From Roy Blount in his book of essays, Long Time Leaving, lamenting the explosive growth of soy beans as a major southern crop: "Everywhere you look it’s soy milk, soy ice cream, soy meat, soy I don’t know what all. Why can’t there be ham milk and ham ice cream and ham this and ham that?" [books of the times]
Claudia, you speak the truth. Bacon!
Also, does everything have to turn into a philosophical discussion? My God. It was a joke.
Will I be ostracized if I say I love bacon (and none of that turkey crap either) and tofu?
There is an Austrian restaurant across the street from my office whose motto is “where bacon is an herb.” I love Herwig’s
.
Ostracized, Maura? Oh, no way! CELEBRATED! Mangia bene, as I always say . . . !
Claudia:
By relegating bacon to the vegetable family, it is then available to any dietary restrictions: kosher, vegan, halal…
I think I’ll have a BLT for lunch. Only replace the LT with BB.
Oh, yes – BBB! OK, you can throw in some T and C (cheese – mozzarella is wonderful in this particular instance), but basically unlimited, unrestricted, unrelegated . . . . B!
Jen, have you been screwing in the walk-ins AGAIN? Tsk, tsk! (Just a joke. You know I think the world of your humanitarian work.)
Claudia:
My mantra is “Bacon is a vegetable”. It solves many dietary rules.
roy blount is pretty much the reason i wake up on saturday mornings to listen to npr’s “wait, wait, don’t tell me!”.
and if i don’t wake up, i at least listen to the podcast.
enjoying reading your thoughts –
- anne, menuism.com intern
and npr groupie
Skawtie, Skawtie, bacon isn’t a vegetable – bacon is it’s own food group! (Like caffeine. And chocolate.) I know it’s got its own row in the food pyramid SOMEWHERE (!!)
Aside from the obvious (and already commented on) to Sean, I think my first reaction is about the slam on cooks. Most cooks I know are putting a whole lot more effort into vegetarian dishes besides just throwing a few (badly) steamed veggies on a plate. Lots of cooks put some serious effort into it. Have you SEEN Keller’s vegetarian menu at TFL?
And asking cooks to not be snarky is like asking red to turn blue – it ain’t gonna happen, now, later, or ever. I suppose you’ll want them to stop scr*wing in the walk-ins next???
Snarkyness is the secret ingredient in professional cooking (followed closely by confidence, fearlesness, and libido). With those a cook turns the humble uncooked ingredient into something noteworthy (and tastey). Without those, you have Home Town Buffet.
Don’t mess with success, Sean – you won’t like the results
No ham-flavored ice cream for you!!
Sean, you come in here with a smart-alecky air of superiority in response to what is quite clearly a simple and transparent joke. You do little but propagate the view of vegans as joyless self-important twits.
Your dismissal of cooks as people who should “shut up and pad their margins by whipping you up a vegetable plate, keeping their snarky comments in the kitchen” is similarly arrogant as it appears on a personal blog.
The only way your post is a success of any sort is if you’re a rabid carnivore making caricature of the vegans who incite such backlash.
All I can say is -
“Ba-CON! Ba-CON! BAYYYYYYYYYY-con!” (Oh, and ham, natch.) Remember, “The pig is a noble animal.”
This is a blog. “[...] leave the snarky comments in the kitchen”?? What fun would it be if he did? More snarky comments!! Less soy! More bacon!
Speaking of kudzu, good work scoring Googlads on your site, Michael! Everybody click, because to click is to contribute.
With my luck, it’ll be ham-flavored soy ice cream.
Vegans probably wouldn’t get so much flak (AKA f–k) if they weren’t actively trying to tag meat eaters as murderers (and that’s a lot of tagging, last time I checked the ratio of carnivores to vegans).
3 more words: Snarky von Schnauzer
But not Smithfield ham!
Oh god…ham ice cream. Thanks a lot, dude, that quote just caused me to audibly moan AT WORK.
The irony is ridiculous. Ninety-five percent or more of that southern soy is fattening your precious pigs, veal calves, and feedlot cattle.
Where does the tongue in cheek contempt for anything even tangentially associated with “health food” and vegetarians/vegans come from? I’m not cramming tofu down your throat or proscribing the latest soy enema for your ED.
At least for chefs I can sense one of the frustrations. Sauce on the side? F#ck that as long as there isn’t any animals products in it. If you ask most vegans you’ll find that they are remarkably adventurous when it comes to dining, ethical considerations withstanding. Is that really so hard to accept? Just whip me up an overpriced vegetable plate to pad your margins and leave the snarky comments in the kitchen; or better yet make an effort to do something with a limited palette of ingredients and make a regular customer out of someone who would otherwise walk away from your restaurant dejected.
Funny you should mention pork….I’ve been planning a Cuban binge for several days now. I think I’ll have to move the day up to before the weekend now!!!
I try to substitute pork for soy whenever possible. It’s my way of sticking it to The Man.
(And also, my husband and daughter are allergic to soy. And pork is yummy.)
As a resident of Puerto Rico, and therefore lover of pork, I’ve long had my eye on that most ingenious of Cuban inventions: the Caja China. They claim you can cook a 50-pound pig in 4 hours.
http://www.lacajachina.com/
Heheheheheh! Love Roy! The only thing worse than soy beans overrunning the South, I guess, would be kudzu (!)
As a Puerto Rican, I have to agree that pork is the way to go. Mmm, pork.
I live in Montgomery,AL , and I don’t see this soy infestation. I hope this trend stays in Atlanta or wherever he stays at.