Medium Dawn Felagund of the Fountain

Anyone who has been hanging around this joint for a few years knows that 1) I am vegetarian and 2) I am highly ambivalent about that vegetarianism. I have been a vegetarian for twenty years, since I was twelve years old. The choice to change didn't come with any great fanfare: I was at a cousin's graduation party, I was bored, and I was reading a book on animal rights that I'd taken out from the library to learn more about issues involving companion animals. But I strayed into the section on food animals, and what I learned of factory farming predicated a change that has persisted across the majority of my life.

I had my fling with animal rights activism. ( Read more... )

Last Friday was World Farm Animals Day, so I'm a bit late but wanted to post about it and some of my more recent mental meanderings on the subject of using animals for food.

( The Skeptical Vegetarian Rambles )

Today is the sixteenth anniversary of my decision to become a vegetarian, made at the tender age of twelve while reading Ingrid Newkirk's Save the Animals! at my cousin's graduation party. I like to commemorate my "vegiversary" (as I used to call it when I was a kid) by writing about my experiences with vegetarianism and the animal welfare movement; however, I've only managed once to actually post those reflections on LJ, thanks to the draconian Internet use policies at my former job. So to celebrate the first day of the former part, I am once again posting about vegetarianism to commemorate sixteen meat-free years.

( Vegetarianism vs. Sustainability )

When I changed to vegetarianism twelve (!) years ago, I did so in a very different "dining world" than I now live. If we were lucky, we might find a grocery store that sold largely tasteless "veggie burgers" and tofu products, and I got pretty used to salad and baked potato as a restaurant meal. Now, the veggie food section at our local grocery store of choice takes up a whole freezer cabinet, a refrigerated section, and there is an entire aisle of organic foods that are largely vegetarian-friendly as well.

Sometimes I think: Choices?? I have forgotten what it is to have those!

For the first year of my vegetarian life, I existed largely on salad until my parents (I was twelve when I decided to stop eating meat) learned how to cook with tofu. These days, I can afford to turn up my nose at certain foods rather than eat them out of sheer desperation for something different.

This, in turn, forces companies to actually make foods that taste good rather than simply boasting "Soy Product" on the label. (And most veggie foods, these days, are quite good. My non-vegetarian husband eats them...by choice!)

Bobby and I love eating out; we call it a "hobby" of ours, perhaps to justify why we spend so much of our money on nice restaurants. (And, sometimes, not-so-nice restaurants with purely evol-delicious food!) There are very few places these days that do not have something that I can eat...or at least convert into something that I can eat.

A popular solution, for example, is to take a dish that involves meat and simply ask that it be made without it. Pasta, for example, or entree salads are good for this.

The downfall with this, of course, is that I am paying for the meat--the most expensive part of the meal--and not getting it. (Sometimes--if it's shrimp, especially--I will have it put on the side and Bobby will eat it.) But it is a fact of life that vegetarians become accustomed to. Using most restaurant computer systems, one cannot simply adjust the price of a dish to accomodate guest requests (although one can always add value to it). Or, if they can, it is a power of management, and most servers don't know or won't bother to ask.

On Saturday, Bobby and I went with friends to a hole-in-the-wall dive with delicious food called Phoenix Emporium that is located in historic Ellicott City. I ordered a chicken quesadilla, without the chicken of course, which cost $7.95.

When the check came, the server had charged us for an open food instead (which means that she punches in the price rather than having the computer calculate it based off of what I ordered) for $5.00, since I didn't get the chicken.

We gave her the three dollars that we saved as extra tip, of course.

Today, Bobby took a mental health day, so he picked me up from work and took me out to lunch, as is our custom. We went to Red Robin, which is a gourmet burger chain. They have decent veggie burgers, but I wasn't in the mood, so I got a southwestern-style chicken salad sans the chicken.

And the server had the manager take a couple dollars off of our check.

Twice in a week? That hardly ever happens--not that I'm complaining--and it happened twice in a week!

But, as I frequently tell Bobby, I think that restaurants are starting to realize the value of catering to vegetarians--or what they serve to lose if they don't. It only takes one vegetarian in the party to make a group not go to a certain restaurant. Take our group on Saturday: There were five of us; one (me) was a vegetarian. Does a place really want to lose the patronage of five people over their inability to concoct a dish that does not involve meat? And I've heard figures that suggest that as much as 7% of the US population is vegetarian. (I don't know how accurate these are or if they include quasi-vegetarians like pesco- and pollo-"vegetarians," but that's the number I've heard. And that's a pretty significant chunk of the population.)

It's not hard to offer a couple vegetarian options using ingredients that have to be kept on hand anyway. And most of us are not hard to please...quite the opposite! After getting up the gumption to try everything from tofu to seaweed, we don't take much convincing to order a veggie sandwich or a pasta primavera. Most of the time, we're just grateful to eat without surviving on a la carte side dishes or feeling that we have to write our own menu...or go hungry.

I was a little miffed because places were getting rid of vegetarian options in favor of "Atkins-friendly" choices, but now that the low-carb craze (and "craze" about describes my feelings on the Atkins diet) is dying down, thank Valar, I'm starting to feel a little more vegetarian love again.