There comes a time (lots of times) in every chef's life when she must look inward and re-evaluate once again why she does what she does and what it means to her. I've had these moments strike me a few times now and it's happened again. Mostly prompted by the tighter fit of my favorite jeans, but also by seeing Jonathan Safran Foer read from his new book Eating Animals at Barnes and Noble the other night. I had read an excerpt from his book in the New York Times magazine a few weeks back and it affected me. I've always struggled with the paradox of being a gourmet chef and wanting to be a vegetarian. The two can go together of course, there are gourmet vegetarian chefs out there, and I might be one someday, maybe someday soon, but I'm not yet. I still have clients and students who want to eat meat and lots of it. How do I work out being a vegetarian myself for moral and health reasons and still justify cooking up slabs of meat for other people? I need these clients, they're my livelihood. But I want to make this work, I want to be able to be meat-free and still have my job.
I sometimes do this thing called "raw till dinner." It's a way to eat raw without going completely for broke. Dinners usually involves a lot of organic, cage-free, humanely raised eggs with different vegetables or sprouted grain toast with avocados and agave nectar, or some kind of pasta or quinoa. These are delicious dinners and I can make a kickin vegetarian dish. But the one thing I will not become is vegan. If only for the cheese (raw, grass-fed, organic, humane) it's worth not having that title to allow for some gastronomical decadence. I can't honestly live without cheese. Well, I haven't tried, so I don't really know if that's true, but I bet it is.
Anyway, eating this way, vegetarian and raw till dinner, always makes me feel really great. And that's the goal here. I don't fool myself anymore that I can be a size 2 if I really really work at it. I just know that when I'm eating clean foods, most of them vegetables, and filling my body with energy from the earth and sun instead of from sugar and wheat and coffee, I feel light and good and weightless. So size doesn't matter. It comes with the territory that my fave jeans will loosen up a bit, and that's great. But I do it because of how it makes me feel most of all.
I'll still be making food for my clients at least until the new year. I also know I'm gonna have to serve some meat to people to keep the bills paid until something comes along that makes it possible for me to be vegetarian in all aspects of my life. But there are certain things that are important to me, like opposing animal cruelty and keeping my insides free from harmful food, and I will do my best to abide by those personal standards.
I'm sure this will go deeper after I read Eating Animals in it's entirety, and I'll keep you posted on that but for now, I'll continue to post what's going on in my food world. I'll even give you a rundown of what I eat on an average day of raw-vegetarianism. Won't that be fun?
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