Tastefully Vegetarian

"Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second."
--Edward Abbey

Taste is everything in modern life.  It is also missing, from practically all our food and beverages.  This is our rule and measure, and our curse.  Prepackaged foods are heated in microwaves with perhaps a dash of processed salt and pre-ground black pepper for seasoning, and this passes for food preparation.  And it is usually bland and tasteless.

We at Myrtle’s place have gone as close to vegan in our daily fare as we can reasonably do, and while there is a long history of veganism from which to draw inspiration, and a large swath of literature describing much of what anyone could desire in terms of tastiness, it has nevertheless not been easy.  In the modern context, most people are frankly incapable of being vegan for one simple reason – prepackaged vegan foods prepared using the aforementioned convenient methodology taste even worse than prepackaged fatty meats.

Trying to be vegan under such circumstances would inevitably be counterproductive, given the high incidence of bisphenol-A (BPA) in the packaging, and the chemical alteration of food cooked in microwave ovens, and the lack of flavor, leading to a lack of satisfaction.  No satisfaction?  Higher sugar and fat intake.  Higher sugar and fat intake, even in vegan households, means weight gain and health problems.

The solution – and thankfully there is one – is to think about the coffee/gasoline conundrum described by Edward Abbey.  Obviously, coffee is good for a body, and gasoline is bad.  Why is the gasoline getting into the coffee?  Solve that simple problem, and you go a long way towards solving the more general problem of why vegetables and fruits and whole grains don’t taste as good as cheeseburgers and milkshakes.

The reason coffee tastes like gasoline is because it is all too often in close proximity to petrochemical inputs.  Either it is brewed in a gas station, or drive-through restaurant, or it is pre-ground, packaged in plastic, and brewed in a plastic container, or (worse still) turned into dehydrated flakes to be reconstituted in a microwave oven, where it comes out as something almost like coffee, but just slightly off, as you could tell either by examining it under an electron microscope, or (if you absolutely must) by tasting it. 

And in all these scenarios, we haven’t even touched on the fact that the coffee is likely made with municipal tap water which is rife with chemical additives – yes, the chlorine and fluoride kill off most of the bacteria, but… what about all the unnecessary chlordates, and all those bizarre salts your body is simply not designed to ingest?  Not to mention all the beneficial bacteria in your body which the chlorine and fluoride will kill off once you actually drink the noxious stuff!  It is, quite frankly, amazing that anyone anywhere has ever had a good cup of coffee.  (We’ll share the secrets of how to make a good cup of joe some other time…)

Likewise, it can only be expected that it would be difficult to get children to eat their vegetables. 

Take a good look inside the can from which all too often our peas, beans or tomato paste have come.  At first glance, one thinks, “Big deal, a tin can.”  Only, it’s not tin or aluminum; it’s also not stainless steel, or any of a dozen other metals you can readily name.  No, it’s a proprietary blend of metals formulated by one of a handful of chemical companies who have learned how to maximize the tensile strength of the material while minimizing its weight and cost; the interior surface of the can has been lined with – wait for it – a plastic film containing our old enemy bisphenol-A, which leaches out in the presence of many of the amino acids found in foods which (prior to being exposed to this BPA can lining) were putatively healthy.

Someone who eats food stored in this manner on a regular basis will develop a dullness to their taste buds which matches almost exactly the taste insensitivity of a heavy cigarette smoker.  However, take a culinary purist who lives on fresh fruits and vegetables and give them a sample of canned peas, and they will likely spit them out, complaining of the metallic patina.  There is a similar taste sensitivity difference in the meat-eating world, too; organic, grass fed beef is vastly superior in taste to the factory-farmed variety, fed a slurry of god-only-knows-what.  We prefer to have no meat at all, but clearly the difference between home-grown and factory grown supports our overall theme.

What makes us even bring all this up?  The answer is revealing as a study in the dietary habits of the modern American.  When we decided to cut butter and other sources of animal fat from our already veggie-centric diet, we talked to as many vegan friends as we could about strategies for making complete and healthy meals. 

