Thursday, January 22, 2009

A few weeks ago I tasted, however briefly, the vegetarian lifestyle when I bit into a Morningstar breakfast patty, ruminating as I chewed one of the food industry’s most cunning inventions. What was cobbled together from soy, more phosphates than modern science ever thought possible, and a laboratory’s worth of chemicals should’ve by rights resembled the very cardboard that wrapped it. But it didn’t. The first bite truly registered as breakfast sausage, though each subsequent piece was subject to the law of diminishing returns, not to mention edibility.

Still, I consider my mind a little expanded, since vegetarianism previously meant eating cows that once ate grass. I was also struck by a seeming inequality in the dining landscape. Why do companies manufacture products that simulate meat and blatantly disregard the inverse market? Easy answer is because people don’t demand it, but this doesn’t address the injustice within. After all, why shouldn’t there be apples made entirely out of pepperoni, or broccoli florets lovingly crafted with beef and cheese? It’d be gross, that’s why.

The health regimen continues to hum along. You probably won’t ever see me invest in a fitness membership in this lifetime, because I’ve discovered the same sedentary lifestyle that may be powering the blog this very minute keeps junk food out of my house. I might crave chips or cookies one afternoon, for example, but the same laziness that glues me to this chair also prevents me from gunning it to the supermarket. The pantry is accordingly empty these days. There’s a tube of oatmeal. Some frozen vegetables. A thing of sugar.

And a box of dirty rice, which I attempted to cook yesterday. For the uninitiated, dirty rice isn’t morally reprehensible, nor is it tainted with melamine or depleted plutonium, as the name might suggest. It’s simply seasoned rice that is Cajun in origin. That didn’t stop me from opening the package and wondering, for at least 45 seconds, whether the small, round black things were beans or rat droppings. The dish turned out fine, but it was a firm reminder that I could benefit from cooking more, and wouldn’t you know it, the local resort is featuring an “All Things Louisiana” cooking class in a few weeks. It almost seems like fate. I’m just not sure if it’s fate to the tune of $85 plus tax and gratuity.