C - The Trouble with Having (non-vegan) Friends

Sorry I haven't updated you folks for a while. I've been busy...with what you ask? Hanging out with all of you! And that brings us to my most pressing dilemma to date: What are you supposed to do when you're a vegan and you have *gasp* non-vegan friends? If you're sitting there reading this, totally oblivious to the significance of this question, let me give you a little background. I have met more than just one vegan who's religious about their veganism, to the point where their didactic spiels about their diet and lifestyle have all the omnivores in the room running to their nearest steakhouse. Let's face it...some vegans are just f-ing annoying. They rant, they preach, and they judge you from their moral pedestal for being a murderer because you had their favourite pig Bobo for breakfast when you decided to order that hickory smoked bacon with your eggs. And if it wasn't Bobo, it would have been Mr. Snuffles and they still would have been pissed because every pig is the Militant Vegan's freaking favourite pig.

Well, of course, there are many of us who don't judge because we know that dietary decisions are very personal and value-driven. I would like to think that I fall under this category. However, the reality is that a full vegan lifestyle is demanding and often vegans just have an easier time with other vegans. I know of a couple where one partner ended up converting to a mostly vegan diet to suit the extreme vegan lifestyle of their sweetheart. It happens. Food is such an integral part of our culture and our relationships that it would be naive to think that a dramatic diet change would not have an impact on your social life. Which brings me back to my question:

What are you supposed to do when you're vegan with non-vegan friends?

Bring out some premium tempeh and hope a conversion happens? I think not. However, I did attempt to answer that question last weekend. This question was bound to come up for me sooner or later, because unlike many of my vegan peers, I absolutely love people. All sorts of people, similar and different from me. I make friends easily and love to go out. I was about to embark on a social experiment. Unfortunately, I quickly learned that as a dietary outsider in a meat-eating city, my options were limited.

Meal 1: Dinner with AM

AM is one of my best friends and she would be what I call a "flexitarian." She does eat meat, but 80% of the time, she's vegetarian. Bravo! But there's a kicker: she has an allergy to gluten so her diet is pretty restricted. She got diagnosed a little over a year ago and I would be lying if I said that it didn't change how we made dining choices when we got together to hang out. She used to be my ramen buddy, but alas, those days are no more. Steaming bowls of miso ramen have been replaced by gluten-free meals at her house or sushi dinners sans soya sauce.

"So what do you want to eat tonight?" I'll ask her. "Sushi would be alrite," she'll say with a sheepish laugh. It's a rhetorical question of course. We've had sushi dinners nearly every time for the last 12 months.

And of course, she's one of my closest buddies so I don't mind one bit. Recently though, we were happy to find that Joey's has a gluten-free menu. On Friday night we wanted to watch Date Night, and pressed to make it for the 7:40 show, we just hopped into the Joey's on Burrard near the Scotiabank Theatre. With her gluten-free menu in hand, AM confidently ordered her beloved comfort dish: butter chicken. I, however, did not have such an easy time. I scoured the menu frantically for vegan choices. The tables had been turned. I was now the one who couldn't find anything to eat!

"Are these Chinatown Lettuce Wraps vegan?" I asked the waitress. "We can make them vegetarian for you, no problem," she reassured me. Then her eyes narrowed. "Wait, how vegetarian are you? They have oyster sauce in them."

What part of vegan did she not understand? I guess where she comes from, the vegans have vowed to spare all animals except the oysters, with whom they have an undying grudge??

I thought about it and remembered that most commercially prepared oyster sauces don't really have oysters in them - it's usually just artifical flavoring (you didn't know that? well now you know!). So at Joey's that night, I ended up having a bunch of szchewan edamame and some questionable lettuce wraps. I probably cheated there because even if there weren't actually oysters in the oyster sauce, both dishes were drenched in oil. Oh well, at least the food was delicious...I'm thinking of recreating that edamame recipe at home actually.

And yes, the movie was really funny. At least funny enough to distract me from breaking down and ordering a giant bucket of movie popcorn layered with real churned butter and topped with that fake cheese sauce. Not that I eat that stuff normally, but being without any junk food makes you crave strange things...

