I tried going vegetarian for the work week, and here’s how it turned out
Evidently this blog has stooped to using clickbait-y titles to attract views, but if a highly reputable organisation like BuzzFeed News can draw me in with the likes of “Bernie Sanders Walked Into A Woman’s TikTok“, who am I to eschew such tactics?
Fair warning: This is going to be a rather boring post, more descriptive than introspective. But I undertook this little experiment because I wanted to understand why it has been so difficult for me to go vegetarian. I’ve been trying to cut back on meat, especially beef, for quite some time now, with mixed success. People have different reasons for doing this — to be clear, I’m not casting any aspersions on those who don’t — and for me I suppose it’s the twin desires to reduce my carbon footprint, and allay the discomfort that has sporadically returned to haunt me ever since I read Michael Pollan’s description of the grim conditions in an industrial feedlot in America. Unfortunately, the harsh realities of the rearing and slaughtering of livestock are very far removed from my day-to-day life, and this physical distance makes it all too easy to put emotional distance between myself and the succulent chunk of grilled meat beckoning from my dinner plate. So this last week, I thought I’d make a more conscious effort to track what I was doing, in the hopes of figuring out how to nudge myself in the direction I aspire to go.
Monday
Breakfast: Luckily for me, the first meal of the day in my household is already almost always a meat-free affair; I typically eat either toast with cheese / peanut butter / some kind of spread, or oats with fruit and nuts, washed down with a generous serving of coffee. I recall once trying this plant-based luncheon meat called OmniMeat Luncheon, which tastes passably like its OG meaty counterpart, except slightly mushier. Sadly, at $8.60 for a 240 g pack, it’s about twice the price of a regular can of Spam. So after I’d eaten my fill of processed soy protein and novelty, I went back to basics (or should I say… breadsics?). On this particular morning, it was toast with cheese and honey.
Lunch: I was working from home, so my mum offered to buy lunch back from Guzman y Gomez, which serves Mexican-inspired fast food — think burrito bowls, quesadillas and nachos seasoned nondescriptly enough to cater to the cosmopolitan, moderately health-conscious, officer worker crowd. I scrutinised their menu online and asked her to get me a “tofu-ranchero” bowl, which was essentially rice topped with black beans, cheese, salsa, and a few cubes of (fried? braised?) tofu. It didn’t taste bad, per se — but I did catch myself eyeing my mum’s seared barramundi with some envy.
Dinner: My little routine before Monday evening’s Spanish class is to drop by Don Don Donki to grab something to go. My friends joke that I always eat the same thing, two long rolls of salmon sashimi wrapped with rice and nori. I joke that it saves me the effort of deciding what to eat (except… it’s not really a joke). Today, though, I did not have the luxury of habit to fall back upon — instead I inspected row after row of meat-filled plastic bentos, growing increasingly worried that I’d be going hungry after all. Beef sukiyaki don? Nope. Omurice with chicken katsu? Yikes. A nice green salad? Unfortunately even that came topped with smoked salmon. I finally spotted a lone box containing two yellow oblongs of tamagoyaki topped with mentaiko mayonnaise.
I hate mayonnaise.
I took the box.
Tuesday
Breakfast: Oats.
Lunch: I’d had my heart set on trying Stuff’d’s Impossible Beef bowl, despite its eye-watering price tag of about $12, but it turned out that it wasn’t even in stock. Disappointed, I meandered over to Subway, where my displeasure deepened as I realised that my usual order of a roasted chicken breast sub was out of bounds. I eyed the Veggie Patty dubiously (when Subway describes it as “a wholesome slice of goodness made from a fantastic recipe“, one can’t help but feel that they’re trying a little too hard to convince you). Incidentally, said Veggie Patty sub was more expensive than almost all of the non-vegetarian sandwiches but the ones that used beef.
I eventually settled for egg mayo, which until that day I had never deigned to try.
Did I mention that I hate mayonnaise?
Dinner: I ate with a friend, who had invited me to try a hip-hop class (I know, I know — but that’s an embarrassing story for another time). Here, less than 48 hours after my quest to avoid meat had begun, I tasted failure in the form of crunchy, salty bits of ikan bilis.
I don’t know why, but I’ve always felt bad constraining other people’s meal options with my own dietary restrictions. I want to be the laidback, “anything goes” friend, not someone who makes their peers perambulate a crowded Capitaland mall for half an hour to find something that suits their fancy. So when my dance buddy said he wanted to eat ban mian, I nodded agreeably and went along with it. In the end, I fastidiously avoided the minced pork (which my friend later consumed), but closed one eye when it came to the ikan bilis — after all, they lent such an irresistible textural contrast to the gentle springiness of the noodles.
Despite this trespass, I left the table feeling distinctly unsatisfied, so I bought a large, sugar-laden coconut shake to make up for the nutritional deficit.
Wednesday
Breakfast: Sourdough toast with peanut butter and honey, with an orange on the side.