One such friend is a failed vegan – that is, she tried going vegan, and then a few months later went the entirely opposite direction and is now on the heavy-meat, low-carb Atkins diet.  When we informed her of  our new direction, she immediately gave us her old vegan notebook, including much material we already possessed, and some new items, including a recipe for vegan pumpkin muffins.

Pumpkin muffins?  Sounds good, right?  Especially entering this time of year, when pumpkin is everywhere.  The only problem is that on this list of ingredients, we weren’t advised how much pumpkin to use in terms of cups or ½ cups.  No, the recipe called for a can of pumpkin pie filling.

We are not surprised our friend is now a meat eater again.  The taste was not there for her in her vegan days, so she never really stood a chance of staying on such a diet.  We evolved with a craving for fat, the hardest nutrient to acquire on the African Savannah a million years ago, and that craving has never gone away.  In the absence of satisfaction, we revert to our cravings.  And there is nothing satisfying about canned fruits and vegetables.  No, to satisfy one’s hunger, one has to eat food that tastes good.

If you’ve ever had fresh baked pumpkin straight out of the garden, you know what we are talking about.  Fresh pumpkin is orders of magnitude better than canned pumpkin.  You can eat a roasted or broiled pumpkin off the shell with a fork or spoon, and hardly need it to be baked into anything else.  It is a meal by itself, without any other accoutrement.

The same is true of every other veggie you can name – kids everywhere tremble at the thought of eating bland, stringy, soggy spinach from a can.  Fresh spinach, cut from a plot right outside your kitchen window?  It tastes divine. 

Mushy, coppery, fibrous-but-not-in-a-good-way asparagus from a can?  Blech.  Fresh asparagus, sautéed in olive oil with fresh onions, garlic, lemon and peppers, or maybe with freshly picked oregano or basil or rosemary?  Yummm!

And if you’ve never had a peach straight off the tree, particularly in the Texas Hill Country, you don’t know what you’re missing.  Fresh peaches are as different from peaches canned in syrup as Tony Bennett’s I Left My Heart in San Francisco is from Justin Bieber’s Baby, Baby, Baby.

We have not been able to utterly eradicate the presence of plastic packaging in our pantry, but we have gone a long way.  Grains and legumes come home from bulk bins in plastic bags, and are then immediately transferred to glass jars.  We do occasionally indulge in things like frozen veggie-crumbles, which also come in plastic packaging.  And frequently pasta will come from a bag rather than a box.

However, as much as possible, we prefer fruits and vegetables which either come straight from the garden, or come straight from a local vendor – either a farmer’s market, or a market with a history of being friendly to the locavore community.

This also applies to another aspect of improving the tastiness of meals – the copious use of herbs.  Prepackaged herbs are not a source of evil in our time, but they are an inefficient tool in the fight against boredom on our plates.  The difference between fresh basil and dried basil flakes is like the difference between a performance of La Boheme at the Met, and a performance of My Ding-a-Ling on a kazoo on a kindergarten playground.

And the smell of bread baked with fresh rosemary is truly one of life’s great pleasures.  But you can’t have fresh rosemary without having rosemary plants nearby.  And if you’ve planted rosemary, you may as well go ahead and plant a full herb garden, right?  And once you’ve got a full herb garden, you may as well use it to improve the flavor of practically everything you make, because if you’re not going to take the time to make your food as delicious as possible, then what on Earth are you eating it for?

Which brings us back to pumpkins.  Yes, they are traditional for this time of year.  For the most part, though, what you’ll see in stores will be the carving varieties, which make great jack-o-lanterns, and even as uncarved doorstops they are attractive enough all Autumn long.  They do not, however, make for the best pies, or pumpkin bread, or pumpkin soup.  For that, you want the smaller varieties, and for that, you will more than likely want to think about devoting some more garden space next Spring and Summer.  Because taste matters.

 Happy farming!