Love conquers a carnivore

September 16, 2008

Paul MacInnesSeptember 16, 2008 - 10:44AM

The T word ... tofu is at the heart of vegan cuisine.Photo: Marina Oliphant

In the throes of passion, wholegrain rice and legumes are a feast.Falling in love is a wondrous thing and an overwhelming attraction to another person can cause unexpected changes. Suddenly, perhaps overnight, you might acquire an interest in folk music. You might find yourself intrigued by high fashion or engrossed in airport thrillers. I am no exception to this rule - love has transformed me, too. If only in the sense that it's left me partial to broad beans.Not just legumes, either, but seeds and grains. Basically, thanks to my wife and my willingness to trust her appetites, I can happily exist on a diet a rabbit might find restrictive. It's vegan food, it's often raw and it keeps me regular. That is the profound, transformative power of love.I have always been a carnivore. More importantly, however, I am a carbivore; I love carbohydrates and the sensation of being stuffed. Some people climb mountains, others inject heroin.

Me, I chase that exquisite sensation of being so full that my stomach starts haggling with my bellybutton for a spot of extra elbow room.My wife doesn't quite approach food in the same way. Technically, she is a pescatarian. She uses the term partly because it sounds like she is predisposed to being pesky but also because it makes it clear that while she doesn't eat meat, she will eat fish.Of late, however, fish has been appearing less frequently in her diet (perhaps coinciding with the appearance in our sitting room of a book called Bottomfeeder: How The Fish On Our Plates Is Killing Our Planet). Instead, she has started to eat huge heaving bowls of vegan food.Today most of the stuff we eat is vegan food with an Asian bent. Most of the recipes rely on the same basic mix: wholegrain rice (yes, we have carbohydrates!), olive oil, tamari (a rich, dark soy sauce made without wheat) and the aforementioned legumes. Each dish

then has its own distinct flourish on top; soy-steamed bok choy, for example, home-made hummus, or a "simple sauce" which is actually a little bit finickety.There is, however, a simple pleasure to making the food; throwing everything into one big bowl and slopping it around is fun. There is a pleasure in eating it, too. It seems obvious but, when you take meat and every single product in any way related to an animal out of your diet, the onus is on you to be as imaginative and thoughtful as you can with what is left.As I say, like a self-experimenting taxidermist, I like to be stuffed - although even better, I have discovered, is to eat tonnes and tonnes of food and feel simply sated. This is always the case when I eat vegan food.According to dietitian Catherine Collins, there are simple reasons for this. "Vegan food tends to have less fat in it. A higher volume of fat delays gastric entry so with most vegan food you simply start

processing your food faster. It's also the case that you might end up pacing yourself a bit better as the food needs more chewing."This is, in a way, a dispiriting realisation as, throughout my life, first with my mother and then with my wife, I have been asked - sometimes politely and sometimes not - to eat more slowly. I have in the past ignored such warnings, considering them an infringement of my human rights while also limiting my enjoyment. Turns out they were right all along.Collins is at pains to insist that the vegan-curious shouldn't go overboard about the idea of a new, glowing you. "It's important not to overstate the health benefits of vegan food," she says. "Vegans can struggle to get sufficient amounts of calcium and vitamin B12 in their diet. It's all about getting the balance right and you can find the balance as a meat eater, too. It's called the Mediterranean diet."There are other unsavoury elements to adopting

a vegan regimen that I would like, if possible, to quickly pass over. The change in diet often causes a temporary increase in flatulence.There's also the T word: tofu, the big white wobbly lump that still, despite all logic and taste, remains at the heart of vegan food.Apparently, it's good for filling up on that hard-to-find calcium but nothing, absolutely nothing, can make up for the fact that in taste and consistency it is simply savoury blancmange.As weeks go by and our vegan adventure continues, my wife begins to mention tofu more and more. She would like to try this dish, she suggests, or that approach. My shocked response seems barely to register with her.Then, last week, my wife made a cheesecake. It was a preparatory cheesecake, a prototype for an upcoming barbecue with friends. It was covered in apricot jam, which I like, so when I was encouraged to try the first piece I didn't dither."Do you like it?"

she asked. Yes, very nice, I replied. "Are you sure?" Yes, admittedly the base is a little soggy but the cheese bit is lovely."Heh." What? "The cheese bit ... it's made out of tofu."I cannot believe she did that to me.

The Guardian

Peter vv