The how and the why?

Alright, I got a little off message there. Or perhaps on message? Whatever it was, it wasn't about me eating meat, so let's correct that shall we? Over the last few weeks I've had a LOT of meat. I don't remember it all but here's the short list:

Carne Asada taco salad at Mondo Burrito.- not a ton of flavor, just tasted like bits of steak..i guess that’s what carne asada is?

Chicken Tiki Masala, and Lamb Briyani at some Indian restaurant whose name I cannot pronounce in Burlingame.-oooh, the Chicken Masala was lovely, and the lamb had a rich irony flavor, a little bit heading toward liver flavor, but enjoyable, in that it was more balanced with some pepper and other spices.

The ubiquitous pepperoni and sausage pizza at our favourite monday night football haunt in Sunnyvale, Tasty Subs and Pizza.

Pastrami sandwich at the Togos in the Sharktank and today at Copenhagen Bakery in Burlingame.- dee-lishious all around. The togos version was thinly sliced mounds of pastrami and the Copenhagen was thicker sliced stacked pastrami.

Andy's BBQ sampler with: Baby back ribs, BBQ chicken, smoked pork shoulder (really?...really?), beef brisket, eye-talian sausage, and lots of BBQ sauce.


OK, first of all this just looks wrong. Let's move past that shall we?

Andy's was a highlight because I've been waiting for years to have some good ribs. In fact ribs are the only thing that I've craved for the last 17 years. BBQ ribs. If there's one food on earth that could make me no longer be a vegetarian that's it. Oh right, to answer your question, yes, I still am a vegetarian even though I'm eating meat. I mean, as much as I ever have been. You see, it's a label that roughly describes my tendencies. Damn, ok, so here we go down this rabbit hole:

WHY I AM A VEGETARIAN:

No, I'm not religious about it...in fact I suppose given my previous post I'm more religious about meat. I think the clearest way to say it is that I'm not a fundamentalist in any way. I typically don't eat meat because of many reasons. The majority of friends are at first surprised when they hear I don’t eat meat because it’s such an enjoyable part of their eating lifestyle they just can’t imagine life without it. I’ll admit now, it is damn tasty, but what I’ve really found is that it’s all about the stuff you put on the meat. Meat by itself isn’t all that great. OK, a goooood cut of steak has a particular richness that is enjoyable, but the majority of dishes have a sauce, a rub, or something extra that carries the majority of the dish’s flavor. The meat seems in most of these to be added just as a side. This applies to everything but Pastrami, which I believe was brought to this earth by aliens several hundred years ago as a particular plot to make us all destroy the planet with deforestation in order to graze the animals that it takes to make the heavenly Pastrami, and, if my calculations are correct, they will return in the year 1123 AD to graze us.

A good number of times when people hear I don't eat meat I get the feeling they take it personally, as an affront. Some say something clever, and half the time there is just an obvious shift in their attitude toward me. I think this reaction has its roots in culture. Food is such a huge part of the collective that when someone excludes that voluntarily they are taken as challenging the whole system. Some people think that by not eating meat I am effectively saying that their way of living is stupid... I guess we all need validation on some level, but the amount changes from person to person. I equate it to that feeling when you meet a fan of a sports team rival team.

So how did it all begin? The first thing, when I was 18, was that I figured out that if I didn't need to kill something, another creature, to survive, why would I ever? Then I studied the environmental impacts of the meat industry, especially in that era and found the practices of the meat and dairy industry to be pretty upsetting. The meat industry is typically worse on the localized environment, and the dairy industry is typically worse on the animal husbandry side. Dude, animal husbandry...come on, they could have thought of a much better name for that. So, I eat dairy, but not meat. Ideally I'd like to exclude both from my culinary repertoire, but I'm not there yet. Next month people, come on, I've got 3 days of meat eating left and tonight it's PRIME RIB!!! MMMMmm. Damn, I am a bad vegetarian.

Oh yeah, and for the record, pepperoni and sausage pizza just does bad things to you. It's just not right.

More to follow, next post will be of the Vegas exploits.