The Great Vegetarian Experiment

For one of my daughter's classes she has a project to work on one of the "five pillars of health" (is it just me, or does this sound vaguely cultist?) for six weeks. She chose to go without meat for that period, and we decided to be supportive and work on our own "pillars of health" at the same time. We were all worried about whether the "the only good bean is hummus" boy child would make it though, but he signed on, and stuck with PBJs instead of ham sandwiches in his lunch.

So how did it go?

Success: Finally a Pad Thai recipe worth making

I have tried before to make Pad Thai, and the results have always been disappointing. But this vegetarian one from epicurious is really good. Tip: use 1 to 2 T of tamarind paste from a jar instead of mucking about with blocks and pods. But don't skip out on the tamarind entirely: it adds an essential kind of tanginess.

Failure: Life without chicken stock

From the start it was agreed that this was not to be a vegan experiment: dairy and eggs were on the table. Early on we realized that life without chicken stock is too awful to contemplate. We usually have several jars of home-made stock about the place, as well as fish stock in the freezer, and some home-made beef stock intermittently. Yes, you can make vegetable stock (a good corn stock being a great base for chile and chowder), but for most soups, chicken stock turned out to have some essential quality we couldn't do without.

A good cookbook goes a long way

Mollie Katzen's Moosewood Cookbook has lots of excellent vegetarian recipes in it. The vegetarian moussaka and gado gado were big hits. We also leaned on The Greek Vegetarian (spanakopita, some nice salads) and various Indian cookbooks we had lying around the house
(Madhur Jaffrey is my favourite: we have several of her books).

Simple things

Some of the easiest things turned out the best: fondue, cheese/fruit plates, a simple pesto/tomato/olive pasta sauce, veggie burgers, quiche, corn/black bean burritos. Higher on the effort scale, but not that complex: spinach/mushroom/onion calzones, butternut squash raviolis with sage butter, savory crepes (the mushroom with crème fraîche was best).

Biggest surprises

We usually do all our shopping and most of our cooking on Saturday, with the rest of the week being mostly a matter of simple side dishes and reheating tupperware. The biggest surprise (and biggest impediment to doing this on an ongoing basis) turned out to be that a lot of vegetarian recipes just don't lend themselves well to being pre-prepared in this way. Towards the end of the week there would either be a rather disappointing result or a lot of mad scrambling and late dinners. I did not expect this in the least. I expect that more experience and expertise would go a long way to helping here. We've had a lot of years of honing down our collection of (mostly non-vegetarian) recipes to a set that work well with this kind of process; we just haven't got there with the purely vegetarian results. On the other hand, a hunk of beef holds up uncooked better in the fridge (or freezer) for a week than many vegetables.

We don't use a lot of bacon/prosciutto/ham in our cooking, but boy, that little bit makes all the difference in a lot of recipes. Bean soups, pasta sauces, spinach salad, and quiche really lose something without it. Given how little (relatively speaking) we use, I was really surprised that this was the only meat I really missed.

True confessions: Sneaking out for a steak

On the days my daughter was away at dinner, and on our dinner-out Fridays, the rest of us frequently went for the carnivore's fare. But dang! I really like those chicken rajas at La Fiesta.

Final thoughts

Are we about to abandon our omnivorous ways and go vegetarian? Nope. On the other hand, we did discover some great new recipes, and are happy to fold them into our rotation. We have also discovered a willingness (even from the vegetable-hating teen boy) to try more things. All in all, I'd call it a success.

We Were Not Asked to Amend the Dictionary

I try to understand the Proposition 8 supporters, I really do. I have read hundreds of blog postings and comments and letters to the editors, and nope, I still don't get it. The recent claims that somehow folks who are pointing out that Prop 8 was all about bigotry and hate is somehow hateful and bigoted still makes me choke on my tea.

Here is my summary of the arguments in favour of this horrid example of the tyranny of the majority:

"It isn't about civil rights; it is about the definition of the word 'marriage'."
The folks who make this claim often follow this with statements about how they support civil unions and giving gays all the same rights and privileges of marriage, but they just don't want the word 'marriage' applied to it.
Response: We were voting on an amendment to the Constitution of the State of California, not an amendment to Webster's Dictionary. The constitution does not concern itself definitions of words that have no impact on the law. Words such as 'marriage' and 'spouse' and 'parent' are scattered about in many places in the legal code. If you really believe that legally redefining the word 'marriage' has no impact on actual rights of actual people, let's try a little thought experiment, shall we? Let's imagine that the vote was to define 'marriage' to only apply to a pair of Zoroastrians. If it is just a word, then why are you so exercised about it?

