FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Eating less meat without going vegetarian

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Food Editor

You can, of course, switch to other meats until the concern fades or your questions are answered. Or, you could become a vegetarian, at least temporarily, taking the opportunity to learn new cooking techniques, recipes and shopping strategies.

It is a lot easier to become a vegetarian now than when I stopped eating meat for a while in the late 1970s.

Then, there were few convenience foods of any kind, let alone meatless ones, such soy-based "cheese" and "hamburger," fatless refried beans, grain-based milks, ice-creams and other products widely available in supermarkets.

However, it is just as tricky to eat healthily as a vegetarian as it is to choose wisely on a diet that includes meat. I confess that one reason I became a vegetarian all those many years ago was that I overheard a nutritionist say it was tough to keep weight ON a vegetarian. "That's for me," I thought.

But I didn't then realize the difference between a vegan diet (one that includes no animal foods at all) and a lacto-ovo vegetarian diet (one that includes no meat or fish but that may contain dairy foods and eggs). I blithely consumed omelets and cheese casseroles and whole-grain toast slathered in butter and — no surprise here — didn't lose a pound.

So I gave myself over to "Laurel's Kitchen" for a while and tried making casseroles made with soybeans (exquisite drudgery and the end result never tasted like anything but dirt) and baking whole grain breads (a most enjoyable activity if you have a lot of time to spend at home). And I made an honest attempt to appreciate sprouts (I still loathe them).

Remember: This was before bread machines and almost before food processors; before arugula and radicchio were available in the grocery store, before tofu (on the Mainland, where I then lived), let alone Tofutti and Silk. It was a lot of work and the food had a discouraging bland, brown sameness.

On top of that, our meat-mad society burdened vegetarians with spurious worries about "getting sufficient nutrition" and "assuring complete proteins." (Truth is, darned few people in this country, then or now, need to worry about getting sufficient nutrition — for most of us, the issue is quite the opposite.)

In any case, about this time the culinary world was exploding with new ideas, tools, influences, celebrity chefs, regional cuisines, products and trends. Soon, I was an omnivore again.

But in recent years, as I've looked back into vegetarianism and the nutritional and food safety issues facing our society — mad cow disease among them — I've concluded that there is a great deal of wisdom to becoming at least a "semi-tarian," eating animal foods sparingly and placing fresh, seasonal, naturally low-fat and whole foods at the center of the plate.

You still won't find me replacing a steak with a soybean casserole. But as my husband and I embark on a revised eating pattern (influenced only slightly by the mad cow thing), our menu this evening will include organic "wild" green salad with toasted nuts and a few Parmesan shavings, a plate of herbed beans and brown basmati rice (made in minutes in the pressure cooker) and nonfat fruit sorbet. And we'll be just as happy as if we'd eaten steak.