It Ain’t Easy Being Green: Memoirs of a Veggie Cowgirl
Ithaca — I became a vegetarian reluctantly. My two best friends in high school were vegetarians, so for years I had no choice but to champion the life of the carnivore. While Kate and Jessica wrinkled their pretty noses, I was the girl going out with the boys for all-you-can-eat ribs at Big Ed’s Barbecue. I believed in the food chain, meat was delicious, but also – and not unimportantly – eating meat marked me as a different kind of girl, one who made dirty jokes and drank hard liquor and just might be talked into a ride on the mechanical bull in the back corner of Big Ed’s.
Dosa and the Metamorphosis
Pittsburgh — Lost in the narrow streets of Pittsburgh but with a new-found energy to explore my new city, I discovered Tamarind, its yellow walls adorned with a few modest handicrafts, serving my favorite Indian dish: Dosa—the South Indian staple eaten at the earliest breakfasts and latest evening meals alike. Eating the dosa, piled high with hot steaming coconut chutney immediately took me away from the loneliness and anger of my job and brought me back to the weekends I spent with grandparents, overhearing family gossip and listening intently to the wisdom they directed me to heed. Dosas, made with flour, are thin and crisp like French crepes and are used as a utensil to pick up meat, similar to Mediterranean pita bread—dosas at Tamarind were served with the coconut chutney and hot sambhar (piping-hot stew with an assortment of vegetables and spices). The dosas, chutneys, and the rest of the menu, as well as the atmosphere of Indian languages I overheard, and even the sari on the wall did as much to satisfy my need for nostalgia as bridge what was becoming a harmful cultural divide in my place of work.
The Never-Ending Noodle
Washington, D.C. — To understand my tendency to tangents and the strange trails my thought processes undertake, you have to know why I eat noodles on my birthday.
It was one of a litany of Chinese superstitions that threaded the fabric of my ostensibly Roman Catholic Filipino-American upbringing, to eat noodles on my birthday and those of loved ones, and so I punctuated these celebrations with various preparations of pancit though more with often whatever edible noodles were available at the time–a plate of spaghetti rigati tossed in olive oil and salt has become my recent observance of this tradition.
And then I received a text message on New Year’s Day: “Eat noodles.”
On the beginning of the Never-Ending Noodle
A note from the publisher
When I was growing up in southern California, on lazy weekend afternoons on Channel 4, whenever it seemed they had an empty half-hour they needed to fill with programming, an installment of Travel Cafe would come on the air. In my upbringing free of cable television, before the Food Network’s quantum leap from “housewife channel” to its current “More Than Cooking” celebrity-driven iteration, Travel Cafe was a half-hour show hosted by one of KNBC’s evening news anchors, international documents of regional delicacies and dietary habits interspersed with B-roll of exotic flora and locals in their mundane existence. One night over dinner with my family (most likely we assembled to eat just as the program ended), my father observed that the existence of a traveling food critic, if you didn’t think about it too deeply, was rather charmed—travel, eat, write, collect a paycheck. A decade later, when I found myself at job interviews—all manner of white-collar, clerical, and sales positions for recent college graduates—where the interviewer would ask about my career aspirations, I inevitably uttered a sentence that contained the phrase “traveling food critic.”
I’ve settled into a job as a webmaster and web designer, much as my peers have settled into their jobs, as our parents settled into theirs—with an unwavering gratitude for salary but a lingering dissatisfaction that waxes and wanes like cycles of the moon. In conversations with peers, we discussed our respective existential crises and would share a daydream of being traveling food critics. I remembered that I started as a web designer with a meager portfolio and no formal training, but after intensive research not simply on the craft and trade but on the business processes, I created my own opportunities in the field. From that experience, I learned that few opportunities find those in waiting, but those who learn to create their own shall never want. In short: it’s one thing to be a traveling food critic because that’s the title on your business card, it’s another to travel, eat, and write about those experiences.
Traveling food writing, I realized, sometimes doesn’t actually require any traveling. It can begin with the exoticization of the place where one resides; furthermore, the self-awareness that one develops in an existential crisis is a prerequisite to this assessment. The stories in this inaugural issue are about how things begin amidst uncertainty—how Nikhil grasped for the comfort of traditions amidst cultural ignorance in a new city, how Uncomplicatedly (her nom de guerre) became a vegetarian as a food snob in a dorm dining hall, and how I set out on this never-ending noodle—how the life I’d lived had prepared me not necessarily to write about what ingredients comprise various dishes or where those dishes are dietary staples, but how ingredients that were introduced into cultures gave rise to new staples and why they’ve withstood the culinary whims of generations that followed.
Ultimately, I founded this periodical on this concept, to refract our lives’ experiences through a prism of culinary metaphor, because it’s a metaphor that is very nearly universal. The first three articles here are a start in that direction, the primi piatti of a feast of verbage that deeply investigates the relationships between palettes and personalities, between cultures and comestibles. If you like what you smell so far and think you can hold your own with a spellchecker, I encourage you to contribute.
This isn’t everything I want it to be—not yet. As the site grows, options for searching and sorting its contents will also be more robust—this site is driven by WordPress and we are sincerely grateful to its developers for the incredible application they’ve crafted. The range of locations and perspectives will evolve as contributors come and go. Advertising will take up some screen real-estate so contributors may reap some compensation and maintenance costs may be recovered. Perhaps, as I hope, it will lead beyond the plate and table, beyond the air and sea. These are a few possibilities, but I know better than to expect that it will ever be everything I want it to be—and for as much as I attempt to hold sway over my opportunities, I’ve also learned sometimes to simply let it be, because it could be better.
Thank you for reading.
Matthew T. Marco
1 May 2007
Washington, D.C., U.S.A.