"Gay rights aren't about civil rights."
For some reason, some blacks get really hot under the collar about any other group talking about wanting equal rights before the law as "civil rights". It isn't a rational reaction, so there's not really a rational counter-argument. There is nothing in the term "civil rights" that says "black rights" and nothing that says it only pertains to sad treatment of black people in this country. There is also the sense, in some circles, that somehow gays "choose" their "lifestyle" so their quest for equality before the law somehow doesn't count. I have never met a gay person who felt it was a choice. In fact, I never met anyone who felt that who they fell in love with was a "choice". You love who you love.

"Radical judges overturned the will of the people."
Our constitutional system was designed precisely to protect unpopular minorities from the majority. It is the job of judges to ensure the law and rights are applied equally to all. If a simple majority can vote to take away rights from one unpopular minority, why not another? Would it be OK to pass a majority vote to forbid atheists from voting? No. Equal protection under the law means equal protection under the law.

"We're just trying to protect traditional marriage."
The folks who make this claim seem to have a very limited view of tradition. Whose tradition did you have in mind? There seems to be quite a tradition of multiple wives, historically and cross-culturally. There is also a fine old tradition of marrying girls barely out of puberty. No, not that one? Saying "the Christian" tradition, doesn't help there. King David? Jacob, Leah, and Rachel? But even if you accept the premise that a marriage between two adults, one of each sex, as traditional: just exactly how does outlawing other people's marriages "protect" such an institution? If marriage is truly such a foundational social and economic building block of our society, we ought to be encouraging gay marriages.

"Churches would be forced to marry homosexuals."
What a stupid idea. Are Catholic churches forced to marry Moslems? No. Why on earth would any rational being suppose that suddenly the state would force rules on the religious rituals performed by churches? Even if someone were to suggest such a thing (and why would they?), it would be such an obvious violation of the US Constitution that it would be shot down instantly (by those 'activist judges').

"Homosexuality is against God's will."
There are, of course, a lot of hidden assumptions and unwarranted conclusions buried in here. Which God did you have in mind? Zeus doesn't seem to have a lot of problems with it. How do you know it is against God's will? Well, OK, Leviticus says it is an abomination and unclean for a man to lie with a man (so...lesbian marriage is OK, right?). But here's the thing: Leviticus says a lot of things about what is unclean: shellfish, bugs (except great locusts), a woman who has just had a baby, skin diseases of certain sorts. (Oh, and here's a laugh: Jacob's marriage -- right out, they're sisters.) It says many things about what is forbidden: eating fruit from a tree planted less than three years ago, eating blood-rare steak, holding a seance. So where is the proposition banning those? Where are the pickets against Red Lobster and the Outback? It also says you shall not oppress your neighbour, but instead love him. So... that part of the Bible, not so important for you? And just because something is written in the Bible, how do you know that makes it God's will? Because the Bible says so? That doesn't even count as an argument, never mind a convincing one. But even if I set aside those objections, the fundamental problem remains: the California Constitution is not a religious tract, California is not a theocracy, and your religious doctrines have no business being enshrined in our law. We are not all Christians here. Making a religious argument for a legal question is a category error. You don't want to marry gays in your church? OK. Done. That has nothing to do with what the law should say.

"It's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve."
This is bumper sticker, not an argument. If I hadn't seen it repeated so often, I'd dismiss it out of hand, it is that dumb. But, let's go through it. (1) California is not a theocracy, much less a Christian theocracy. (2) Even if it were, the fact that the first people were a man and a woman has no bearing on the question of marriage. One could just as well say "It's Adam, not Eve" and use that to somehow claim that we should exterminate all women in the world. (3) The Bible isn't exactly clear on the Adam and Eve thing, anyhow: how long were those Land of Nod folks around, anyhow? (4) The Bible is wrong. Sorry, I'm not going to sugarcoat this in politically correct "let's be especially nice to dumb ideas just because they are religious." So: incorrect on the facts, irrelevant to the question, and a category error.

"It's icky. It makes me uncomfortable."
Response: Grow up. Eating meat is icky to some people. Childbirth is icky. Making compost is icky. Your personal squeamishness is not a sound basis for public policy.

"What's the point? They can't have children."
This one just makes me angry. By this reasoning, all post-menopausal marriages should be outlawed, all post-vasectomy marriages should be outlawed, and probably all marriages involving contraception should be outlawed. And just because you can't see the point, what gives you the right to judge whether that couple has a reason to get married? There are plenty of reasons to want to get married, and children is just one of them. Reproductive plans of the married couple are none of your business and none of the state's business. But the fact is, gay couples can and do have children via adoption and artificial insemination. Forbidding those children's parents to be married just leaves them vulnerable. Yes: it harms children.

