The Omnivore's Herbivore's Dilemma

This post is inspired by The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan which I received for my birthday and is an excellent read.

Being a vegetarian has thrown my whole system of deciding what to eat out of whack. I am not a person who very often has a gut feeling about what I would like to eat. Craving, hankering or lusting after a particular food is a rare phenomenon for me (and one, I might add, that is not to be trifled with when it does occur) and so I have had to work out a way of whittling down my options for any given meal. This is a system of logic and elimination that enables me to make decisions about food, without relying on the ever-elusive ‘preference’. The problem is that, without strong inclination towards any one thing, and as a person who will eat almost anything, everything is an option and I could quite easily end up in a situation where I buy ten different things and have a bite of each if I’m not careful.

This system revolves around meat. If possible, I would rather avoid eating the same meat for two, or sometimes three, consecutive meals. So, given the luxury of planning my meals I would choose to have a rotation of meats (fish, chicken, beef, pork, lamb on occasion) for dinner, having red meat maybe once or twice a week, and then I would design my lunches accordingly. I also don’t like to have foods of the same ethnicity in too close a proximity – Chinese food for dinner on two consecutive nights is a problem for me. Leftovers are an exception to this rule.

The next level of this is starch selection. I’m not going to have potato in two consecutive meals, even if one is baked and the other is fried. I also like to plan meals with ethnically appropriate starch – just because it’s easier from a cooking perspective to make something Chinese to go with rice noodles than it is to try and incorporate them into an Indian dish. The rotation of starches is potato, bread, pasta, couscous, rice, and Asian noodles. Pasta and Asian noodles are pretty cuisine specific whereas rice is good for Chinese, Thai or Indian and so will appear in my menu rotation more often than pasta.

Sometimes there will be an event happening in the week that I can work out the rest of my meals from – for example I am having lamb on Easter Sunday. So breaking that down into my criteria, that becomes lamb, English, potato. Therefore, Monday night might be chicken, Italian, pasta. Or fish, Indian, rice. But nothing with fries, red meat, gravy or anything roasted. Based on that selection, I can make my lunch and dinner choices for the next day and into the rest of the week. This is my preferred situation and so, if you want to make me happy for a week, decide what I should eat for one meal and I can work out the rest.

As I’m sure you can imagine, this makes going to a restaurant something of a stressful experience for me and those around me because, unless I’ve already had a chance to review the menu, and in the absence of a ‘little-bit-of-everything’ option, I have to go through this process at the table in a short amount of time. The menu itself serves as a natural option limiter, but I have to make quick decisions about starter and main pairings that won’t overlap too closely, whilst considering what I ate for the previous meal and what I anticipate eating at the next (and possibly the meal after that). This is the only way I can ever make a decision about what to order. Well, besides other people becoming (understandably) impatient and forcing me to make a panic decision by calling the waiter over and telling them that we are ready (this never ends well). “John, I’m starving – can we please order?” is a phrase that I am sorely familiar with.

So, now that you are familiar with my process of menu deduction, I’m sure that you can understand that taking meat out of this equation has been quite a shock. In some ways, it is a boon because less options means less decisions to make. Going to Subway, for example, I only have a choice of two sandwiches – picking one of them doesn’t take much brain power. And I can’t have parmesan and oregano bread because it has gelatine in it…but I wouldn’t have it anyway because it’s a double whammy of words that I sound and feel ridiculous saying in Canada.

The downside of this is that it’s harder to find variety whilst fulfilling my nutritional requirements. Having a different type of bean in two meals isn’t quite the same as having a different meat is it? And some cuisines are completely out of the question - Pho, BBQ, Mcdonald’s (yes it is its own cuisine type), and Korean Grill are a few things that, though I wouldn’t necessarily eat them usually anyway, I can’t even consider them now and I find that difficult. Now that they are off limits, it’s like all I can think about it that steamy hot soup with the tender meat cooking in it. So I have discovered that being limited in this manner is not something that I enjoy – one of the things I love about Toronto is how many options there are for everything. And I have a process that I laboriously worked out over many conversations with my patient sister! I don’t need any limitations beyond the idiosyncrasy of my own mind.

I think that I have come to some sort of balance with it – at first I felt like I was on a diet, as well as being vegetarian. It was just the sense of limitation that put me into automatic diet mode – why else would you limit yourself unless to stop getting fat after all? But now I’m tucking in to a reasonable amount of cheese and fried goods and so the constraints of vegetarianism are manageable. I hate to think what’s going to happen when I’m back to being an omnivore though…so many options…

John