The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [11]
Sometimes, fasting comes with a financial incentive, too. When I was eight years old, my brother, who was then ten, bet me $10 that I couldn’t be a vegetarian for a month. We shook on it. Thinking it would be impossible for me to give up my normal eating routine, my brother thought he had made a solid investment that would pay out in a month’s time. After the first few days, however, he’d begun to realize whom he was dealing with.
I was stalwart about my new diet. He heckled and hounded, ate drumsticks with gusto before my eyes, tried to trick me into eating meat a few times, and made me forgo dessert once by proving that Jell-O involved a certain animal by-product, but by the end of the month, he was forced to give up his lawn-mowing earnings for about that same length of time.
I was too young to cook for myself then, but I took a lot of interest in whatever my mother made for me. She knew about our shenanigan and made sure there was always something I could eat at family meals, which helped my end of the bargain considerably. But it also made me begin to think about food a lot more, in ways that I hadn’t thought about it previously—where it came from, what it consisted of, and how to cook it.
Around suppertime, I was usually delegated menial kitchen tasks such as setting the table or unloading the dishwasher. But I liked to stick around, watching my mother slice flank steak into thin strips for a stir-fry with vegetables and douse the splattering pan with extra soy sauce, sometimes causing droplets to jump feet in the air. Other times, the aroma of sliced mushrooms simply sauteed in butter would envelop the kitchen as she prepared a spaghetti dinner, with the fresh vegetables added to a jar of tomato sauce. I’d watch, mesmerized, as the mushrooms’ juices drooled over the bottom of the pan and slowly evaporated, noting the way the mushroom slices not only shrank but also turned from white to translucent brown.
“It all cooks down to nothing,” I can hear my mother say as she stirred, wryly though not without fondness. Its bulk was mostly liquid, I understood then.
With a wooden spoon, she offered me a few slivers to taste. The hot morsels were coated in a viscous gray liquid. Now concentrated in flavor, the savory aroma I’d been smelling burst in my mouth, accented with butter and salt. I wanted to eat them all up on the spot instead of adding them to the sauce that was warming in another pot.
During that month of eating no meat, I was reading The BFG by Roald Dahl. In one scene, while devising a plan to wreak revenge on a clan of savage giants, the book’s kid-hero, Sophie, says to the Big Friendly Giant:
“I think it’s rotten that those foul giants should go off every night to eat humans. Humans have never done them any harm.”
The BFG responds:
“That is what the little piggy-wig is saying every day,” the BFG answered. “He is saying, I has never done any harm to the human bean so why should he be eating me?”’
Goodness, did that quote ever stir my eight-year-old sense of ethics. Under normal circumstances I might have skimmed past it just like with any other book about giants who ate children. But now that I had become a vegetarian for a month, it stuck with me in a way that kept me thinking.
I never did become a vegetarian again after that monthlong stint. (But I will say that I strongly believe in respecting and preserving the earth, and this weighs greatly into my eating habits today.) What I took away from the experience, $10 notwithstanding, was the small discovery that changing one’s diet can have profound effects on a person.
That was the last time I engaged in any extended aberration to my eating habits. What eventually turned me on to not eating out and blogging about it, aside from financial incentives, was