In Praise of Vegetables

For someone who is a confirmed meat-eater, I eat a lot of vegetarian dinners.  Looking at my Dinner Calendar for the past few months, I can see that I generally have at least two vegetarian dinners per week, and another two where meat plays more of a supporting role than as the star of the meal. 

Meat is expensive, of course, which is one reason people sometimes find themselves eating more vegetarian meals, although that can lead to the nutritionally unbalanced approach of simply omitting the meat from a meal that would ordinarily contain it.  This is tragic, not only because it can result in the gaunt, low-energy image that popular media often holds as the vegetarian standard, but because there are so many delicious, complete and healthy vegetarian meals out there.

I am not interested in food that doesn’t taste good.  This is why I am reluctant to a certain legendary vegetarian restaurant in my neighbourhood, whose culinary joylessness is evident in the faces of patrons whose expressions look as though the food is a penance to be endured for the sake of one’s socio-political views.  People actually line up to eat there, which boggles my mind.  There are a lot of places to get great vegetarian food in this town, without submitting to the misery of the historically grim, west coast hippy version of vegetarianism left over from the 1960s.

I like meat.  I like the flavour, the textures, and the versatility.  I like the nutritional components: protein, B12 vitamins, and iron.  I have no wish to embroil myself in a polarized argument for or against meat.  I like vegetables, too.  I grew up eating a fairly wide variety of veggies, and they took up the lion’s share of the plate.  My mother’s garden salads, legendary things that they were, were known to nearly engulf the entire place setting and required some serious wrangling to create enough space to put anything else.  I remember a wide-eyed school chum whispering to me that she fully expected to find a rabbit at the bottom of her plate. 

We were a meat-and-potatoes family, though.  Potatoes were decidedly the side dish of choice – often enough that, if Mom wasn’t yet home by 5:00pm and other dinner plans had not been indicated, one of us kids would start peeling potatoes and put them on to simmer.  For all there was meat on the dinner table every day, we didn’t eat vast portions of it.  Our serving size for a piece of beef or chicken was closer to the healthy eating guidelines currently published by government health authorities than most restaurant meals.  It was, in fact, a fairly balanced diet – in itself an anomaly, I have discovered.

As a dinner guest at my friends’ houses, I quickly learned just how odd our family was.  Daunting portions of meat that were put on my plate were initially ascribed to generous hospitality, and while I have no doubt this did play a role, the plates around me confirmed it as the standard for the household.  Scant vegetables were also the order of the day, potatoes excepted.  Most vegetables that I recall were served boiled to death, without regard for any flavour enhancing notions beyond excessive salt, and perhaps margarine.  Coming from a house where salt was used minimally and margarine relegated strictly to baking duties which concealed its flavour shortcomings, the combination was almost unbearable. 

No wonder none of my friends liked vegetables!  They weren’t really encouraged to like them, either, I discovered.  Many parents simply gave up trying to get their children to eat anything healthy, and began an unending progression towards prepackaged (and heavily marketed) foods like Hamburger Helper, Kraft Dinner, and boil-in-the-bag rice.  Broccoli, much touted as one of the more hated vegetables of North American childhood, was yellowish-olive when it appeared at all.   Salads were a fraction of the size of what I was accustomed to, and frequently so smothered in a commercial salad dressing that one would be hard pressed to identify the components – assuming there were any – beyond the ubiquitous iceberg lettuce.

Lest I come across as having been an abnormally accommodating child, let me set the record straight:  I despised seafood in all its forms, lamented the presence of winter squash in the household, and turned up my nose at green peas.  Every child has some food aversions, and I was particularly ill-behaved about mine.  I remember hatching a clever plan to dispose of a dreaded pile of green peas by dropping them, bit by bit, into my lap, pressing my knees down and pointing my toes so that the little round vegetables rolled right down my legs and underneath my brother’s chair.  I failed to take into account the fact that my brother liked peas quite a bit, and certainly wouldn’t throw them on the floor.  Busted.  Not to mention, my first lesson in trajectory and forensic evidence.

Most vegetables I was pretty happy about, though.  Broccoli and cauliflower never went to waste, nor carrots, nor corn, nor tomatoes.  I was happy to eat almost any vegetable in its raw state, and even iffy vegetables such as turnips were acceptable as a component in a stew

Even though I have always enjoyed vegetables, generally speaking, it took a long time for me to begin to eat meals that didn’t contain meat.  I mentally envisaged vegetarian food as consisting wholly of enormous platters of plain boiled vegetables or frighteningly architectured faux-meat loaves, based pretty much solely on the contents of the refrigerators at some of the homes where I baby-sat, and ominous references to seaweed and brewer’s yeast. 

I eventually realized that I was eating vegetarian dinners, completely unintentionally, in restaurants.  I would select, for example, a creamy fettuccini with wild mushrooms, and it wouldn’t occur to me until later that there hadn’t been any meat in my dinner.  While I remain a big fan of the classic Bolognese sauce, I was noticing how frequently my pastas were meatless, or contained meat more as a garnish than a focal point.  Pizza, too, was a contributing factor.  Arriving home late, tired, and planning to make a pizza from ingredients in my fridge, I discovered that a hungry roommate had devoured the pepperoni.   Grumpy and broke, I simply made the pizza with what was left – and, since I have always tended to overload my pizzas, it was plenty – I found myself thinking that the pepperoni couldn’t have possibly added anything to it. 

It was the introduction to Indian food that really steered me towards cooking in a more consciously vegetable-based style, though.  Menu pages full of foreign-sounding dishes, the heady scent of cumin and chiles and coriander perfuming the air… this was not the bland, self-conscious food that I associated with vegetarian cuisine, nor was it food where meat was circumstantially omitted.  Once past my initial resistance to curry (link), there was so much more to discover.

I cook a lot more Indian dishes, these days, and am increasingly drawn to the vegetarian ones.  The techniques and many of the ingredients are new to me, but it is a rewarding journey of new and different vegetables, grains, flavours, and textures.  I am finding my eyes are increasingly being opened to vegetarian traditions within many other cuisines, full of flavour and discovery.  I don’t want to talk you out of your meat, but I do want to champion increasing your vegetable intake.  It doesn't take much effort to veg-up your meals with wonderful, flavourful foods.  With so much variety and availability out there, and so many cuisines from around the world to joyfully plunder at will, meals will be anything but boring.

June 2005