So, a vegan walked into TGI Friday’s…
Yeah, sounds ridiculous, right? Well I would have known that if I had been there before becoming a vegan! Check out what happened when I took some Australian friends to TGI Friday’s in this vegan diary entry.
Food Rules (written July 23, 2010)
Yesterday I was given a book by my colleague called Food Rules by Michael Pollan. It’s a thin book, it only took an hour to read, but it is very good! It is a collection of rules and sayings about what one should eat, when, and how much. Some of them made me laugh, like “It’s not food if it arrived through the window of your car”, and others taught me something I didn’t know, like “Avoid food products with the wordoid ‘lite’ or the terms ‘low-fat’ or ‘non-fat’ in their names”. As it turns out, these “lighter” products are usually higher in salt and sugar to make up for the flavor lost when the fat is removed. Sure enough, I compared my lite peanut butter to my housemate’s regular peanut butter, and even though mine had less fat and less calories, it also had more sodium and more sugar. D’oh!
After work I had to fill in some time before I met a friend for dinner so I went to Borders and browsed their Vegan section. I was looking for a book that wasn’t filled with recipes and was different to my Complete Idiot’s Guide (aka my idiot book, which still makes me laugh) but I couldn’t find one in that section. So, being desperate to find something, I went to the Diet section, a section I always avoid. There are plenty of other vegan books there, but they aren’t labeled as such, so it took a fair bit of browsing to find one that I wanted. I’m so glad I did that though because I ended up buying Diet for a New America by John Robbins (of the Robbins family that formed Baskin-Robbins ice cream!) and WOW, I read 30 pages on the train this morning and I am enthralled! I can’t wait to read more! So far he is detailing cases where animals have shown compassion to humans and other animals and saved lives- in order to prove that animals do in fact have souls (to contradict the belief that animals do not have souls and cannot make moral decisions) as well as to put the reader in the right mindframe for the rest of the book, I suppose. It certainly has me hooked (so to speak)!
After I bought the book I met my friend and we went to dinner. She’s from Australia so I thought it would be fun to eat at TGI Friday’s because it’s a pretty American place (and there weren’t many other places to eat in the area). I had never been there before, and it was terrible! There was not one dish on the menu that was suitable for vegans! I couldn’t pick a dish and say “no cheese, please” or “no bacon, please”. Every dish had at least 2 animal products on them. Even the salads were filled with multiple cheeses and meats, and covered in ranch dressing! So I asked the waiter if I could order some sides and he wasn’t going to let me until I explained that I’m a vegan and there is absolutely nothing else on the menu that I can eat. So I ordered broccoli and some french fries but he came back to say that they ran out of broccoli. Noooo!! So he suggested I have the fried beans, and I agreed but then spent the next 10 minutes worrying whether the beans are fried in butter. I thought he meant green beans. Silly Melissa! As it turns out they were out of beans as well so I had to eat french fries and nothing else! But when we got the check it actually said ‘baked beans’ so I’m glad they didn’t have any- that wouldn’t have made my meal taste any more refreshing! I wish they’d had the broccoli!
Anyway I regretted my TGI Friday’s adventure later that night when my stomach started taught me a lesson about greasy food. I felt so sick! No more greasy fries for me!! And, of course, no more TGI Friday’s, either.
