Veeeguhn

My mom can barely say the word "vegan."

"It sounds so restrictive," she said. "Veeeguhn."

Our conversations on the topic sound something like this:

"I made these delicious almond biscotti yesterday."

"Yum! What cookbook did you use?"

"Vegan Planet."

"Eww."

What I find interesting about this exchange is that one of things I love about being a vegetarian is the diversity and abundance of foods that I discovered that I had no idea existed way back when I ate meat. I grew up believing that dinner always consisted of three things: a piece of protein hanging off a bone, a starch (usually a shriveled baked potato with Butter Buds, some weird fake butter substitute in powder form, or plain white rice), and a frozen vegetable. We had more types of baked chicken than I care to remember: lemon chicken, barbecued chicken, herbed chicken, chicken with some kind of oatmeal topping...it was like the scene in Forest Gump where Bubba talks about all that shrimp. A really exciting dinner meant we were having sloppy joes.

All that changed when I became vegetarian. I had to re-conceive my entire food schema. What else could dinner look like? Imagine my surprise when I learned that a meal did not have to contain three discrete items. It did not even have to contain two. Dinner could be multiple bowls of a hearty lentil soup, a plate of spinach and rice casserole, or a helping of Thai peanut noodles. I always tell people who are considering becoming vegetarian that simply removing the meat from their diet is not enough, at least not if you want to be a healthy vegetarian. You have to actively seek out varied ways of replacing the meat in your diet, and that doesn't mean that you must have a slab of tofu every night where the steak would otherwise be (though you would never hear me advocate against a juicy piece of grilled tofu marinated in soy sauce and ginger, but I digress). On my path to becoming vegetarian, I discovered grains I never knew existed (quinoa, an ancient grain of the Incas and the only grain that is a complete protein, is now a staple of my diet), increased my consumption of beans and legumes, learned about the varieties of squash. Also, I eat a lot more peanut butter. At any rate, this has forced me to pay much closer attention to what I put in my body and how I feel when I am eating too much, or too little, of a particular type of food, and at the risk of sounding New Age, eating more vegetables, fruits, and whole grains makes me feel more connected to the earth.

Now, I must go connect with, I mean stir, my homemade applesauce that I have simmering on the stove.