The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [58]
In this country, waiters no longer carve the roast at your table or fillet the fish or sauté your veal over an alcohol flame. They rarely even toss the salad or cut the cake or tart. Waiters nowadays simply sell you food, rearrange the silverware, deliver the food, and open your wine. Service has become an illusion, we learned in waiter’s school, and those who best create that illusion are the most handsomely rewarded.
One day we were all divided into teams, given a cold slice of pizza and a Hostess Twinkie, and asked to come up with an enticing description of each—the way waiters do when they try to sell you the day’s specials. My team did particularly well with the Twinkie: “a golden roll of classic lemon genoise, scooped out and filled with a delicate sweet cream.” The moral, I suppose, is that a good waiter can transform even a Twinkie into something worth tipping for.
January 1989
Vegging Out
My first love affair with vegetarianism ended on a dark and chilly night in 1975 on the corner of Eighth Street in Greenwich Village with a hot dog from Nathan’s Famous. For four years, I had been a lacto-ovo vegetarian, meaning that I allowed myself eggs and dairy products but no fish or shellfish, no chicken or other feathered things, no meat either red or pink. The question of insects never arose because, like most Americans (though unlike members of many other cultures), I have always reacted with revulsion to the idea of eating insects, despite their high nutritive value, crunchy texture, and wide availability. My bible was Diet for a Small Planet, by Frances Moore Lappé, published in 1971. The message of this utopian, spiral-bound volume was that consuming meat is tantamount to consuming the environment. My other motivation was the conviction that meat is murder.
Eighteen omnivorous, Lucullan years later, I am a vegetarian again, much stricter this time, a full-fledged vegan, which is pronounced “VEE-g’n” and means that I avoid animal products entirely, including milk and eggs, butter and cheese. My first act as a vegan was to eat a carrot, and my second act was to make a list of sixty vegetarian and natural-food restaurants within a taxi ride from my house. Then I ordered some Archer Daniels Midland Harvest Burgers, the kind you see advertised on television. I’ve always wondered if they taste as good as they are made to look.
Everybody tells me that vegetarianism is a happening thing. Last year, Vegetarian Times magazine, to which I now subscribe, commissioned a study by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. About 6.7 percent of the adults they telephoned told the pollsters that they are vegetarians, way up from 3.7 percent in 1985. This works out to 12.4 million vegetarians nationwide, an apparent jump of 80 percent. Two-thirds of vegetarians are women. At this rate, I calculate, everybody will be a vegetarian by the year 2024, or at least everybody will say they’re a vegetarian by the year 2024. But then how can over half of them possibly be women? Maybe something is wrong with my calculations.
The problem with the Yankelovich survey is that many people who say they’re vegetarian have an extremely eccentric idea of what a vegetarian is. Forty percent of them report that they eat fish or poultry or both every week. Maybe I’m using the wrong dictionary, but it seems to me that somebody who eats chicken at least once a week and claims to be a vegetarian is the very definition of an impostor, a charlatan, a pretender, or a mountebank. The survey also discovered a hitherto-unrecognized category—the 10 percent of vegetarians who eat red meat at least once a week. I cannot decide whether to call them bovo-vegetarians or psycho-vegetarians.
The survey’s results are broadly consistent with recent trends in food consumption. From 1976 to 1990, the average American’s consumption