On Eating

and the cult of omnivorism

Many years ago when I lived briefly in San Jose, California, a couple invited me to their house for dinner. I was so excited because I didn’t have friends in San Jose, and because I always get excited when I’m invited to dinner. At the time, I was a strict vegetarian—as repulsed by the killing of animals as I was by the smell and texture of meat. I was also in my early 20s, so it seemed that nothing could be more humiliating than alerting my new acquaintances to my dietary restrictions. I decided that I wouldn’t say anything, and in turn, they would never find out. Sound reasoning, I know. I’m still no paradigm of common sense, but at that age? When moving to San Jose, I packed knives in a plastic garbage bag.

The couple was in their late 40s and the wife was a painter. Their house was beautiful—ranch-style, floor-to-ceiling windows, her art all over the walls. Once the wine had been poured, the house tour completed, the wife stuck her hand into a puffy oven mitt. I recall this night so clearly, I remember wondering at what age one must acquire an oven mitt. She opened the oven and extracted from its fiery depths a giant turkey, the kind that families eat on Thanksgiving. She set the corpse on the table, right at the center. She and her husband took their seats. I followed suit. We all smiled at one another through the steam. And then the husband, as is the custom of American husbands, carved the bird with a great, buzzing knife.

It was not November. It was not even December or October. I was wearing a sundress. But in this house, we were behaving as though we were about to watch football in flannel pants. The husband motioned to me to hold up my plate.

I felt sweaty and a little bit faint, a little bit outside my body. I thought of my mother telling me that if something looks unappetizing to her but she doesn’t want to offend, she pushes the food around with her fork, to create the illusion that she’s eaten some. I pushed the turkey around with my fork. When I stopped pushing it around, it was glaringly obvious that my plate held no less turkey than before.

The oddest aspect of this meal was that there were no other dishes—no salad, no sweet potatoes, nary a dinner roll. I had brought stuffed dates for dessert, but those remained on the counter, covered in plastic wrap.

I speared a bite of meat with my fork. I was just going to do it. I was going to eat the fucking turkey like an adult. This was what adults did, I supposed—they ate turkey even though they were vegetarians.

Avoiding inhalations through the nose, I raised my fork to my mouth and opened wide. But before I could close my lips around the tines, I gagged. Tears filmed my vision, but I saw the couple see me. I hoped I was dreaming. I hoped I would wake up in bed and realize that there was never a giant turkey! There were never two kind hosts watching me reject their giant turkey!

I figured that gagging was worse than sitting there not eating, so I lowered my fork to my plate. I was so ashamed, I wanted to cry. But to their credit, the couple was gracious. We all pretended that I had eaten turkey. Then I filled up on wine and dates.

I don’t have any pictures from that year in San Jose (can you believe we used to go a year without taking pictures?), but here’s one I took the last time I was in California. It was 2021. I arrived in LA and instantly came down with Covid and had to quarantine in a hotel. This was the day I was finally set free.

I’m a pescatarian now, my dietary range wider than it was back then, my palate more developed, my willingness to speak up more developed, too. But I still have several food aversions. The smell of many fruits turns my stomach. So does the sight of anything milky. If you dare utter the word curdled in my presence, I will pass away. (Considering my subscriber list, I anticipate at least three texts that read, curdled.)

In travel circles, I often hear the sentiment that to appreciate another culture, one must eat that culture’s foods. In fact, unless you’re a closed-minded rube, you must eat anything that could possibly be deemed edible—cow brain, tuna eyeball, rotting shark carcass. I hear adventurous eating equated with virtue, although in my experience, some of the worst bigots have zero food hang-ups, while some of the most capital-E-Enlightened people are strict vegans.

