In 1995 I decided to stop eating animals. As I was living in San Francisco it really wasn’t hard to find good food made by someone else and which didn’t contain meat. Traveling inland even a couple of hours, though, was traveling to a world where “vegetarian” meant, “eats alfalfa sprouts and avocado and, um, cheese.”
In 1996 I stopped eating dairy and eggs. This necessarily meant that traveling to anyplace without large populations of hippies or Buddhists meant I needed to be prepared to make all my own meals. The American South is particularly fond of gratuitous meat, for example, but even Fresno was a trial.
Today, I’m eating lunch at the food court at a mall in Boston. I’m eating a burrito with grilled vegetables and no dairy, without alfalfa sprouts and without gratuitous meat broth. Globalization has plenty of critics but today I ate lunch in a town distant from my home and I didn’t have to make it in my hotel room.
When is Fresno not a trial? 🙂