Michael: Friday, April 17, 2015

The men, like flowers,
Are clustered along the hills
Coloring the land.

When you become a vegetarian, what don’t you see coming?

Right off the bat I discovered how convenient eating out was for everyone, except for me, as fast food places were pretty much verboten for anyone on a vegetarian diet. Over time I’ve come to appreciate the effects of not having eaten at these establishments for close to 40 years, but in the beginning I was still in the poor social milieu of college, and like high school, going to a fast food place was a quick and frequent social outing as well as an opportunity to eat. Perhaps my loner tendencies were even partly behind my diet decision, but I don’t want to go down any Freudian trails at the moment. Suffice it to say that ruling out fast food establishments should lead to wiser menu choices, but it also a had an additional aspect of social isolation that I hadn’t taken into consideration.

Much more gradual and ongoing changes in my diet have occurred as I’ve discovered and/or occasionally been told what products that I wouldn’t have considered as a meat product, was or is. For example, I grew up on Hostess’ junk food, toss it in the brown bag for school, products like Ding Dong’s and Tiger Tails…mmmm, that raspberry and coconut swirl wrapping around that sugary sponge cake with that gush of liquid white cream inside…But flip those products over, I was told, and, “Ah!, there it was - vegetable and/or animal shortening.”

Fortunately for me now, at the time these companies, like Hostess, were in no big hurry or were being pushed by the anti-trans fat movement to engineer their goods away from animal shortening, so by the time they made the conversion, my cravings for them had vanished. But I will admit that sometimes when I’ve been driving on long stretches of road like the I-5 in California and I’ve wanted to grab a quick bite to eat at the gas station/convenience store, I’ll flip over an old favorite, those fruit or chocolate filled pies, to check and see if they’ve become edible yet, and surprisingly, last time I looked the answer was still no. Maybe I’ll have one on my deathbed, or with my last meal before the warden nods his head and they anesthetize me.

And that brings me to further gradual and ongoing changes that I hadn’t anticipated. Once fast food and a great deal of junk food were removed from my landscape, it makes it surprisingly easy to notice the few remaining weeds that I had or still have, poking up through my otherwise garden of delights, like soda and chips.

Now, full disclosure, I haven’t entirely eliminated these from my diet.  Kimme still craves a bag of Lay’s Barbecue chips once in a blue moon, so when she indulges, I’ll either share or have a different flavor of chips - do Sun Chips count? And I will allow myself an occasional 7-Up or the like, in fact it’s a ritual after an ultra race. But I’d say that boils down to a couple of occurrences per year, and I’m willing to live with that.

Sounds like hell, doesn’t it? Really I enjoy food and that’s been another unintended benefit of becoming a vegetarian, opening myself up to the wide variety of other types of cuisines, like Indian and Thai, that I may not have indulged in or tried as often, if I had stuck to the steakhouse side of the street.

And that’s not to say I still don’t have my dark side, I do; a very dark chocolate side in fact. But a further talk about that and how Panama is effecting our diets is going to have to be put off until tomorrow. I’m once again butting my head up against the workout wall.