Anyway, I don’t like the subtextual threat: Eat this or you’re closed-minded. Having preferences and boundaries hardly makes you closed-minded. Closed-minded is sneering at vegetarians, How do you live without bacon? Closed-minded is mocking peanut allergies. It’s throwing a dinner party and refusing to accommodate someone’s dairy intolerance. It’s scoffing at minced garlic in a jar because it’s not fresh garlic. It’s pushing just one beer on a sober person. It’s casting judgment on a woman who orders a salad, instead of on the insidious death grip of the diet industry. Or instead of casting no judgment at all because…maybe she just wants a damn salad. And anyway, why do they care what she puts in her body? Why do they care what she does with her body? Unfortunately, those are rhetorical questions because we all know the answers.

When I was 20, a Kabbalist rabbi told me that when we die, God will ask, Why didn’t you taste all my fruits?

Uh-oh. Would it be ok, I wondered, to respond, Because I don’t like a lot of them? Or, as I was taught to say when I learned my manners, I don’t care for them? When my niece was little, I expressed hatred for some food in her presence and she said, “You don’t have to say you hate it. Just say you’re not a match.” Indeed.

Making pizza with that wise niece, who is now so old, she reads my Substack.

I just googled the rabbi’s question and couldn’t find a reference to it. Maybe he was riffing? He also said that God will ask, Why didn’t you see my Alps?

That one I’ve done. His Alps > His fruit.

Of course, it is an enormous privilege to be a picky eater; it means I have plenty to eat. But trendy omnivorism seems to have gathered steam not in response to food shortage, but in the era of celebrity chefs. Maybe it was Anthony Bourdain who planted the seed 23 years ago in his memoir, Kitchen Confidential: “Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn.” I have many times quoted that line because it’s brilliantly funny—Hezbollah-like splinter faction!—but…why the hate, Chef?

I interview a lot of chefs. And there are two kinds—those who see diners’ food restrictions as an “irritant” and those who embrace the challenge. Likewise, there’s more than one kind of omnivore, and I know which kind I’d rather avoid. The guy who introduced me to Anthony Bourdain, a few years after Kitchen Confidential came out, also once tricked me into eating cracklin’s by letting me believe they were Funyons. Dick move, although only at this very moment is it dawning on me that Funyons probably aren’t vegetarian, either.

In 2015, I spent a dreamy month in Oaxaca, in the south of Mexico. There I tasted the richest, darkest chocolate. I learned about mole and cafe de olla and mezcal. In the mercados, where I heard all 16 Oaxacan languages (or at least some of them), I saw rows upon rows of chiles in every color. I also saw giant baskets filled with ants and grasshoppers, dried to crunchiness for high-protein snacking.

There are people who will tell you that international travel is meaningless if you don’t indulge in the local cuisine, but I am not one of those people. In Oaxaca, I indulged in neither ants nor grasshoppers. When in Rome and all that, but I couldn’t get past the prospect of a filament-thin leg stuck between my teeth. Just as it’s in poor taste to shame other cultures for eating what we would not eat, it’s pretentious to act superior for partaking of those dishes.

I’m all for reading up on a place before visiting, and learning some food customs so you’re not, like, a tourist wearing American flag pants, toting Heinz Ketchup in your fanny pack. And yes, in some countries, refusing food is offensive. But ultimately, you don’t have to taste all of anyone’s fruits. That’s the best part of being an adult.

Beyond food, there are so many ways to know a place: learning some of the language; snapping interesting photos; visiting the museums; seeing the art; hanging out with people who live there, asking them which foods they dislike. I suspect it would surprise the Omnivore Bros, but picky eaters exist all over the world.

Ok, I have to tell you one more thing about the California turkey couple: the husband was a catfish! The word catfish didn’t even exist back then, except in the context of the actual fish, so he was kind of a pioneer. He explained to me—in front of his wife!—that he posed on the Internet as a hot 19-year-old dominatrix woman and picked up male sex slaves. Virtually, he ordered the men around, making them send him money in the mail, sleep outside because they’d misbehaved, masturbate at his will, and so on.

What I’m saying is, there are more embarrassing things to be than a person who doesn’t eat turkey.