In Which I Join the Vegans

JUNE 5

One of my best friends has recently become a vegan. Which is great. Reason being, if you go to a restaurant with a vegan, ordering chicken fingers or grilled cheese is nothing compared with asking to hear every ingredient and ultimately getting a piece of lettuce with a tofu cube on the side. In other words, vegans make uber-picky eaters look remarkably normal. That’s why I also love eating out with people with widespread allergies, God love ‘em. The difference is that I feel bad for refusing to try perfectly good foods that people with allergies would love to eat. With vegans, I feel absolutely nothing except alimentarily superior.

Anyway, this superiority goes away the second you try to eat with a vegan in a vegan restaurant. The picky eater no longer comes across as a picky eater, but he is suddenly a picky vegan.

But, when my friend told me there was a vegan restaurant she’d been excited about trying, I said okay. I hadn’t tried a single new food since the blackberries and I thought maybe a restaurant filled with foods I didn’t eat might shake me up a bit.

I looked at the menu online and saw they had whole wheat quesadillas. Perfect! With tapioca cheese. I google imaged tapioca cheese and it looked mildly edible.

I arrived at the restaurant excited to try new foods and I opened the menu, only to find the tapioca cheese quesadilla was no longer there. It turns out vegans are not only limited in what they eat but in what they name their restaurants and there are two totally different vegan restaurants with the same name.

So, back to square one. Or zero. 

I have to tell you something: I think veganism might be a cult. 

The first way I figured this out is that they worship Seitan.

The second way is that my friend and the waitress instantly began a conversation about making almond-crusted tofu something, a dish I had never conceived of in my wildest imaginings but one in which they were both well-versed. They also exchanged a large book of vegan recipes which is the Seitanic text or vegan Bible of sorts, perhaps.

Perusing the menu, I thought very seriously about running out to the nearest McDonald’s and rejoining my friend once I had purchased some Chicken McNuggets.

When the waitress asked me what I wanted to eat, I panicked and reverted to my default setting of, “Could I please just get plain spaghetti?” (I figured it would be fruitless to ask for butter.)

“Sure,” the waitress said. “But it’s gonna be whole wheat.”

Ah, vegans.

The whole wheat spaghetti was fine. I can’t really take credit for trying a new food. It was remarkably bland. I also had like 5 glasses of water. Just so you know.

The waitress gave us the dessert menus and I was thrilled out of my mind to see they had vanilla ice cream. Then, I realized, what exactly would vegan ice cream be made out of? Paper mache? Baby powder? So I got no dessert. The waitress was very disappointed in me.

I did get something good out of that meal though.

“I’m trying to try new foods,” I told my friend.

“You should come to my house and I’ll cook vegan meals for you,” she said.

“No,” I replied warmly. 

“I’m thinking,” I went on, “that I’d be more motivated to try new foods if I wrote a blog.”

“That’s a fantastic idea,” she said. “You definitely should!”

So I did.

Beware: they're coming for you. But the good news is they definitely don't want to eat you!