"It's harmful for children."
Well, given that the effect of the ban is harmful to the children of gay couples, I'd expect to see some really compelling evidence that the mere presence of gay marriages harms children by the folks making this claim. But there is none. Canada has had gay marriage for some years now, and there is no evidence anywhere that the children of Canada are suffering thereby. Tied up in this is a confusion between pedophilia and homosexuality, which have nothing to do with one another. You want to protect children from sexual abuse? Look in the mirror, Catholic church.

"Where will it all end? Next thing you know we'll have multiple wives and people marrying their pets!"
Whew. Finally finally something resembling an actual rational argument, although not, in fact, a very strong one. Slippery slope arguments always assume that there can be no rational reason to draw a boundary at all, once you decide against the current boundary. But in this case, it isn't so. There are rational reasons for disallowing polygamy: in practice it leads to coercive marriages involving young girls, maltreatment of young boys (aka rivals), and using additional marriages as a means to publish and control existing wives. There are rational reasons for disallowing "marriage" to pets: a non-sentient being cannot enter into a legal agreement willingly. Where these reasons differ from the reasons put forward for outlawing gay marriage is that they are civil arguments, not religious ones, and therefore actually have a valid place in the consideration of public policy.


All in all, Prop 8 was a scurrilous attack on not just civil rights but human rights, our constitutional principles, and families, and the arguments in favour of it are all absurd. I'm ashamed of my state, and I'm angry. There's a part of me that wants to go picket the Mormons and insist that if the Roman Catholic Church wants to inject its peculiar brand of bigotry into our Constitution then maybe its time to start paying some taxes in our state too. Fighting hate with hate is not a way forward, but the folks who are now saying that "the people have spoken" and "get over it" need to understand that when you vote to remove rights that people already have, the anger isn't going to go away. This is not just another defeat at the polls. I have some confidence that the California Supreme Court will do the right thing and recognize that a majority vote to remove fundamental human rights is an illegitimate act under our Constitution. We'll see.

Recent Reading

Charles de Lint, Moonlight and Vines
ISBN: 978-0765309174

I admire Charles de Lint's writing immensely. As a prose stylist, you could do worse. Far worse. He has a wonderful eye for detail in drawing his settings and people, and a deft touch in drawing together the natural, the urban, and the supernatural. His characters are interesting, the kind of people you wished you were sitting down in a coffee shop with. Still, there was something dissatisfying about this collection of interlinked short stories. It is like listening to some of Glenn Gould's records: after the zillionth etude your mind rebels and craves either something really different or some larger overarching structure. Something with the size of a symphony shouldn't should like the same little thing over and over. This book strikes me the same way. Each story was fine by itself, and many were very fine indeed, but the interlinked characters leads you into wanting something more akin to the structure of a novel, and it just isn't there. De Lint attempts to draw the book together by making the last story circle back to the first, but it is very unconvincing. The last story isn't, fundamentally, a story. It reads like a 2am confessional from the author. The characters in it bear little relation to the ones introduced in the first story. Still, worth reading. Just read it in pieces.

Barbara Robinette Moss, Change Me Into Zeus's Daughter, A Memoir
ISBN: 978-0743202190

This is eight tenths of a fantastic book. Moss recalls her appallingly poor childhood as one of seven children of an alcoholic and violent father. What makes it only a partial success is that Moss writes towards an ending where she gets her terrible teeth fixed and emerges swam-like into her new beautiful reality. But the suffering because of her teeth isn't the central thrust of the narrative, we don't get any of the payoff of the emergence, and honestly, the most interesting thread of this story is her mother. Here is a woman who has records with her own voice recording on, who has a love of learning and reading and poetry which she somehow manages to pass on to her children under the most appalling circumstances, who holds the kids together as best she can, and sticks with an terrible husband through thin and thinner, but who finally, finally breaks free. And we get that story only in glimpes. The moment when Moss' father, now remarried in a more stable (emotionally and financially) environment refuses to help with her educational fees is set up as some kind of key emotional moment, but it looks whiny. What did you expect? The moment that we didn't get a good view in was when Moss' mother finally leaves the bum. One of the most heart-rending moments for me, in part because it is told with such flat affect, was when the children destroy the mother's records by tossing them around the yard like frisbees when they are to be left behind in yet another forced-out-again move. What must she have been feeling at that moment? How does hope die? How, after all that, do you finally decide enough is enough? Why? All unanswered, alas. Still, a good and moving read.