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Meat-free holiday about as happy as a heart attack By Jim Mullen
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
"Here's the problem. When she comes to eat at our house, we serve meat and vegetables -- plenty of vegetables. She can eat all the vegetables she wants, and she never has to touch the meat. Which is fine -- there's more meat for the rest of us. But when we go to her house, she serves only vegetables."
My friend Jackson has just returned from his vegetarian sister-in-law's house, where she hosted the holiday meal as she does in alternating years. "There's never any meat at her place," he says. "It's not fair."
"Is she a good cook?" I asked.
"Yes, but you're missing the point. Why is it that we bend over backward to accommodate her by serving mashed potatoes and creamed corn and cranberry sauce, but she never makes the tiniest bit of meat for us? It's not like we serve just meat at our house. You can be a vegetarian and still find plenty to eat. We have potato chips and corn chips and guacamole and fried mozzarella sticks and doughnuts and sticky buns ..."
"Wow, you are really bending over backward," I interjected. "It's not as if you had all that stuff lying around your house anyway."
"Once again, you're missing the point. I'm not saying she has to go out and slaughter a cow just so I can have a piece of meat, but come on! Would it kill her to put a little chicken on the table for the holidays? I'm not even asking her to cook a turkey or a ham -- just a chicken. Not even a big one. A chicken is practically a vegetable anyway. It's like a vegetable with legs."
"Yes, it's hard to believe that someone who wouldn't hurt a fly won't cook you a chicken. So I guess you had to fill up on chips and dip."
"If only. She doesn't have anything like that. It's all pieces of cauliflower and broccoli with hummus and olives and little bits of gooey cheese that a friend of hers makes. There's no real food anywhere."
"It's a wonder you survived. It's a surprise you didn't turn into a cannibal after going a whole day without meat."
"If I hadn't had bacon and sausage for breakfast, I may have. My life did flash in front of my eyes, but it wasn't from the lack of meat. It was when Sarah started asking for the recipes for stuff. 'Oh, that was delicious. You'd never know that was a gluten-free cake. Can I have the recipe?' Yesterday she made me lentil soup for lunch. What is that? Her sister is a bad influence on her."
Jackson's wife, Sarah, regularly prepares things Jack distrusts under the guise of keeping him healthy. "What's this?" is a question I've heard at their dinner table dozens of times.
"It's a fish taco," Sarah might reply.
"A fish taco? Did the grocery store run out of hamburger?"
"All the magazines say we should eat less meat and more fish. Fish once a week isn't going to kill you. You could stand to lose some weight."
"Yeah, I see those people in the magazines you read. All skin and bones like your sister. That can't be healthy."
"Can you imagine what would happen if I told Sarah she could stand to lose some weight?" Jack asks me.
"It would upset the balance of world peace; it would cause untold misery; life as we know it would come to an end," I said.
"You complain about this every other year," I continued. "Couldn't you smuggle meat into your sister-in-law's house and hide it where you can get to it easily? Say, under a sofa cushion? A little bit of beef jerky here, a can of Vienna sausages there?"
"Go ahead, make fun of me," Jack said. "But when someone invites you to their house for dinner, it would be nice if they served an actual dinner."
"That's the holiday spirit. The good news is we all know what to get you for Christmas next year," I said. "The Spam Gift Collection."
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Jim Mullen is the author of "It Takes a Village Idiot: Complicating the Simple Life" and "Baby's First Tattoo."
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