A Cook's Tour_ In Search of the Perfect Meal - Anthony Bourdain [124]
I’m going to try – really try – to be nice here.
I went along with the producer’s scheme. Fair is fair. The opposition should be given every chance to prove the righteousness of their cause – or at least the merits of their case. The people coming to the dinner, the folks who’d be cooking for me, were all serious vegans. Cookbook authors. Vegan cookery teachers. People who spent lots of time going to seminars, classes, corresponding with others of their ilk – on-line, in chat rooms, and at conventions and informal gatherings. Maybe, just maybe, they had something to show me. Maybe it was possible to make something good without meat, or stock, or butter, or cheese, or dairy products of any kind. Who was I to sneer? The world, I had recently found out, was a big, strange, and wonderful place. I’d eaten tree grubs and worms and sheep’s testicles. How bad could it be?
Bad.
The vegans I visited did not live in a converted ashram on a hilltop, tending to their crops in bare feet or Birkenstocks. No one was named Rainbow or Sunflower. Only one person wore a sari. My hosts lived in a kempt modern luxury home in an exclusive area of the suburbs, surrounded by green lawns and shiny new BMWs and SUVs. They were, all of them, affluent-looking professionals and executives. Ranging in age from late thirties to early fifties, they were well dressed, unfailingly nice, eager to show me the other side of the argument.
And not one of them could cook a fucking vegetable.
Fergus Henderson, the grand master of blood and guts cookery, shows more respect for the simple side of sautéed baby spinach on some of his plates than any of these deluded vegans showed me in ten elaborate courses. Green salads were dressed hours before being served, ensuring that they had wilted into nutrition-free sludge. The knife work – even from the cooking teachers present – was clumsy and inept, resembling the lesser efforts of younger members of the Barney Rubble clan. The vegetables – every time – were uniformly overcooked, underseasoned, nearly colorless, and abused, any flavor, texture, and lingering vitamin content leeched out. Painstaking re-creations of ‘cheese’, ‘yogurt’ and ‘cream’ made from various unearthly soy products tasted, invariably, like caulking compound, and my hosts, though good-humored and friendly to the hostile stranger in their midst, seemed terrified, even angry, about something nebulous in their pasts. Every time I asked one of them how and when exactly they had decided to forgo all animal products, the answer always seemed to involve a personal tragedy or disappointment unrelated to food.
‘I got a divorce,’ began one. ‘I lost my job,’ said another. ‘Heart attack,’ offered another. ‘I broke up with my . . .’ ‘When I decided to move out of LA, I started thinking about things . . .’
In every case, it appeared to me (in my jaundiced way of thinking anyway) that something had soured them on the world they’d once embraced – and that they now sought new rules to live by, another orthodoxy, something else to believe in. ‘Did you read about the PCBs in striped bass?’ one whispered urgently, as if comforted by the news. ‘I saw on-line where they’re pumping steroids into cattle,’ said another breathlessly, every snippet of bad news from the health front a victory for their cause. They seemed to spend an awful lot of time confirming their fears and suspicions of the world outside their own, combing the Internet for stories of radioactive dairy products, genetically altered beets, polluted fish, carcinogenic sausages, spongiform-riddled meat, the hideous Grand Guignol chamber of horror abattoirs and slaughterhouses.
They also seemed curiously oblivious to the fact that much of the world goes to bed hungry every night, that our basic design features as humans, from the beginning of our evolution, developed around the very real need to hunt down slower, stupider animals, kill them, and