DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I really didn’t want to be a fussy pain-in-the-ass granola-toting California vegan food weenie, but somehow word got out among the 20 college friends I’d flown to Cincinnati to spend the weekend with, and at every meal occasion somebody would say, “Let’s make sure we pick a restaurant where Matt can eat.” I downplayed this demand, for I assumed I’d be able to find a salad or even a plate of salmon just about anywhere (not that salmon is a traditional vegan pantry item; I’m not that strict. For the moment, at least, the foods I skip are all the ones that have legs.). But just as “no” didn’t used to mean “no”, “salad” still doesn’t mean “salad”, if you’re within 500 miles of our meat-addled heartland.

A small group of us were in a rush to eat. We dropped in to Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, a restaurant chain from the Friday’s/Hard Rock Cafe mold, with pop-culture paraphernalia hanging on the walls and lots of blood and oil being excreted from the kitchen. As expected, the menu had a section dedicated to salads. As I should have expected, all but one of the salads contained some kind of flesh: grilled chicken Ceasar, taco salad, and — I kid you not — something called Barbecue Salad, which I couldn’t bear to even read about, because one of the least kind things you could do to a generally healthy lettuce leaf is dunk it into sauce made from white sugar, cheap vinegar, and canned tomato paste. I ended up bypassing all these chopped-muscle entree “salads” and opted for the spinach salad from the side-order menu. When it was served, I was reminded of the pervasiveness of dairy-farm thinking in these Midwestern states… Again, I should have expected this, for reasons I’ll go into in a bit: my spinach salad had about eight leaves of green, covered with hard-boiled egg and a mound of bacon bits (gah!). I didn’t ask if the meat nodules were real, because I’m not sure which answer I would have preferred: fatty pig meat pan-fried in oil, or textured soy proteins flavored to taste like fatty pig meat pan-fried in oil, but chemically fortified to be shelf-stable for approximately 400 years. I picked them off as best I could and tried to surreptitiously wrap the remaining baco-crumbs in spinach, in hopes that they’d pass unnoticed through my virginal digestive tract.

The thing is, the salad’s description on the menu did not mention any of these animal products. To be fair, it also didn’t mention that the salad would be served on a plate, or that a fork and a cup of water would be provided; some things are just taken for granted. In the Midwest, the meat is assumed.

Why, as I indicated, should I have expected all this? Because just 30 days ago I was in Cincinnati, reuniting with a different group of old friends, eating dinner at a pub that had an afterthought of meaty salad items on the menu. I’d ordered the one that sounded least likely to require after-dinner defibrillation, but it turned out to be so covered with shredded cheese that I could literally not see anything underneath. I had to ask for a separate bowl to dump the cheese into as I shoveled it away, excavating my vegetables, although in retrospect the wiser course would have been to flip the whole thing over into the second bowl and eat from the bottom up. There was at least a quarter-pound of cheese on there.

Obviously I survived both episodes. I’m really not that fussy about my diet, and I’m sure I wasn’t a pain in the ass about the issue, even though I am a Californian vegan food weenie, and I do travel with my own granola. It was really sweet of everyone to be so concerned about me though. My wife and I were even offered vegetarian dinners at the wedding reception.

Of course, I followed it up with a piece of cold pizza we found abandoned in the hospitality suite, a socializing room in the hotel that was set up for out-of-town guests, provided by the newlyweds to save us from standing the beds up against the wall to make space for the crowds of people we’d otherwise pack into someone’s room like we used to do in college. We’d left the suite at 3pm for lunch, and returned 11 hours later, post-ceremony, post-reception, to find that the bride’s father had absconded with the half-case of beer we’d stashed there for our late-night return. The cold pizza was a small but much appreciated consolation. I don’t often eat found food (hey, look! there’s a piece of gum on the bottom of this desk!) but our forensic clock analysis indicated that the pizza was, at most, 8 hours old, far less than the half-life of delivery pizza, which I’ve never actually seen spoil — someone invariably eats it before it turns, presumably three to four days later.

There were only three slices left: two sausage and one pepperoni. I snaked the latter on the theory that at least the meat was hidden. I figured was going to feel ill the next morning anyway (it was a heck of a party!).