Life Among the Meat Eaters : Vegetarian Solution

In her life as a vegetarian, writer Michelle Kort has experienced some, well, interesting meals, the oddest of them made by non-vegetarians. There is, for instance, what Kort calls “the white meal”--a single scoop of cottage cheese and a hard-cooked egg--whipped up at the last minute during a family gathering by her aunt who’d inevitably forget that her niece ate no meat.

Another time, she was served a bowl of cheddar cheese cubes, a bowl of marinated mushrooms and a piece of bread. “I tried to eat these things in every possible combination,” Kort says, “but it wasn’t what you’d call a meal.”

Kort herself has even cooked some meals that she now winces at--her vegetable “surprise,” for instance. “It was always the same ingredients,” she says, “a little eggplant, a little zucchini, some onions. I ate that over and over again until I couldn’t eat eggplant any more.”

But, for Kort the hardest part about being a vegetarian might be explaining it to other people. “A lot of times people would tell me, ‘You know, plants have feelings too.’ I’d get that a lot. When you go out to eat you can feel pretty deprived--everyone else is in heaven and you’re eating a baked potato. You become the brat.”

“It’s a little hard to describe what you go through socially,” says Gloria Lopez, assistant to the president of A & M Films, who has not eaten red meat since 1976. “If you’re in a group and you don’t enjoy what they enjoy, you’re immediately the outsider--you’re a little strange.”

Vicki Campagna, an aspiring filmmaker who stopped eating red meat, fish and poultry five years ago, and then cut eggs and dairy products from her diet two years ago says, “I try not to be too militant with my friends because they respect what I’m doing and they don’t mock me for it. I find that if you shout your position all over you’re going to get an adverse effect.”

Despite press reports of famous proselytizing vegetarians--New York magazine’s account, for instance, of Linda McCartney imploring her fellow diners at the Hard Rock Cafe to “Go veggie! Go veggie!”--most vegetarians don’t impose their views on their friends.

“For a number of years,” Kort says, “I wouldn’t let meat be cooked in my house, but then I decided I was being way too rigid.”

“I feel I’m the minority,” says Campagna, who also wears no leather, “so I won’t say anything if someone eats a rare hamburger in front of me. But if someone asks me questions about my lifestyle, I’ll tell them what I think.”

What Campagna thinks is that eating meat and dairy products is morally wrong. “It’s like my own personal boycott against factory farming,” she says. “To me, eating meat is like eating my cat.”

But not all vegetarians are so politically minded. Lopez, who isn’t a strict vegetarian (she eats fish, and occasionally chicken), first stopped eating red meat when she started doing yoga exercises. “You become very aware of your body,” she says. “It’s almost a spiritual thing, and somehow, eating a hamburger doesn’t go with that.”

Kort was still in college when she stopped eating meat. “My original reason for becoming a vegetarian seems embarrassingly silly now,” she says, “but I was actually inspired by Melanie’s song, ‘I Don’t Eat Animals.’ Of course Melanie’s not a vegetarian any more, but I’ve stuck with it. It’s been 21 years.”

Kort’s thinking on the subject has become more sophisticated over the years, but she has not come to the conclusion that she should stop eating dairy products. “I’m not against animal products,” she says. “I just don’t want to eat dead animals.”

Campagna says that cutting eggs and dairy products from her diet was much more difficult than not eating meat. “You can’t have most desserts, you can’t have coffee with cream, most candies are full of whey. Even the breath mint I used is made with meat byproducts.”

Being a vegetarian in a meat-eating society takes discipline.

“I live with a man who loves steak and sweetbreads, all kinds of meat things,” Lopez says. “We’ve been together for a very long time and he has never changed his eating habits for me--and I’ve never changed mine.”

“I don’t salivate when I see a steak sizzling on a grill,” she says. “But there is one thing I’ve always craved, I can’t help myself--a Dodger dog.”

Free Instruction in Vegetarianism

A 16-page recipe booklet entitled “Vegetarianism: Answers to the Most Commonly Asked Questions,” offered by the North American Vegetarian Society, gives recipes, how to cook with grains and beans, plus a resource list of books and magazines on vegetarianism free of charge. For a copy, send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to North American Vegetarian Society, P.O. Box 72 L, Dolgeville, N.Y. 13329.