Vege-Man

Certified Organic Plant-Based Whole Grain Locally Grown Humor

Recently, a British study came out that concluded that vegetarians, especially women, are more likely to break their hips.[1] Why? Because they don’t have enough body fat to cushion a fall.

That’s the problem. Vegetarians are not fat enough. The message is “Look, you’re gonna get old. You’re gonna fall. You’re gonna need to bounce.”

So, when the obese meat eater collapses and dies from a heart attack, his loved ones can say “Well, at least he didn’t break his hip.”

Shelley has been a vegetarian since her teens and a full-fledged vegan for the last thirty or so years. I stopped eating meat about fifteen years ago. I’m essentially vegan in the house. Out in the world I won’t reject something made with cheese, eggs, or butter, mainly because I’m a dessert whore. And even Shelley will eat eggs from the three hens we keep in the back yard. That’s because she is a vegan for moral reasons and does not want to be a party to the way animals are treated in the American concentration camps we call factory farms. She can’t take pleasure eating something she knows suffered in the making. It’s a personal choice for her which she keeps to herself unless someone asks. She does not proselytize and is not interested in making people feel guilty about what they eat. Although it’s difficult, because people tend to feel guilty all on their own around her. She has to expend a lot of energy assuring others that she is not judging them. That’s why my own guilty caloric intake has been boosted when at dinner parties, Shelley will surreptitiously pass me the non-vegan dessert plopped in front of her, because the host assumed her veganism could not possibly include sugary treats.

She’s passed me a lot of dishes over the years. As a young couple in the early nineties, we won a trip to Spain in a raffle. Toward the end of a lovely vacation, we stopped for lunch at a restaurant, a converted mill that straddled a river complete with a picturesque water wheel just outside of the walled town of Toledo. All the while, we had been negotiating our trip with a limited knowledge of Spanish. Shelley spoke some Italian which, helped a little as we spent considerable time trying to decipher menus posted outside various restaurants before we entered. This was before I became a vegetarian; and the guidebook informed us that this restaurant had a particularly tasty bean dish, which we thought would be good for Shelley. It didn’t take long after the bean dish arrived for her to suspect that the small chunks in the ragu were beef. Shelley tried to ask the waitress in her broken Spanish mixed with Italian if these chunks were in fact meat. The waitress took this question back to the kitchen whereupon the owner came out, stood before us, and made what seemed from its tone an earnest apologia in Spanish. Unfortunately, the waitress must have mistaken our question for a complaint. When he left, I turned to Shelley.

“What did he say?”

“He either said - if we weren’t satisfied with the food, it would be like a stake through his heart or if we didn’t like the food, he was going to kill himself.”

We decided to make no further fuss. The plan: I would now reach over with my spoon and shovel in as much of Shelley’s meaty bean dish that I could. I had to be sneaky, because we were the only ones in the restaurant that weekday afternoon. We paid our check and hurried out the door.  In case I hadn’t finished enough of it, we did not want to hear the agonized screams of this proud restaurateur driving a stake through his heart.

Years later, when our daughter, Julia, started high school, Shelley got invited to a special luncheon hosted by a group of moms from the incoming class. The organizer found out Shelley was a vegan and called her back to suggest that she would not be comfortable with the menu. Shelley told her she’d be fine. It wouldn’t bother her. She was used to this and could always find something to eat. But the organizer insisted otherwise and disinvited her. What the hell were these suburban moms going to do at this luncheon, slaughter a pig in some sort of Satanic initiation ritual?

“Hail Lucifer, Prince of Hades, we command the forces of Darkness to bestow their infernal power upon our daughters to receive straight A’s so that in four years each of them may gain access to the elite university of her choice without our having to bribe coaches or pay unscrupulous middlemen to fake applications… mmm this barbecued pork is delicious, falls right off the bone.”

Shelley would definitely not be comfortable with that. She has always been a thoughtful person who lives a mindful life according to consistent, deeply rooted values.

In other words, a pain in the ass.

I, on the other hand, became a vegetarian because I wanted to lower my cholesterol. That worked, with a little extra nudge from a daily diet of statins.

