whole-grainy, so Lappe’s whole combining-proteins concept didn’t seem too difficult, as we were already eating rice-and-bean casserole with green chile for dinner. And the power-to-the-people aspect of me loved the fact that I, halfway around the globe, was eating what 99 percent of India was eating for dinner.

People also talk about teenage vegetarianism as a low-level eating disorder, a way of expressing control over your body the same way anorexics and bulimics do. In my case, though, that was just crap. I was pretty well adjusted, body-wise (OK, small breasts meant for distressing bathing-suit shopping, but lots of people had it worse than me), and, more important, it soon became very, very clear that I had absolutely no control.

I’d been meat-free for the last couple years of high school—two years of high school I’d spent starting an environmental organization and squandering gas driving around aimlessly on weekend nights—and after I graduated, I needed a summer job to save up the necessary “student contribution” that my generous university had decided on for my financial aid package. Albuquerque not being exactly a booming economy, the options were slim. First I went to the nearest Wendy’s and picked up an application, and briefly talked myself into thinking I could work there, but fortunately my friend Chad called and said his mom could probably get me a job at Kmart.

Lo and behold, the first act of shameless nepotism in my life transpired, and I was soon wearing pantyhose and a little name tag that said “cash register service employee.” I felt bad getting a job offer after a five-minute interview, when there were six other more desperate people sitting in the antechamber, but given the management’s utter (and justified) paranoia about people stealing shit, I soon rationalized that it was just more efficient to hire the white girl who’s going to college, even if she is wearing a tie-dye T-shirt.

I wasn’t actually working for my friend Chad’s mom—she was the manager at another Kmart on the other side of town, in a livelier strip mall. My Kmart was just off a freeway exit and shared its mall space only with the Olde America Shoppe, a slightly creepy right-wing junk store that even I couldn’t find anything good in, and I’d been shopping second-hand my whole life. And way off at the far end of the parking lot, by the freeway on-ramp, was a Burger King.

On my mandated 15-minute breaks, I would step out in the sun to counteract the frigid a/c. Also, the break room was grim and fluorescent, and once I got cornered by the manager, an earnest, sad man who told me how great it was that I was getting out of here and going to the Ivy League, and that I should make good and sure I made something of myself. Usually for lunch, I would pack a little something and eat it in my car (employees were discouraged from sitting on the sidewalk in front of the store and eating sandwiches).

But with a few weeks to go before the end of my Kmart tenure, the wind shifted, and I don’t mean that metaphorically. Whenever I walked out of the store’s front doors, all I could smell was flame-broiled goodness, the essence of Whoppers wafting downwind toward me from the far-off BK.

Even pre-veg, I’d had a soft spot for Whoppers, always coming down firmly on their side whenever a Big Mac booster shot off his or her mouth. I mean, duh: Flame. Broiled. Meat. Essence of human food.

Also, of course, essence of corporate evil. We were very pre-Fast Food Nation at that point, but I still knew about slash-and-burn ranching in the rainforests and all that. I knew BK was wrong, but, baby, it smelled so right.

So one day, I walked right across the parking lot (huh, not so far away after all, it turned out) and ate a Whopper.

I’d like to say I never looked back, but then I went to my very expensive college that had very vile food, and rarely did we have anything meat-based in the dining hall that was as sublime as a Whopper. I ate so much broccoli in two years that I couldn’t eat it again for four, and I had peanut-butter sandwiches (good combining proteins) every day for breakfast. I scavenged free pizza and ice cream, and gained a decent ass-load of weight.

I was greatly relieved when junior year rolled around, when I joined the amazing Terrace Club and could choose from fabulous food of every possible kind, from roast suckling pig to the human sushi bar. Chef Barton Rouse (RIP) made all food so pleasurable, so filled with love, that it seemed ungrateful not to eat all of it. Plus, he took great delight in bitching about finicky eaters like “milk-jug girls,” who whined that the skim milk had run out, and all, coincidentally, had really big tits. Earning Barton’s approval meant eating meat, and loving every bit of it. That strategy worked, and as a bonus, all that free-pizza weight came right off.

I think my few meatless years now keep me from indulging in that unthinking macho meat-coma gluttony (most of the time), but it also makes me appreciate that it’s all about where the meat comes from, and I don’t mean just whether it’s bioengineered. If it comes from someone who cares about you, that’s the essence of human food. And if it’s flame-broiled, well, so much the better.

