What I'm Eating

It’s time to talk about what I’ve been eating.

My debut days as a vegan have been conducted on the road in Germany. I am rather surprised, and pleased, with the relative ease with which we grocery shopped, ate out and navigated hotel breakfast buffets over this four day period.

You could say I entered my vegan year with a straight-backed, white-knuckled, clenched-jaw sort of posture. My body had a certain tension every time I entered a culinary establishment; I was convinced that the Germans were determined to slip sausage into my off-the-menu orders when I wasn’t looking (I was armed with a sort of sausage-radar, one could say). I carried a jar of peanut butter, a plastic knife and a snack-pack of ryvita in my handbag everywhere I went, ready to assemble a p.b. cracker sandwich should I find myself in some sort of vegan-emergency.

Michael, who’s been nothing but a good sport about my new lifestyle from the moment I announced my intentions over a decidedly non-vegan breakfast mid-December (the first words out of his mouth were ‘I won’t be joining you in that’; the second were ‘but I will fully support you’), did a stand-up job of translating my interrogations of the waiting staff with unwavering patience.

Some snapshots:

Michael and I are shopping in downtown Munich. Lunchtime is upon us. We approach a cute outdoor soup-selling booth. There are six vats of soup on offer, and amazingly, three of them have labels that suggest they are vegetarian. I am hungry and cold, but try not to get my hopes up. Two helpful-looking girls are peering out from behind the vats, ready to take our order. They confirm that the tomato soup, mixed vegetable soup and carrot and ginger soup are indeed vegetarian.

“Are they, by chance, vegan?” Michael asks in German.

“Yes” the girls reply.

“They answered too quickly,” I growl at Michael. They must have noticed the doubtful expression on my face; they turn to each other for a quick confab, and then turn back and reduce my options from three to one. Michael double-confirms that there are no sausage bits, creams or meat-broths used in the making of the mixed vegetable soup, and we are satisfied.

Perfect weather for patio dining: enjoying vegan soup at -8C in Munich

A restaurant snapshot:

We are looking for somewhere to have dinner in the resort town of Bad Toelz. The name of one particular restaurant is encouraging, Café Sol. It sounds like somewhere that one might find some non-traditional options, and we are indeed rewarded with a substantial salad section on the menu. Having identified one salad that has the potential to be turned vegan without too many alterations, we test the willingness of the kitchen. It’s a mixed green salad with artichokes, olives, sprouts, corn, beets and a medley of different cheeses. If they are willing to remove the various cheeses and include some extra vegetables, as well as substitute the yogurt dressing for oil and vinegar, then I will dine like a vegan queen.

The waitress comes over to take our order. Michael introduces me (I am no longer introduced as ‘my girlfriend who doesn’t speak German’ when we place orders, I now have the even more endearing title of ‘my girlfriend who doesn’t speak German or eat animal products) and he politely asks if they would consider our modifications to the mixed greens salad. She is both accommodating and gracious, and offers to substitute mushrooms for the mozzarella and feta. There is a moment of confusion as to whether parmesan comes from animals, and after everyone agrees that it does, the modified order is taken to the kitchen. I am served a massive plate of mixed greens with a mountain of olive-oil marinated mushrooms on top, which goes very well with the cabernet, and I do indeed dine like a vegan queen.

A supermarket snapshot:

We have a near miss while shopping for lunch items at the ubiquitous Aldi. I feel like soup again, so Michael heads off to the canned goods section to hunt for a vegetarian soup sans meat broth. I wish him luck. I head off on what is ultimately a fruitless search for homous amongst the cheeses and dips. We meet in the salad section where I am grabbing one of everything in sight, and Michael is grasping two soup cans to his chest, looking very pleased with himself.

“I found two safe soups!” he announces.

“Great!” I respond, and we add them to the basket and head to the checkout.

While in the lineup, Michael decides to pass the time by doing a casual reread of the soups’ ingredients, and we learn our first lesson in the importance of due diligence with ultra-long German ingredient lists (given that the average German word is 20 characters long, these lists look like the company’s business plans printed on the side of the can to me). It turns out that one does have to read the words in brackets. Closer inspection reveals that eggs were used to make the noodles in the vegetable noodle soup, and cream was used in the finish of the tomato soup. The soup cans are left next to the batteries on the checkout lineup shelf and I eat a sad lunch of salad and fruit on a cold, cold day. My spirits are lifted later in the afternoon when we find a café that has soymilk options, and I order the largest latte that Europeans coffee shops allow (although I did do some December dry-runs of drinking black coffee in preparation for January; I can only assume it’s an acquired taste).

All in all, not a bad start. I take back much of the fun I made of German culinary culture in advance. Perhaps the most encouraging moment was when I learnt that there is actually a German word for vegan (veganisch), which brings the total number of words in my German vocabulary to nine.

Now I’m back home in the French-speaking region of Vaud, Switzerland, and things might not be so easy. I don’t have my on-hand translator (Michael’s French leaves more to be desired than mine) and there doesn’t seem to be a French word for vegan (although a friend living in Paris has suggested that I could try végétalien, which is only one letter away from the word for vegetarian, végétarien, so I’m forecasting some difficulties here). Still, I live in a village perched on a ridge overlooking vineyards with endless farmland stretching out behind. How hard can it be to find a decent vegetable?