Meal 2: Lunch with S-K

The next day, I met up with my pal S-K for a casual weekend lunch. "You're what??? Since when??" she exclaimed. Gawd, I might as well have told that her that I joined the sisterhood. "So what are we going to eat then?" she asked.

"Sushi," I replied, cringing at the irony. Is sushi the godsend for everyone who's dietarily "challenged"?

We were on Denman Street and too lazy to think of a more adventurous sushi place, we hopped inside Shima Sushi. I had been there a handful of times before, mostly in a rush from having only an hour to eat lunch during my shift at the library. Akira and Tanpopo were the other two options, but I was too lazy to cross the street to get to Akira's and I had a horrible date once at Tanpopo, so Shima was the only logical choice to me. It turned out that Shima Sushi was lucky find for the EtL regime because they have a brown rice option for all their rolls. Brown rice also became symbolic in ways that I wasn't aware food could be.

S-K was telling about her turbulent life as an artist as I scanned the menu. To my relief, there were several types of veggi rolls on there. Thank god, because I used to be an avid sushi and sashimi eater, and this sudden change in diet left me feeling like I was one avocado short of a California roll. Haha, I know, bad pun.

The waitress came up to our table and I began to order, "Okay, I'll have an order of gomae, an inari roll and an avoca-" She interrupted me before I finished, "With brown rice instead of sushi rice, right? Dieting, right?"

Well yes, I did want brown rice I told her. She looked at me with a sympathetic smile. God, was I that easily type-cast? Was I now one of those people? Did ordering a bunch of vegan options suddenly initiate me into the cult of the patchouli wearing health freak? (No offence to those who wear patchouli, but I can't stand that smell!)

Who was I kidding. That "I feel so sorry for you look" said it all. As S-K ordered her two dynamite rolls with, yes, real unstigmatized sushi rice, I wondered why people who've chosen health-promoting socially conscious diets get so much flack from the "normies." I guess for regular people who aren't especially thoughtful about what they put in their mouths, the negatives (i.e. all the restrictions and all the things you can't eat) are all that they see. Never mind that in forty years I won't be in the emergency room needing yet another quadruple bypass; never mind that I can still give you my trademark look of skepticism with both eyebrows because of those stroke-inducing cheeseburgers I didn't have... all they can see is the huge list of "Can't Eats." I get identified for all the "lack" in my life and not the things I gained (i.e. better energy levels, better skin, a killer waistline etc.). When did society get so "glass half empty"?

Meal 3: Dinner with J

On Saturday night, I had dinner with my friend, J. So let me tell you about J. She's one of my favourite people. What is J like, you ask? Well, she's incredibly smart, has great fashion sense, can be a bit strange at times and can be endearingly neurotic at other times. J is one of the few people in my life who can make me laugh to the point where I can't breathe and tears start streaming down my face. Oh, and I forgot to mention, she's got a big heart; her goal is to work in advocacy. She's a rebel with a cause.

So after being abroad in India for a year doing activist work, J has returned to Vancouver and recently moved into a two bedroom apartment in the West End. I visited her new apartment for the first time about three weeks ago and I've got to say, it's an interesting place. The former tenant, presumably high on a bevy of recreational drugs, decided to exhibit his artistic talent through redecorating the apartment's walls with large scale murals. On the walls of J's apartment, there are pictures of warped, contorted faces sprouting out of skyscrapers, hands looking like they're grasping at nothing and everything at the same time. Everything is painted in psychedelic colours. When the tenant left, the landlord took a look at the walls and decided that he liked some of the murals and that they could be a selling point for potential new tenants. He kept the mural of the faces and skyscrapers.

But there was still the issue of the penis monster.

Above the spot where J's couch is, there is an illustration of a penis monster. It is a penis, growing out of a body, with eyes, a gaping mouth and sharp jagged teeth. The landlord decided that this would be offensive to potential tenants, so he painted it over with a coat of white paint. Problem is, he got lazy and applied only one coat, so the penis monster is still visible, lurking above J's couch. If you sit in just the right spot on the couch, it'll look like the penis monster was about to take a bite out of your head. Kind of like the whole Jaws thing. Come to think of it, that'd make a great Facebook profile pic.