What’s wrong with me? I saw this picture a couple of weeks ago, and it just keeps popping into my head and making me think, Awwww. I don’t know the people at Machine Project, who took this picture, but I think I’d like them. I really want a Fry Daddy…

First: All drollery aside, Mt. Sinai is a hundred times better than either of the LIJ joints I was in. (My ID doctor said that if I had to stay over the weekend, he’d take me on a tour of the chichi $1,500-a-night suites on the hotel floor.) I’m still glad to be home, especially with all the good wishes from everyone.

But I know, while you’re writing the get-well cards and sending the chocolates, you’re definitely thinking: What about the food?

Let me first admit: I have a soft spot for airplane food. The little individual compartments and containers are very compelling to me (but maybe that’s just my OCD talking). I have never had a completely inedible meal on an airplane, and once, in Delta biz class, I actually said “Yum!” while I was eating. My only complaint is that the flight attendants just say “Beef or pasta?” without explaining more, and then I don’t want to hold up the whole process by saying, “How would you say that beef is prepared? And what’s the cut of meat? And is that linguine or shells?”

So, that said, I didn’t find the hospital food that bad–at first. I’d been actively fearing it because several years ago I went to a restaurant-supply convention here in NYC, where I stood mesmerized and morbidly fascinated in front of a robotic food-dispensing machine for use in “institutions such as prisons and hospitals” (suggested the demo video). A huge stainless-steel box contained Nutrient Gloop A, and it was pumped through springy tubes, then squirted in precisely measured portions onto trays running by on a conveyor belt. I was scared straight, as they say.

But fortunately there was no Nutrient Gloop on my tray in Forest Hills. Most food items were recognizable. The separately heated entree dish and coffee mug provided the familiar reference point of dining in the sky. The trouble with the airplane-food analogy is that I’ve never been on a plane for more than three meals. My first hospital stay, eight days total, would be the equivalent of jetting to Australia and back four times in a row. In the hospital, you get a special jiggly bed that ensures you won’t die of deep-vein thrombosis, but the stewardesses aren’t the least bit cute. And, at least at LIJ in Forest Hills, you don’t even get a choice of beef or pasta.

And what your menu says rarely correlates with what’s on your tray. Best example: a promised chicken cacciatore took the form of tuna casserole with tricolor rotini–very jarring if you’re expecting chix with mushrooms. Some items required a little imagination to match them up with their labels. At first I thought “Chinese-style roast chicken” was another case of a failed menu writing. Then I realized the little scallion slices and the brown glaze signified “Chinese-style.”

And then some things were just straight-out weird: one day I got some beef stew with mandarin oranges. Yes, the ones you get in the syrup in the cans. Is it tacky of me to blame this on the fact this was a Jewish hospital? This was perhaps some institutional interpretation of Passover brisket? That’s the only real-life foodstuff I could peg this concoction to.

Additionally, there was a disturbing lack of concern for nutrition. Partially hydrogenated spread was the norm. I, a heart patient, got coffee for breakfast every morning. And dessert portions were always physically larger than entree portions. Which I guess was supposed to be a perk, but only seemed to reinforce the miserableness of being in the hospital, as the big bricks of gooey cake practically screamed, “You poor hopeless sickie! Here’s a treat!”

After a few days of this, I was living that dumb joke: The food is terrible, and the portions are so small! At every meal, I’d been diligently cleaning as much of my plate as I could before I was gripped with utter despair (I drew the line at the margarine), but on the morning of the third day, I was weak and dizzy with hunger. Fortunately, Tamara started the daily dinner delivery that night, but by then I’d already been carted down to the special heart-monitoring floor, as I gasped, “It’s just low blood sugar…need REAL food badly…”

Getting transferred to LIJ in Manhasset was a step up, because there at least I got a little menu to choose entrees from each day. Again, descriptions rarely gibed with reality, and chicken broth, a plastic mug of tasteless murk, accompanied every meal. One morning I just started crying right off the bat; I was crushed by the task of discerning actual oatmeal bits amid the starchy pap. I felt like Oliver Twist, but without the pluck or, of course, the desire for more. But the green beans weren’t so mercilessly boiled, the dessert portions were a bit more moderate, and fresh fruit made an occasional appearance. One night I got a thimbleful of real butter, but the bread to put it on was like mattress stuffing. I rubbed it on the ubiquitous green beans instead.

