I married a vegetarian.
By Matt Farr

At this very moment, I'm thinking about a cheeseburger. It's on a fresh, crusty baker's roll, the kind that cracks when you bite into it. Directly beneath the dome of the top bun lies crunchy lettuce, thick tomatoes, a slice of Swiss cheese, and a slice of cheddar. And then there's the meat, a two-inch slab of the finest sirloi -- hey wait, this isn't real meat! Is this a garden burger?!

Yeah, I married a vegetarian. It wasn't a surprise; I knew she didn't eat meat when I asked her to be mine. It didn't seem like a big deal at the time.

I grew up eating southern white trash cooking. A fried bologna sandwich on white bread with a heap of potato chips made for a delicious, nutritious Saturday lunch. I'm not joking. Never had a fried bologna sandwich? Take a couple of slices of Oscar Meyer's finest, make a few inch-long incisions from the edge of each slice towards the center, and plop 'em on the griddle. The incisions help keep the bologna flat on the griddle; otherwise it just puffs up and doesn't cook right. Flip each slice once, letting the edges cook until they're nearly black. Then scoop up the charred meat, place carefully on genuine Wonder bread, and you're in hot grease hog heaven. 

Elvis would have been proud.

By the time I met my wife, I had foresworn fried bologna sandwiches and was eating "healthier." That's not to say that I was eating nothing but spinach and lima beans, but I no longer considered Cheetos a vegetable. So when I met the girl that was to become my beloved, her being a vegetarian was not an issue. I figured, hey, I'll probably eat healthier because of her.

Karie had stopped eating meat at age 16 after getting food poisoning from a pot roast. She spent an unhappy couple of days puking and laying in bed. After that, she refused to eat any form of meat, including beef, chicken, turkey, mutton, and fried bologna sandwiches (not that her Minnesotan family would have eaten such a thing). After a while, not eating meat had become a habit, and she didn't miss it. Her only transgression from the true vegetarian program was the occasional fish filet.

Karie didn't necessarily eat healthier because she was a vegetarian; she just didn't eat meat. A big bag of Doritos and a Coke made for a fine dinner. And she didn't have any moral, ethical problem with meat eaters, so I could continue eating pepperoni pizza without any hesitation or guilt.

Then we got married.

After the first year of marriage, Karie made an observation. "I do all the cooking," she said. "How come you never cook me any meals?"

"How about a nice London Broil?" I replied. 

She declined, graciously.

A few months later, she asked again. "Are you ever going to cook me a meal?"

So I made her my one non-animal-protein meal: grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. I didn't even suggest adding bacon to the grilled cheese sandwiches -- that's how much of a caring spouse I am!

A few years later, after a vacation during which we ate our way across Europe, Karie decided we needed to lose some weight via a form of torture known as the Atkins diet. This entails eating normal food sans carbohydrates. So you can go to Arby's and chow down on a big honkin' roast beef sandwich, except that it's not really a sandwich because you can't eat the bun. And no curly fries, either. Or home style fries. Or potato cakes. 

This is a really weird diet, because you can eat all the meat you want, but stuff that normally might seem healthy, like a glass of orange juice, is forbidden. The mainstays of the diet are meat, cheese, eggs, nuts, Jello, and salad. (If you don't eat enough salad, say hello to Mr. Constipation.)

So anyway, we started this Atkins diet. After a week, I lost several pounds. My jeans were feeling loose, in a good way. I quickly became an advocate of this Atkins dude.

The biggest change for me was breakfast. For the last several years, my breakfast has consisted of a bagel and large dose of OJ. On the Atkins diet, both of those are verboten. Instead, you can eat all the eggs, cheese, bacon, ham, and sausage you want. 

After a couple of weeks of the Atkins diet, I had lost 10 pounds, but I was pretty sick of cheese omelets. So Karie bought some sausage -- tofu sausage for her, real sausage for me. She'd cook up a couple of each in the morning, I'd wolf down my tiny pork links, drink some water, and run out the door for work -- late, as usual. 

Another month went by, and we're both looking trim. One morning, I got up early and decided to cook up the sausage. I opened the freezer, pulled out the tofu "fake" sausage, and searched for the pork "real" sausage.

"Karie!" I hollered up the stairs. "All I can find is the tofu sausage. Where's the real stuff?"

Her head appeared at the top of the stairs. "We ran out of that stuff after the first week. You've been eating tofu for the last six weeks."

"Tofu? Gaaa-aa-aaack!"

"Don't act like that. You'd never have known the difference if I hadn't told you."

She's right.

In fact, tofu ain't so bad if you flavor it with enough chili pepper and onions. And garden burgers are OK too, especially the black bean burgers from Morningstar. Since marrying Karie, I've found that nearly anything normal can be made from tofu, bean curd, or soy milk. Most of these products taste pretty good, although it's laughable the lengths that vegetarian food companies go to approximate "real" meat products.

Take hot dogs. Tofu hot dogs are for the struggling vegetarian. It's like your Uncle Ted, the recovering alcoholic, drinking near beer at the family picnic. If giving up meat is so hard that you're tempted by a hot dog, one of the nastiest meat products on the planet, then buddy, you just aren't cut out for meatlessness.

Anyway, vegetarian hot dogs don't even come close to the real thing. Avoid them at all costs.

Karie even has got me eating broccoli. I understand that broccoli is good for you, indeed it may be the healthiest food in existence, but it is a really heinous vegetable. I choke it down under duress. 

I much prefer the vegetables I grew up eating. Green beans, cooked for hours until shriveled, and soaked in butter and bacon grease.

Now that's good eatin'.

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©2000 Matthew Farr
No tofu was injured in the writing of this column.