1 Week of Vegetarian
I’ve been eating vegetarian. Eating as* a vegetarian.
It hasn’t been as hard as I expected, to my own surprise. But it’s made me realize I’m more lactose intolerant than I thought I was.
I’ve lost one and a half pounds. Face is a bit skinnier. Appetite’s gone down, and energy levels too. So basically my entire life has changed. I poo a lot (like, a lot).
My mom keeps saying, “I don’t think you’re gonna make it.” Shush mum, you don’t know anything ok. I wave my chicken wing angrily. Haha, just joking.
But not joking. On Day 4 I ate a chicken wing by accident. I was at a friend’s birthday party and there was food on the table, and I ate one(s). More things happen, I go to sleep, and when I wake up the next morning I realize — oh.
It was bizarre that it didn’t hit me during the entire night. There was no casual immediate reflex, like “Oh oops I’m a vegetarian right now. I shouldn’t have done that.”
It was “Oh nice chicken very nice,” and 16 hours later, “ ”
I’m not sure what I was less aware of: that I’d eaten the chicken wing, or I was a vegetarian. And it made me question my motivations — maybe they weren’t strong or deep enough. Maybe vegetarianism had yet become part of my identity. Maybe I just didn’t care.
Truth is, I still don’t really know. Most of the vegetarians I know are because some of 4 reasons: environment/sustainability, animal ethics, health, and/or religion. And if I think about it, I don’t know if I have any of these reasons.
Don’t get me wrong, they’re important to me — I care about the environment and I’m an animal — but more as byproducts of intentions rather than the main goal itself.
There is something else I’m interested in. Perhaps it has to do with all of those things, or none of them.
My relationship with food. What does that mean. No idea.
I bought a sous vide a few months ago, and ever since people have been calling me Gordon. I don’t know why, but it seems to be an aftereffect of being able to cook chicken. My current street name is Gordon Sous-Vide David Zhang. Or just Gordon, if you’re my close friend.
A Sous Vide is a machine that cooks stuff (mainly meats) at perfect temperatures, and ups the meat consumption of whomever it touches three-billion-fold. My cholesterol levels were not having fun, but I was. My roommate would always pass by the kitchen during dinner time, look me in the eye, and with his best Borat impression say, “I can guess what you’re eating tonight!!”
“HaHA! Your booty!” Is what I sometimes replied with, but the usual answer was either steak or chicken breast or chuck roasts or pork tenderloin or eggs. (Yea sous vide eggs are a thing but not good — boiling is better)
Anyways, the point is that I was eating meat excessively, and overconsumption dilutes meaning. I was eating without any regard for what the food actually was. Meat, to me, had become the same thing as rice, or lettuce, or bread, or egg. It became under the umbrella of the word “food”, in the most unitalicized-flat-grey-dull-brick umbrella possible.
Two months ago, I had a dinner date with a friend where we made Tonkatsu (Deep fried pork chops) for the first time. I went to a Loblaws and got some meat, and then to an actual butcher shop to get some more meat, for comparison. But at the butcher, I looked at the prices and slightly pooped my pants and looked back at the dude.
“Man, these meats are way more expensive than supermarket meats.” I expected a premium, but not like a 300% premium.
“Ya bro, we git that gud funk here u kno?” said The Dude, boastfully.
Ok what he actually said was, “Yeah, but the meats here are a lot different than your average No Frills pork chop. We know exactly which farm the pig’s from, what it ate, how it was taken care of, and who its mother’s uncle’s sister’s daughter was. All of which, are natural — more humane, sustainable, and healthy.”
That’s great Dude, but I’m broke AF and cannot afford $34/lb striploin (vs $13/lb @ supermarkets).
“I get it — it’s expensive for a student, but even if you just cut NoFrills meats for a few days, and use that money for better meats on the weekends, I think that’s a good option to reduce consumption, eat better, and appreciate the animal better.”
I nodded and bought two small pork chops. The thought lingered with me after I left the shop.
One thing about treating and feeding animals well is the ethics — which is important and I was aware of. But another thing I wasn’t completely aware of, was how different the meat actually is.
When we cooked them, the meat from the butcher was insanely different from Loblaw’s.
Texture, taste, smell, colour — It was kind of mind blowing. I generally know the difference between cuts of the animal, and I’ve tried different cooks and can appreciate these differences to some level. I’ve had dry-aged meats, Kobe beef, Matsusaka beef, Kurobuta pork, and other stuff with 4+ syllables, and while way different compared to NoFrills’, they were specific breeds optimized to be different by design.
The pork that I got from the butcher was just your normal pig, except, taken care of properly, and importantly, naturally. Compared to the meat I’d get from a pig raised in a mass production pork farm, there was a tremendous difference in what I was eating. And unlike with Kobe beef, which I expected to be super different, this new difference was hard to understand.
If the animal itself was more or less the same, why was the food version this different? One was what I’d been eating on the day-to-day — manufactured meats. And the other, was just a normal, well-fed pig — natural meats. Maybe “manufactured” meats and “natural” meats weren’t just different foods, but completely different animals fundamentally.
Then maybe food was more than just food; it was deeply tied to the source — the background of the animal, the personality of the animal, and even the culture of the animal, whatever that means. I had a newfound appreciation for the meat — the animal — that I didn’t yet really understand.
Of course I know that meat is an animal, just like lettuce is a plant, but what does it mean to understand that — to be genuinely aware?
Not (intentionally) an epistemological self-circle-jerk, but between eating food and it is an animal, and, eating food that is an animal, the former is associating food with an abstraction first, and then the source; the latter is understanding each food as the source directly — its own entity, the animal itself.