After all that, Mt. Sinai was like Babbo, Le Bernardin and Jean-Georges all rolled together. The nightly bulletin applied a bit of hyperbole to the next day’s choices–though to be fair, a “seasonal” green salad in December would be iceberg lettuce and carrot shreds. Otherwise, I felt like I had a new nutritional lease on life, with my choice of butter or margarine (duh), salad and fruit options galore, and dinner entrees so edible that I fortunately can’t remember any of them.

So, a tip to hospitals: If you make your patient cry or swoon in her chair, it might be time to reevaluate the kitchen. And future patients should consider this: Food quality appears to correlate directly with the quality of the medical care. If you get served spinach that inspires you to sing that “Great green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts” song, tell ’em to put their scalpels away, and make a run for the door.

(Fun in Hospital, Part I)

What else can you say when a candy bar is so straightforward, so blatant in its desires?

(I’ve lost my original, quickly torn and crumpled wrapper, my sole souvenir of Toronto, so this pic comes courtesy of The Candy Critic.)

I like perusing the candy aisle in other countries–in the Netherlands, for instance, it’s all licorice. In Switzerland, you can barely find any dark chocolate. And in Canada, which seems just like the U.S. in so many ways, you find maple-flavored everything (maple Cadbury Flake, maple Coffee Crisp, maple Kit-Kat), and Smarties that come only in red and white (“Save the red ones for last, eh!” says the label).

The Eat-More, though, appealed because it seemed to be a homegrown candy bar, not just a Cadbury product tweaked for the local market. Once I unwrapped it, I saw it falls into the somewhat unappetizing category I’ve come to call the “turd bar,” for lack of a more poetic term. Baby Ruth, all lumpy with peanuts, is the ur-turd bar–none of those artful swirls of chocolate enrobing a luscious center. Without too much imagination, you know what’s inside the BR, and if you don’t chew it carefully, well… OK, you get the concept.

The Eat-More isn’t lumpy, but it’s a pretty unappetizing combo of dark chewy toffee holding together lots of chunks of peanuts. It kind of reminded me of going hiking with my mom and my brother, where we stand around in the middle of the trail poking at a piece of scat while they remark on what the critter could be based on the visible vestiges of its diet. The Eat-More could just as well be hiker scat, at the end of a long backpacking trip when he’s got nothing but gorp left.

Now I’ve made the Eat-More sound so disgusting that you won’t believe me when I say it was great. It was perhaps the ideal urban energy bar–all the quickie protein and sugar, and none of the stigma of an actual energy bar, which we know are eaten only by rock-climbers and baby boomer women and, oh, fine, people, very much like myself perhaps, who were getting over a stomach ulcer. (I still can’t look at a Luna Bar, especially those lemon ones.)

The ingredients are basic and not too toxic, but it’s still complicated enough to merit actually buying, rather than just making at home–unlike those Larabars, which are very much in the turd bar category, and happen to be just dates and nuts and other dried fruit pressed into a bar. I’ve got all that stuff at my house, and it won’t cost $3.50 and look like a turd if I just eat it in handfuls.

And there’s no chocolate. This might seem like a major drawback, but as an on-the-go snack, it avoids being too decadent. Which means you can just…eat more. Eh.

Aww. I love it when someone says that. And then it ends up being of an animal carcass. Thanks, Adriana.

“Holy crap!” is not really the polite way to greet a coworker, especially one I haven’t seen in months, early in the morning. But she had this little packet of doughnuts bearing the distinctive Krispy Kreme font. After my eyes stopped bugging out of my head at this wondrous baked good before me, she explained that she’d just bought them at the vending machine on our floor.

“They go fast, though,” she warned. Was that her just protecting her snack-donut turf, or pointing to a legitimate floor-wide Krispy Junior obsession that I hadn’t heard about? The latter is totally possible, since I only ever leave my desk to use the bathroom, and never chat with anyone, even though I’ve been showing up for work here every so often since 2000. (Ah, the joys of freelancing.)

Anyway, I just hustled down and bought me a pack of these Krispy Juniors before said coworker got them all herself, or whatever it is that happens to them. I have such a soft spot for mini donuts. Although I’m sure they would taste wretched to me now, those chocolate-covered ones with the bright yellow cake were really the best treat ever when I was young–I think they were only, like, 40 cents in the high school snack bar, which to me seemed like the most sugar for your dollar, and an intriguing texture sensation to boot. The “chocolate” coating was so waxy that it would leave unsightly brown flecks on your front teeth if you weren’t careful. The powdered ones were good in a pinch.

