Chickpeas and Tofu

Just before the new year I decided to become a vegetarian. Since this is very new I have no moral ground (or interest) to preach on the subject, I will just say that this is motivated by my desire to stop participating in the killing of animals. It's also an attempt to act-out on a moral belief even though it entirely contradicts my deeply engrained eating habits.

I come from a Jewish-Lithuanian family were food seems to be made out of only two ingredients - potatoes and pork. There are dishes like ground potatoes filled with pork (Zepelins), or pork intestine filled with mashed potatoes (Vedarai). As Jews we were prohibited to eat pork, but as soviets we were prohibited to be practicing Jews, so eat pork we did. Lithuania's specialty is smoked pork. It can be a type of a salami (Skilandis), ham, bacon or even just smoked pork fat (Salla).

When we immigrated to Israel, where it was finally permitted to practice Judaism, it was already too late to stop eating pork (or start practicing anything religious, for that matter). But pork wasn't easily available in Israel in the 70s. In our neighborhood the solution was Uncle Leo. He operated a mobile pork supply business, delivering pork products to neighborhoods like mine - densely populated by pork-craving immigrants from the eastern block. Every Thursday night me and my mom would walk to the end of the block where Uncle Leo's beat-up Ford Transit van was already parked. At the back of the van several hundred sausages were hanging on hooks. The predominant language in the line-up was Russian, with Romanian, Hungarian and Polish also heard. Not a word of Hebrew though.  Other than sausages Uncle Leo used to sell liquor filled chocolates, just to help solidify my conditioning. When we got back home me and my mom used to tear off a chunk of polish sausage and eat eat it with some dark and heavy bread and raw onion.  

When I came to Vancouver I quickly identified the best places to buy smoked pork - the huge deli section at Santa Barbara market and the smoked pork Mecca - J N Z Smoked Meats. Since both are on Commercial Drive we moved into that neighborhood. J N Z is a stationary replica of Uncle Leo's van - hundreds of sausages are hanging above, the customers only speak some Eastern European language and they even have chocolates from Poland. Buying a Hungarian farmer's sausage and coupling it with fresh Rye bread from Strawberry's bakery quickly became a weekly ritual. I almost never made it home with all the meat I bought, some had to be consumed on the way.

All this to suggest that lasting vegetarianism doesn't necessarily have the highest odds in my case, after all, what's a moral conviction compared to decades (and perhaps generations) of conditioning.

It's been just 8 weeks so far and I'm doing fine. It would have been wonderful to write that it's been enjoyable - a discovery! To say that I feel lighter and healthier, that Tofu is surprisingly flavourful when done right and that I'm excited about cooking chickpeas twice a week, but I'm not a liar. It's not that I miss the meat so much, and I've always eaten lots of fruit and vegetables, it's just that I realized a couple of things that should have been apparent-
1. I've lost the joy of cooking - one of my main hobbies (I may still find it).
2. Eating out isn't fun anymore.

Both facts are a bit of a blow to my short-term quality of life, and the benefits are as abstract as can be.  Perhaps I should point out to myself that not eating out has much needed financial benefits and that cooking less will free up time for more physical activity and eventual health, but as a pork-adict in withdrawal these thoughts bring no relief.


      

Yogurt

Wow, my first post. Exciting. I'll get right to it. My 10 year old daughter Nomi, threw a yogurt container at me today. A big, 750 ml container of 3.5% fat, organic yogurt. It was half full. The lid was luckily on, and did not open upon contact with my face. I just started laughing. There was something so surprisingly outrageous about her act that made it very funny to me, at least for a moment. I quickly forced the smile off my face and took on a much more appropriate, angry expression. The moment was full of drama and I was the queen. I looked at her intently for a long while, then, without a word, turned  sharply to my five year old son Lior, and quietly asked him to go to shower. I was hoping that the moment's gravity wouldn't be lost on him and for once he would comply. He didn't. It took several more request and finally a threat to get him in there (my big threat these days is that if he chooses not to shower I will choose not to read to him - for now it works). Nomi, in the meantime, vanished somewhere in our huge, 800 sq ft mansion.
Why did she throw the yogurt? well, we were going through our usual night-time ritual - I ask the kids to go to shower and they come up with other must-do activities instead. It works something like this -
me: "Nomi go to the shower please"
her: "I'm just finishing my bracelet on the Rainbow Loom dad".
5 minutes go by.
me: "Nomi go to the shower please"
her: "I just have one page to finish in the chapter"
me: "I thought you were doing the loom thing, go to the shower NOW!"
her: "but I'm hungry"
me: "Nomi, it's too late for that now, please go to the shower"
her, in her super-winey, annoying voice: "but I'm soooo hungry"
At this stage I can't help myself and do my best impersonation of her voice  - "I'm sooooooo hungry"
and before I know what's happening a container full of yogurt is flying through the air and hits me in the face.  

And so, here is a dilemma, what do I focus on? On the one hand, throwing yogurt containers is  a bad idea, on the other hand mimicking people to their face isn't nice either. The key word here is people. What I did in the situation was to treat her as something less than an equal person, which is easy to do -  she isn't entirely equal, is she? For one she is smaller. She also depends on me in a way that I don't depend on her, so, to speak of equality is perhaps irrelevant. But our need for respect is obviously equal. Perhaps the right reaction would be to reprimand her for her act of violence and then to acknowledge my own transgression? Or perhaps the other way around, to apologize for the mimicking and at the same time explain that throwing yogurt containers at people is disrespectful? maybe, but I think that the best reaction is to apologize for mimicking her. That's all.

I hope to post to this blog weekly, and share small scenes from our home. My moto for now is - more intimacy, less opinion, and almost no information.