But Gordon Sous-Vide David Zhang, I thought you said you didn’t care about animal ethics!? I do! But this actually has nothing to do with animal ethics. It is about the relationship with the concept of food. Rice, lettuce, instant noodles are no different — when we eat, everything just becomes the word “food”. At some level in my mind, I’d detached from what the actual meaning or sources of those foods were.
And maybe that’s why becoming vegetarian has been easier for me than most; I had a robotic relationship with food in the first place. Perhaps related to optimizing my lifestyle, or trying to look jacked af, previously I saw food as only an abstraction of nutrients or culinary bricks. If I could get all my nutrients from sous-vide soil, then I’d be able to eat it every day for the rest of my life, without huge complaints. Probably.
That’s nutritious, but not healthy. And now this kind-of-obvious-yet-kind-of-nuanced revelation really gripped me — what is the difference between unitalicized “food”, and “food”? What was it that I’d been overlooking? My curiosity was dying to kill itself. There had been a huge gap of ignorance in how I understood food. I was overdue to break that understanding apart.
So I came home that day and looked my roommate in the eye, and with my best Borat impression, said “I’m going vegetarian for a week.”
And when I think about it, the reason I’m so impacted by this is because it isn’t even just about my relationship with food. It is about my relationship with everything.
When I lived in Japan for a year, I noticed people would always put their hands together and say “Itadakimasu”, or “I receive”, before a meal. When I asked my friend if it prevented Satans from spawning out of fried tofu, he told me when we eat, we are receiving from: one, the cook(s) who make the food and two, the food itself. There is a cultural belief that there is “god” in everything; a brick, a grain of rice, my sous vide — everything is/has god. And thus a part of consuming and receiving food, and everything else, is also appreciating those gods — the sources.
The me in the past had lost meaning of what that meant, and vegetarianism to me is about trying to rebuild that meaning. The me in the future, will hopefully have a deeper association with those sources. Sources in the physical sense (actual animals, farms, communities, etc.), in the abstract sense (language, concepts, god, etc.), and in senses I don’t know yet. The me in the future might also have 8 arms and have an added honorific prefix ‘Bodhisattva’ before his name.
I’ve created these abstractions in my head (eg. the word ‘food’ and having all food things just fall into that abstraction) that let me optimize how I think. Perhaps when I was 3 years old, I needed to survive and didn’t need to understand “relationships with food”, didn’t have to waste brainpower thinking about this mumbojumbo, and this optimization was totally useful.
But now, I’ve become a collection of abstractions, of not just food, but everything— abstractions that reflect on how I behave, what I consume, how I think, and who I am. And do I really understand them? I think that when it comes to things like relationships, people, goals, attitudes, and other parts of life, I’m pretty good at understanding and separating the sources. Yet, just like my original unawareness with meat — how sure am I really?
Meat itself is also just an optimization — we consume it often because it has good nutrients, and easily provides a fullness/savoury part in a balanced meal. But how much of those nutrients do we actually need? How much savouriness is the right amount? We have these different buckets of needs that meat fills, but automatic unaware consumption obscures the actual shapes and sizes of the buckets. Maybe we are over/underfilling all the time; we just don’t know, because we assume the optimization (meat) takes care of it, without stopping filling to take a look.
And maybe it’s no different from how I spend relaxation time, how much money I want, how much social time is right, work, love, goals — whether too much or less, it’s not about measuring these things, but cultivating a genuine awareness of their sources. Maybe the measurement comes as a byproduct.
Perhaps there are parts of this food ignorance that lingers in other abstractions/optimizations I’ve made, and am just not yet aware of, or have not yet gone to the analogous butcher shop. Perhaps breaking apart this food ignorance and reconstructing anew will unlock other perspectives and parts that I wasn’t thinking about before — other optimizations around my life I had made previously, and were now necessary to be challenged.
Becoming vegetarian is about understanding my relationship with food, and ultimately, I realize as I write this, my relationship with myself. The people around me, the music I love, my sous-vide, and the big big world and universe I’m a part of.
So yeah, I’m on my 7th day of vegetarian. You can -1 since I ate that chicken wing, but since it was an accident, I’m not going to count it, and nobody’s going to stop me.
For the first few days, I lived off bread and eggs and greek yogurt. Now I’ve started to discover more about muesli and lentils and spices. I want to challenge myself to cook non-meat mains, and different vegetarian cuisines.
I don’t think “toughing it out” and living off sous-vide soil is the point of being vegetarian. Acclimatization is not just a passive process. To fully understand what I want to understand, the goal is to find a lifestyle that’s enjoyable and sustainable. A lifestyle where I’m pretty much the same as before — enjoying food, high energy, getting all my nutrients, and cooking tasty gastronomically balanced meals — except in a space without meat.
I’ve been living in this big bucket, meat existing. Now, after taking out meat, the bucket itself has completely changed. It’s been a little weird, and I’ve accidentally thrown a chicken wing in it, but the point is, I will only have succeeded once I’ve completely filled this new bucket.
I’ve already finished the 1 week challenge, but I’ve decided to stay vegetarian as long as it takes until I understand this. At that point, maybe I’ll reintroduce meat and go back to the big bucket. I might realize it wasn’t actually the shape I thought it was. Maybe it was something different all along. Maybe I’d been unnecessarily filling this fake bucket. And once I realize that, maybe all my other buckets will change a bit too.
It’ll take some time, but I’m slowly and surely moving towards that area. And it’s good to not take things too seriously — I still eat egg sandwiches almost every day, and most days tofu is just tofu and not god. But some days it is god, and then I have to pray and levitate for 2 hours.
Some days I spend the time to make a good meal, and I generally try a bit more to appreciate whatever foods I eat, or any other things that could be appreciated more. It’s just nice to have an awareness in the back of my head. Yesterday I made Chana Dal, and let me tell you, it was f**king delicious.
