The taste of meat products bothers me ever since “the incident“. I had to get a turkey sandwich the other day out in the wilderness of Valleyjo and experienced the disgust I had towards meat for the first time after having eaten only vegetarian food for the past few days. Last night I got a salad from Wendy’s with small chunks of chicken — the smell of chicken made me sick. I had to give the chicken pieces away to Wawa (who gladly accepted my generosity after Grace chopped them into finer pieces).
Then I realized how difficult it is to be a vegetarian in the United States. Every single fast food chain serves almost exclusively only meat products for main meals. Salads, in most cases, are simply side dishes. Not enough to fill someone like me (or Jason, for that matter). Wendy’s has some pretty mean salads, but all of them come with some kind of meat. And here’s what I don’t get… how come vegetables cost more than meat? I mean, seriously… A bowl of mixed greens cost about the same, or in most cases, more than meat! In fancy restaurants, I used to notice, some salads cost more than some of the entries! WTF? Doesn’t it cost more to raise all those warm-blooded living mammals? All the electricity it takes to keep them warm, the land to occupy them, the medicines to keep them from dying (not necessarily to make them feel better), the processes it takes to slaughter them, the care it takes to keep their corpses bacteria-free, the kind of storage it takes to keep them from rotting in transit… etc. I mean, com’on, the economy of mass market demand aside, it CAN’T cost that much more to grow the vegetables, maintain them, harvest them and keep them fresh. Can it? Or maybe it’s just the economy of supply and demand.
I digress.
Seeing that the fridge is stocked with mostly meat products at home, I had to do some veggie shopping spree. Thank god it was relatively easy to find vegetarian stuff in Chinese markets. And since there are lots of vegetarians from Taiwan (and that Taiwan makes delicious vegetarian products), it was relatively easy to get a cart load of veggie food. But I had to call Jason up to see what goes into a vegetarian Sushi since all I came up with were cucumber and avacado.
I made five rolls of Sushi today with the ingredians Jason suggested. I think I will experiment with some Chinese vegetarian stuffing I got tonight for the next batch.
Being a vegetarian in a mass meat-consuming market is tough. But knowing the alternatives (animal corpses), I am sticking to vegetables (maybe occassionally some seafood), thank you very much.