What surprised me early on was how much I didn’t miss meat. And these days, the thought of eating a cheeseburger no longer excites me. In fact, it’s become vaguely repulsive. The only thing still capable of involuntarily activating my salivary glands is a smoking grill full of barbecued chicken. But then I am reminded of our hens in the backyard, who have names. I have trouble remembering their names, but just knowing they have names and that it could be one of their relatives stuck between my teeth gives me pause. One of our first batches of chicks was named by my son, after 19^th Century Russian anarchists. I don’t know about the original Bakunin, but ours was a Buff Orpington and a real sweetheart.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized I didn’t love eating chicken as much as I loved the taste of barbecue sauce. The chicken is merely a vehicle for the barbecue sauce. I was explaining this backstage around the craft service table to my writing colleagues at a break during a run-through on the Everybody Loves Raymond set. To make my point, I picked up a banana, dipped the tip in barbecue sauce and took a bite. Our show runner and noted foodie, Phil Rosenthal, who has sampled exotic dishes from all over the world said, “That’s crazy.”

He was not wrong. I do not need to do that again.

After a while, I came to appreciate that meat is essentially tasteless. They say most meat tastes the same, like chicken. Because chicken tastes like nothing. It’s all how you season it. And you can season tofu and tempeh, and seitan the same way. The real difference is texture. It’s hard to replicate sinew. Or blood. Or fat. But they’re getting closer. Shelley is not a fan of the meat substitutes that get too close to aping the real thing. It’s been so long since she’s had actual meat, sometimes the facsimile will conjure in her the same queasy reflex. She doesn’t need to be reminded of the mouth feel of gristle that would make her picture eating an animal.

***

The other day, a young woman, probably late teens, early twenties with dyed fluorescent yellow hair and a nose ring was bagging my groceries. She asked me if I was vegan. When I said, “Yes” she looked delighted. “So am I!” she said. I didn’t go into the more precise explanation about Shelley being the true vegan and my being a “house vegan” for fear it would complicate the encounter and ruin the moment. We were like two early Christians in a hostile Roman empire quietly acknowledging one another. Turns out this graying man still wearing a KN95 mask and this young woman with a nose ring belonged to the same cult.

We vegetarians are frequently treated as oddball cultists. That’s why most jokes about vegetarianism are at the expense of the vegetarian. It truly is a minority conviction, and vegans are an even smaller subset.

Many of the jokes I’ve heard usually focus on, unlike Shelley, the stereotypical strident vegan. These characters are depicted as rude buzzkills, quick to rain on everybody’s meat parade by pointing out that in addition to animal cruelty, meat production is a larger driver of greenhouse gasses than trains, planes, and automobiles. And if we took all the land used to raise and feed methane farting cattle and instead used it to grow food for humans, we could end world hunger. Not to mention, all of the antibiotics they inject into cows, chickens, and pigs to keep them alive and robust enough to butcher. Those antibiotics get passed along to us at the dinner table and in the water table.

That’s a tag line you’ll never hear in an Arby’s commercial: “Arbys: We Have the Antibiotic Resistance!”

Even fish these days is full of micro-plastics and mercury.

And lest we forget, pathogenic viruses like coronavirus, anthrax, HIV, Zika etc. are all animal borne. They never come from plants. Oprah has never had to do a show about an outbreak of Mad Broccoli disease. What about bacterial diseases, like E. coli, you say? Sure, sometimes bunches of romaine lettuce contaminated with E. coli have to be taken off the market. But E. coli is not produced by leafy green vegetables. E. coli emerges when an animal wipes its ass with a leafy green vegetable.

But I would never point any of this out to anyone. Unless they asked me. Or challenged me. Or I was writing an essay on Substack.

Because like all the other holes in our bodies, what we put in our mouths is intensely personal.

I suspect that study about broken hips and vegetarianism focused on women because they couldn’t find a large enough sample size of vegetarian men. Over the years I’ve come to realize that most people instinctively regard vegetarianism as something innately feminine, which I guess makes me a traitor to my gender. Even today in these so-called enlightened and non-binary times, for me as a man, as a he/him,” when I say, “I’m a vegetarian,” I might as well have said, “I have a vagina.”

“How long have you had a vagina?”

“About fifteen years now.”

“What made you decide to have a vagina?”

“I’ve heard people with vaginas live longer.”[2]

Explaining that it’s for my own health plays better to meat eaters than telling them it’s about animal welfare. Animal welfare, as we all know, is for pussies.

To a certain segment, I am not a Vege-man. I am a “Soy Boy,” a meme that originated in the alt-right online septic tank meant as an insult to liberals, the implication being that plant-based food “feminizes” men. Which I guess is supposed to be a bad thing. Plants contain a chemical called phytoestrogen, which is different than the hormone estrogen. Not surprisingly, this scientific subtlety is lost on the same people who think the climate crisis is a hoax and that the ghost of Hugo Chavez rigged the voting machines in the 2020 election. My own anecdotal, non-peer-reviewed study has concluded that phytoestrogen more likely vaccinates you from being a macho right-wing asshole who hates his mother.

