Episode 48: How to Be a Vegetarian

This Episode is brought to you in the interest of fair play. Since I instructed you how to order a delicious, died-for-your-sins steak just one episode ago, I realized that some of you may be toying with the foolish notion of becoming a vegetarian, so here's some advice about that.

I used to work at a natural foods market in Memphis - the Squash Blossom, in case any of you are reading from that god-forsaken city. I worked in the kitchen of the deli, cooking up vegetarian delights for all the no-deodorant-using-hippies in a fifteen-mile radius. This was back in the days before SUV-driving lady-types clogged the aisles of Whole Foods, when the only people at these sorts of markets were unwashed art-school students and that skinny lead singer of R.E.M. Anyway, my boss was this nice lady named Bonnie, who taught me all the vegetarian voodoo lingo - rennent and stevia and Spike and cilantro and tempeh and tofu and tamari - and in almost no time flat she had me being a vegetarian too! Because it was convenient and at hand because I worked there and also because it was basically free - whoops! I made too much vegetarian lasagne! Better box that up! - it was really easy to do. Plus Bonnie was quite evangelical about it. It was sort of hard to ignore her; it was just easier to do what she said than to have to listen to her rattle on about it every day with no apparent end in sight.

So months went by where I pretty much ate shredded kale excelsior and bean sprout gelato and one day I went into the kitchen pantry to get some chickpeas to make fifty-something gallons of hummus and sitting there on a crate of asparagus was Bonnie....stuffing about eleven beef tacos from Taco Bell into her mouth! I pointed a fourteen-inch daikon radish at her and hissed j'accuse! and she mumbled through a beef-taco-stuffed mouth, "Forgive me! I couldn't help it! They were only forty-nine cents a piece!" So I sat down and helped her finish them off. And that was, as they say, the end of that.