Well anyway, so why all this info about my friend J? Because J is also on a special eating regiment right now. She's on the PaleoDiet. She is doing it as a cleanse, and she started at exactly the same time H and I started our EtL diet. I would also like J to start a blog on her diet, so hence I'm talking about her ad nauseam (J, if you're reading this, I'm still waiting). J is doing the Paleo Diet as a part her training in CrossFit, this crazy exercise program that works on strength training and overall fitness through endurance and stamina. It sounds pretty intense, and J is taking it to the next level with doing the diet part of the program too. For those of you wondering, Paleo Diet is where you eat like a neolithic hunter gatherer, so 1). no grain 2). no processed food 3). no dairy 4). no soy. You're only allowed to eat meat, vegetables and fruit.

Maybe you can see the problem with this already. Her diet is nearly opposite of my diet, in the sense that she has to have meat with every meal and I can't have any animal products at all. So what did we have for dinner that night? Sushi, of course (it apparently is the solution of all the world's dilemmas. One day, it'll bring world peace). We ended up going to our favourite sushi restaurant downtown, Aki's.

"Feel my callouses!" J insisted to me after we were seated at our table. J is very proud of her callouses. Those little bumps of thickened skin at the tops of her palms were evidence that she had become proficient at dead lifting and chin-ups. Today, those callouses were broken and popped, but she made me inspect them anyway. I usually touch them but today looking at them was enough to make me cringe. Fitness was painful.

I looked at the menu and was confronted with same looming problem: what does a vegan eat when eating with non-vegans? I selected a bunch of appetizers, a roll and some robata (food grilled japanese style). Most of the items I selected seemed pretty safe, but I needed clarification.

"Does the tofu hotpot use bonito flakes in the broth?" I asked the waitress.

"Umm....no bonito. That one vegetarian," she said in her perky Japanese accent.

"Are you sure?"

"Ehhh....yes." Her eyes darted back and forth.

I've seen that expression before on wait staff. It's the "oh shit I think it's vegan/vegetarian but I'm not sure and I don't want to look dumb or screw up my chances for a good tip" look. This happens quite a bit and actually, the last time I went to Aki's with D and AM, D's supposedly vegetarian eggplant robata showed up smothered in bonito flakes. We were not impressed.

I think a lot of the time, the wait staff are not that knowledgeable about food allergies or diets and how these correspond to the ingredients of the dishes on their menus. Some of the dishes are straightforward: obviously a greek salad is not vegan if it has feta cheese on it. But it starts to get tricky when there are pre-made sauces or dressings; usually these have eggs and hidden dairy ingredients, obviously big no-no's for vegans.

Well, I ordered the tofu hotpot in good faith, and sure enough, when it arrived, the broth had the signature smoky flavour of bonito. Damn it.

"I think I screwed up with this one, but it's not my fault!" I complained to J. "I was misled!"

"Oh whatever," she replied. "It's no biggie. I won't tell H." J was not one to judge at the moment. She was busily devouring a spider roll, a delicious sushi roll made with deep-fried soft shell crab. J was obviously having a cheat night. She was apparently allowed two a week.

The tofu hotpot that did me in!

***

So there you have it. To sum it up: it's hard for vegans to eat out with non-vegans in an omnivore's city because there are a lack of vegan-friendly eateries. There is a general stigma associated with any diet that is specialized or apart from an omnivore's. And from my experience, there is a paucity in the awareness of special dietary needs on the part of wait staff and menu items. With all these factors combined, I am not surprised that some vegans are either A) hermits B) misanthropic or C) all of the above. I'm writing this post on a Friday, exactly one week after all these lovely meals. I have a horrible sore throat and I'm living off of Alicia Silverstone's "Magical Healing Soup" (I kid you not, it's actually called that in her book, "The Kind Diet"). If I feel well enough, I'll write about our outings to Nuba. I've been there twice in the past week, and let me tell you, after the dining experiences I had last weekend, Nuba turned out to be one hell of a place in comparison!

Ciao for now,

xo C

ps. Sorry for the bad photography. My SLR was missing in action during my outings!