If these alt-right carnivores are so sure that eating meat is all a part of the natural order of things, why do they draw the line at people? Seems rather arbitrary. Shouldn’t a real man be willing to eat another real man? And by so doing become an uber-man? Hunters defend hunting by saying “I eat everything I kill.” For an uber-man this could be a good defense against murder.

“Yes, I killed my wife. But let’s not forget, I also ate her…

…And she tasted like chicken.”

***

One time, someone did challenge my vegetarianism. A few years back I was having dinner in Tel Aviv with the host of a television show, a smart, witty guy described to me as the “Bill Maher of Israel.” He told me why he would never be a vegetarian and had “the perfect line for why being a vegetarian is wrong.” I was intrigued. I have met few people who seemed so sure of themselves on this topic. Most say things like “I know I should be, but I just can’t.” Or “It’s just too hard to avoid meat.” Or “My blood type requires meat.” But he was hinting that being a vegetarian was a bad moral choice. And all he needed was one line. He was going to pierce the heart of my dietetic belief system with a single arrow. He leaned confidently back in his chair and released his fool-proof barb.

“Because Hitler… was a vegetarian.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

I was at once both amused and disappointed. I expected more from the Bill Maher of Israel. His “perfect line” did not live up to the hype. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it is a commonplace in debate circles that the first person who mentions Hitler loses. But I did point out that Josef Stalin murdered a similar number of people, albeit not quite as efficiently and in the short amount of time as Der Fuhrer, but no one ever blamed that blood drenched curriculum vitae on his meat eating.

I spent a couple of months working in India, where I thought being a vegetarian would put me back in the majority. To my surprise, it did not. Among the scores of people I encountered in the land of the sacred cow, not one of them was a vegetarian. My Indian co-workers would cock their heads at me as if to say, “But, you’re an American. How can you not eat meat? You people slaughter everything.” I can’t really prove that’s what they were thinking. I may be projecting. But they did have a hard time believing that this 5’11’’, 195 lb. American male, who towered over most other Indian men, never let animal flesh pass his lips.

Of course, I was working with citified folk in Mumbai, whose inhabitants were probably less religious and eating meat was more a sign of prosperity and status. It’s the opposite here in the States. Our cosmopolitans are more likely to be the vegetarians. Good luck finding a vegan option at your local Dew Drop Inn in Bubba, Alabama.

A quick Google search tells me that a majority of the animal kingdom is carnivorous, about 63%. I thought it would be more, especially among big beefy animals. Once, I stumbled upon a YouTube video where a pride of hungry lions was attacking a wildebeest. The lions were fast and numerous, but the wildebeest was big and strong with sharp horns and a vicious kick. He fought them all off. I felt good for the wildebeest but bad for the lions.

If I were one of the lions, I would have called a meeting. Everyone’s back in the locker room licking their wounds, I stand up.

“Excuse me! Pride! May I have your attention, Pride?! I gotta ask a question… And I know some of you aren’t gonna like it. But I think we should seriously reconsider our diet.”

“What?”/”What did he say?”/”What are you talking about?”

“All I’m asking is, ‘Why do we have to eat meat?’”

“What the fuck?”/ “What kind of question is that?”/”What are you, hopped up on goofballs?”

“Just hear me out. Look at that wildebeest. He’s fucking huge. He just kicked our asses. You know what he eats?... Grass!”

General grumbling, “That is true”/ “He does have a point.”/ “Fair enough.”

“Why are we killing ourselves trying to bring him down? Why can’t we eat grass? Think about it! You don’t have chase grass. Grass doesn’t run away. Grass doesn’t kick you in the teeth. Grass doesn’t stick a horn up your ass. I say from now on we eat grass!”

Of course, it doesn’t go over very well.

“I know it would be healthier, but I just like the taste.”

“My blood type requires wildebeest.”

“Okay, maybe we can wean ourselves off slowly. Take an intermediate step. Maybe first off, we stop trying to eat an animal whose name is the combination of the words “Wild” and “Beast.” How about that?  Maybe we try… platypus.” 

Platy

Puss

A plate of puss.

Now, that sounds tasty.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-62504018

[2] Although, they are more prone to breaking their hips.

Opening musical notes from the Long Island Vegetable Orchestra performing the Allegro from Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik (“A Little Night Music”)

Closing music from Documentary Wildlife by Infraction [No Copyright Music]/Nature Awakening