April 2006
I've Just One Beef...
Munich is no place to entertain a vegan
Sure, we need it to live and can derive some serious pleasure from it, but perhaps the most powerful attribute of food is its ability to tie us to other people. We use it to stay in contact, say thank you or I’m sorry, celebrate, congratulate and come together. Eating with someone can be something extremely intimate, and a meal is much more enjoyable when you have someone to share it with.
So, after months of being away from home, I was hoping to use food as a way to reconnect with my Mom as she prepared to make her first trip to Europe all the way from the US to visit me. I felt adventurous and pretty darn proud of myself for making it on my own in a foreign land. I couldn’t wait to introduce her to the new culture that was slowly becoming a part of me, telling her all my exotic tales about living abroad over some
Schweinshax’n,
Apfelkuchen and
Augustiner beer.
Easier said than done. Mom’s a vegan—which means she doesn’t eat meat. Or dairy products. Or any animal products, for that matter. She’d never touch anything processed or containing sugar, and doesn’t drink alcohol either. Nevertheless, as soon as her plane touched the ground, I selfishly took her straight to a Bavarian beer hall—secretly hoping she’d bend some of the rules and take a bite out of the country I was starting to feel so at home in.
As I settled into the cozy wooden booth, cherishing the sound of clinking beer mugs, Mom squirmed uncomfortably in her seat, struggling just to breathe in the smoky air. After poring over the English menu, she closed it quietly, looked me in the eye and said, “Alright, so just what am I supposed to eat here?” With that, I got up to go ask one of the hefty waitresses whether or not there were any vegetarian dishes. I don’t even think she answered me—the look on her face told me it was time we sought out other dining options.
Unbelievable discipline or just inhumane self-torture? My Mom’s reasons for going vegan aren’t because she feels sorry for the animals. No, my Mom maintains her diet based on tofu, nuts, leafy greens, legumes, tempeh, rice, soy milk, fruit and vegetables because she believes it’s healthier. “Processing foods kills the
life force in them,” she always says. “My diet keeps the body-mind complex peaceful, harmonious and strong.”
The next day, Mom and I took a meander around the
Fasching stalls on Marienplatz, where I debated whether to sink my teeth into some warm, crumbly (and processed)
Lebkuchen or indulge in chunks of chocolate-covered fruit. But those cravings quickly disappeared when I noticed Mom felt terribly out of place—and had nothing to eat. Dining out became a daily ordeal and the tension between us was growing. We went from restaurant to restaurant, making the weary walk up to the menu posted on each door, praying there would miraculously be a vegetarian dish on offer. No such luck. Meat was an obvious no-go, pasta was also out, since it contains egg. So that left salad and single servings of sauerkraut. “But Mom, we’re in
Germany,” I’d insist. I figured if she couldn’t eat the food, at least she could soak up some more of the culture. So off to another Bavarian beer hall we went.
It was by the end of day three, when I saw Mom picking so miserably through the soggy, white clumps of shredded cabbage, that it hit me: I’d been forcing all this Germanic stuff on her, thinking it was the only way she’d really understand what I was doing and experiencing here. I was trying to make her conform to something that just wasn’t, well, her. The pangs of guilt set in fast, for letting something as small as a hunk of
Currywurst stand in the way of making the very most of the little time I had with her. So I asked for the check and took her straight to the nearest
Reformhaus. Mom was like a kid in a candy shop—ogling aisles of organic vegetables, whole-grain granola bars, nut mixes, sugar-free bonbons and sunflower crackers. We had a riot checking food label after food label on some pretty outlandish vegan products (
Tofu-naise and
Soja und Gemüse Leberkäse, to name just a couple). It became like a game, trying to find anything at all made from whole grains (not white flour), honey (not sugar) and without dairy products. Finally, we made our way out with arms full of soy milk, muesli and some bizarre-looking cake with sprouts. Sure, we could have checked
www.happycow.com/europe that night for a listing of some vegetarian restaurants in town. But, instead, we decided to pig out on the muesli in her hotel room for dinner, where I told her all about my expat experiences in Munich in some serious mother-daughter bonding—without the
Schweinshax’n.
