The Vegan Diary of a Voracious Meat-Eater: Day 12–20, or Daddy Smells
If all both of you have been waiting for an update, or wondering if I quit this diet and started freebasing lamb’s blood, I’m sorry to disappoint you.
It’s just that being vegan is boring. Yes, the dietary options are limited but it’s also scant as far as creating content-worthy events.
Also, I think it’s not far off to say that vegans lack something in the humor department.
Let’s face it: vegetables are not funny. On the rare occasions you laugh at a vegetable it’s because it looks like an animal, a face or a body part. I challenge you to think of a plant that’s funny outside of those 3 constraints. You can’t.
Meanwhile, animals are non-stop hilarious. The internet is basically 90% funny pictures and videos of animals.
There’s a long running comic strip called Marmaduke solely about a large dog just existing in a regular house. The punchline is the same everyday: this dog is large.
Is there a connection between eating funny things and being humorous? Or is there an inverse connection between eating boring things and not being funny? Maybe.
My point: I’m having a hard time coming up with witty banter about this very boring diet. And for any vegans out there, you know you are basically humorless. Why is that?
I am getting good at cooking fake-ass meat in ways that makes it resemble the hilarious flesh of an actual animal.
So far, the gardein brand stuff seems to be the most palatable. The chicken patties are fine — they taste pretty close to over-processed chicken patties you’d get at a college cafeteria.
They also make “beef” crumbles which I’ve used in both chili and tacos and I’ve had no complaints. My VEGAN wife even ate a gardein burger (topped with tomatoes, avocado, salt, pepper and ketchup) and she said it tasted like an ordinary overcooked beef patty.
One thing that you have to look out for are fake meats that still contain animal products. Morningstar makes a bunch of “vegetarian” meats that contain milk and eggs, which is annoying. All of these fake meats have massive ingredient lists — which makes me doubt any health claims they might make. If I can’t pronounce or haven’t heard of half of the ingredients on a label, it’s not a healthy food product and it might not actually be food.
You have to read through a novella of ingredients to see if they’re truly animal free. Sometimes they’ll sneak in a whisker or a drop of blood in as the literal last ingredient so you need to be vigilant.
As far as the proto-fake meats, like tofu and tempeh, my advice is to skip them. They take a ton of work to make them taste just okay. You’ll starve to death eating that stuff.
When in doubt, you can make any boring fake meat or vegan dish more interesting by adding more cayenne pepper. I ate some vegan chipotle sausages this past weekend that were pretty close to the far end of my spice tolerance — and I’m not some heat prude.
They tasted like extra spicy hot dog rolls. Get yourself a hot dog roll steeped in hot sauce, and then lay that spicy hot dog roll into another hot dog roll and you can save yourself the indignity of paying $7 for vegan sausages.
Honestly, besides not eating meat and *constantly* farting so much that my 3 year old just thinks I smell bad now, the worst part of being vegan is having to be vegan in public. Asking sheepishly if something is vegan, or buying stacks of gross looking fake meat in a grocery store is a real drag.
I keep asking the guys in the meat department at our local supermarket if they’ve received a shipment of a vegan burger I want to try (the beyond meat burger). I’ve asked so many times, and they never have it. I would rather ask them to join me in the men’s room for a little mutual masturbation (no gay stuff) then ask for vegan meat ever again.
I feel the need to explain “oh I’m not actually vegan, I’m just doing this for a laugh” which is also very strange.
So I only have 10 days left of this nonsense and I can tell I’m very much looking forward to pizza especially. The one ingredient I will not eat again is any kind of vegan mozzarella. If you want to prank someone, make them a pizza with vegan mozzarella and keep that camera ready for when they take that first ghastly bite. They should honestly re-brand this stuff as Prank Cheese and sell it at Spencer’s gifts, if that place still exists.