Lunch: I met a colleague for lunch, but it was mercifully at a build-your-own-bowl type of place where I wasted no time piling on a braised egg, tofu skin and mushrooms. At this point, I was growing ever more aware that these three foods, alongside beans / pulses, cheese and nuts, were going to be the main sources of protein for an aspiring vegetarian. I admit that I was beginning to miss the satisfying bite of meat, with its unctuous ooze of animal fat and umami flavour, so tenderly coaxed out by the Maillard reaction on a sizzling pan.
Dinner: At home. Two eggs, mushroom dumplings, and an assortment of vegetables from a cai fan stall. I congratulated myself on another successful day.
Thursday
Breakfast: I could feel my willpower flagging even as I bit into my toast.
Lunch: A farewell meal with a departing colleague. Every single main on the restaurant menu had meat, except for the creamy mushroom pasta. Did I mention that I hate creamy pasta? Unlike what bottles of Prego sauce might have led their loyal following to believe (and I was the staunchest fan during my time-starved student days), traditional Italian carbonara doesn’t even use cream; that incredibly rich mouthfeel is produced by pecorino cheese, egg yolks and guanciale.
Anyway, as you might have guessed, I ordered the pasta.
My friend then asked if we minded ordering chicken wings to share. No, no, of course not, I assured, even as something inside me curdled at the thought that my sacrifice to the cream gods was going to be for naught.
Now if, at this point, you’re wondering why I didn’t just come out and say that I was trying to go vegetarian — I confess that I’m as perplexed as you are. In that moment, I suppose I just felt… embarrassed. As if I was afraid that they would judge me for virtue signalling, pretending to care about the environment with token actions while the rest of my lifestyle remains rife with overconsumption. Or perhaps they would simply think I was being silly — I’m sure we all know that one person who refers to “treehuggers” with ill-concealed disdain.
Dinner: Roasted vegetables, and yet more mushrooms, at home. Enough with the mushrooms already! my taste receptors cried out. Fungi had ceased to be fun.
Friday
Breakfast: As part of my ambitious plan to squeeze in a short run and then make it to the office for a 9 am meeting, I decided to buy breakfast from the McDonald’s adjacent to my workplace. I couldn’t get my usual Sausage Egg McMuffin, so instead I opted for a plain ol’ Egg McMuffin, with an extra egg, sans ham (why is it not called a Ham Egg McMuffin, for transparency?). Special Order, declared the sticker pasted on the waxy wrapper.
Lunch: Another meal with friends, another failure. I was beginning to notice a distinct trend. The Indonesian place we’d chosen didn’t have any vegetarian mains, so I picked the grilled pomfret. If it is any consolation, I had developed a renewed appreciation for fish after all that mushroom and egg, and found myself savouring every mouthful.
Dinner: Department social at a fancypants restaurant that was also light on meat-free options. At this point any remaining determination I had disintegrated like noodles that have been left soaking in soup for too long. To be fair, the uni and ikura somen I ordered had such a small portion of both ingredients as to render it *almost* vegetarian (is salmon roe vegetarian? Funny that I had to think twice about this, when I consume chicken eggs with mindless abandon). And with this expensive, seafood-sprinkled, delightfully cream-free bowl of food, five harrowing days of playing hide-and-seek with animal protein were over.
Post-Mortem
Turns out that a dearth of balanced vegetarian options while eating out, coupled with my lack of social confidence to own my lifestyle choices (however fleeting they might be), have been contributors to my hit-and-miss relationship with a plant-based diet all along. Who would have guessed? :p It doesn’t take an experiment for me to know that it’s a lot easier and cheaper to control what I eat when I’m at home; I also get the opportunity to try different recipes to deliver the variety that my tastebuds desperately crave. Nevertheless, I’m glad that I’ve validated this hypothesis at last.
The more discomfiting thing for me, though, was realising that despite my best attempts at putting new spins on the rotation of tofu, eggs, and mushrooms, I just couldn’t imagine going for more than a week or two without seafood (prawns! squid! sushi!). Even newfangled plant-based meats like Beyond and Impossible remain discouragingly expensive for the average consumer, and don’t perfectly replicate the experience of chowing down on a hamburger patty, let alone something more complex like a fillet of fish. No longer could I hide behind the excuse that my failures were simply due to price point, peer pressure or convenience; had I kept my experiment up under conditions of perfect isolation and a lifetime’s supply of OmniMeat Luncheon, I still probably would have caved within a month.
There’s truth in both the cliché that we shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good, and in the law of diminishing returns — I find it much easier to be a “flexitarian” than a strict vegetarian. And in the presence of choice, willpower is a fiddly thing, best not to be relied upon for long-term decision-making. Perhaps one day plant-based or lab-grown substitutes will be truly indistinguishable from meat as we currently know it, and replace the latter on restaurant menus. Or our destruction of the biosphere will make meat unaffordable for all but the highest echelons of society. As I contemplate this possibility, I am reminded that this is to a large extent already true. How very privileged I am to be able to take meat — or indeed all kinds of food — for granted. How little I show my appreciation for each meal.
It might well be my final takeaway: That, suddenly, egg mayonnaise doesn’t seem so bad after all.
