I’ll be the first to admit that I have never had much success with sustained healthy eating. Even after a heart attack that left me shell-shocked and painfully aware of my own mortality, I pretty much kept my eating habits the same – sprinkling salt on potatoes, wrapping cheese in tortillas, smothering any vegetable I could with spoonfuls of butter. Like many Americans, the word unhealthy to me is really just code for tasty.
As you might be able to suss out from that list, vegetarian eating is easy for me. Vegan eating is not, even if I recognize the health and environmental benefits of that diet. Without animal fat, the integrity of the vegetable is even more important and the seasoning errors cannot be as easily masked. And as I have written before, I don’t particularly fancy imitation. Vegan cooking can get far too caught up in approximating omnivore favorites instead of working in its own vernacular. I may not always love it, but I do try to make the majority of my diet plant-based. So I am always interested when eateries go against the grain.
This article appears in January 27 • 2017.