But enough reminiscing, because I’ve got this nasty taste in my mouth, and I won’t get up to get some water until I’m done typing this.

See, I just ate a Krispy Junior. It sucked. About two-thirds of the way through the tasting experience, it gave off some hideous chemical flavor, and it still hasn’t gone away. I guess the solution would be just to eat another donut. Because at the beginning, it wasn’t so bad. They’re the cinnamon-sugar variety. So, OK, a little dry, dusty, cinnamony at first. Then some cakiness–but very dry cakiness. Not the glaze-sodden glory of a fresh KK cake donut. Then that hideous chemical explosion. Ack. Coughing. At least I won’t be eating the whole package (6 mini donuts total) and then feeling gross about the hydrogenated fat. (My bad cholesterol is precisely 100, I just found out. One point higher and I’d be in big trouble, apparently.)

Putting the Krispy Kreme label on these donuts–which clearly come from some sub-par donut factory in Kazakhstan using cast-off equipment from the Hostess plant–reminds me of some Oscar de la Renta luggage I owned many years ago. Like, why would that guy, the king of evening gowns, be designing luggage for me? Especially luggage that I’m buying at T.J. Maxx? KK had better watch out for brand dissolution. I’d muse further, but I’ve got to get a glass of water.

Oh yeah–and I had a Vietnamese sandwich in San Fran. Of course it wasn’t as good as our regular joint, because it didn’t have the crumbly pork sausage, but it was still damn good for a corporate catered lunch situation (the situation I was in last week). I got a little worried when “soy sauce” was listed on the possible condiments NOT to include, so I wrote “extra fish sauce, please” on my order, in hopes of encouraging authenticity. Who knows if that had any effect, but I was pleased with my sammie, and filled with envy that a Vietnamese sandwich was even on the corporate lunch menu–they’re so not on the radar here.

The excellent, recently noticed blog Daily Gluttony also has a very good report on banh mi.

I got so caught up in the fascinating world of my health crisis that I forgot to mention this yummy goat’s milk ice cream I had in San Fran. I only had a couple of spoonfuls of the “Molasses Tipsycake” flavor, but it was super-intense. I’m not sure what the “tipsycake” part was, but it basically tasted like the hot milk with molasses my mom used to give me before bed. Except, of course, it was cold. It did have a noticeably goaty aftertaste–which the Mado stuff in Istanbul didn’t have. I like goat’s milk and goat cheese, but this stuff might be a little hard to take if you’re just expecting a sweet treat. I also imagine, as the stuff is “slow farmed and kitchen fresh” (whatev), that product consistency might vary–goats and lambs taste very different depending on the time of year. But gosh, they sure are cute all the time–adorable pics on LaLoo’s website.

To borrow Heidi’s quip, only in Marin County can you be sitting in your own car, parked by the side of the road, enjoying an impromptu picnic of Vietnamese chicken salad and grilled beef, and some bouncy baby boomer will seek you out to tell you that eating meat is bad for you. Thanks, healthy dude. You’re 50, and I’m not. (Heidi and I were suitably unimpressed–I kept gnawing my beef chunk while Heidi shoveled down her salad, saying “Uh-huh. Yeah. Cool” to all his proselytizing about the “liquid body” health program that “honors and respects” the fact that our bodies are 70 percent water. Fortunately the guy thought we were lesbians after a bit, so he jogged off.)

On the other hand, for all that I snark about the California “I hear you” culture, I did get some excellent medical care–or at least some medical care that didn’t make me feel like I was just a pain in the doctor’s ass, which seems to be standard NYC style. I still have no idea why I had a fever and my leg started hurting like crazy, but at least it wasn’t deep-vein thrombosis, which really would’ve thrown my whole travel-writing career into the shit. I got the chilled-outest ultrasound ever, complete with candlelight and ambient whale noises, and then this buff, tan doctor looked thoughtful and asked me lots of relevant-seeming questions and confirmed that I was not crazy for coming to the ER. That makes up for a lot of mysterious pain.

Maybe I _should_ stop eating meat, or at least start drinking a lot more water? Arg. I would respect and honor my dehydration, except my bladder is so small.