What We Talk About When We Talk About Cheese

One thing that will probably prove to be an adjustment over time is giving up cheese -- though for the foreseeable future I'll probably still allow myself tastes of it every once in a while.

For instance, last week I was invited to lunch by a PR person who has been some help to me of late and whom I'd never met. She was treating, and she suggested an excellent Italian restaurant down the street from my office. This is a fine-dining place, not one where you can easily choose something like spaghetti with marinara (not on the menu) or simply ask for olive-oil-and-garlic substitution (well, maybe you can, but I haven't tried there). Everything that didn't have meat had cheese, so I ordered the vegetable lasagna, which had cheese. And probably cream.

I haven't yet missed cheese. Even before becoming vegan, I'd been reading a lot about how artery-clogging and caloric cheese is -- a fact I'd always conveniently ignored -- and had already started cutting back. While I love a good Brie or Saint-Andre at a party, I hardly ever buy either one. I do admit to usually having crappy 2-percent American cheese slices in the fridge at all times; so now I'll have a supply of crappy soy American cheese on hand -- what's the difference? Parmesan is great on pasta, true, but does pasta with a good, fresh, flavorful sauce really need it? I honestly don't think so; we're largely conditioned to add it. In sandwiches and burritos, I find that avocado or guacamole provides a nice element of creaminess, such that I don't even miss cheese.

For now, in restaurants I'm not being as strictly vegan as I could be, though I have to say I am being a lot more vegan in restaurants than I expected to be. When I told a friend in December that I was starting to be vegan, I clarified that it would be "mainly in what I cook for myself -- it's too hard to be vegan when out." Well, I already don't think that's true.

I am making an effort to avoid egg and dairy at lunch and have been eating very well -- almost indistinguishably from how I'd been eating before: Yesterday I brought a sandwich of "chicken" salad I made from Gardein Chick'n Filets, fantastic vegan mayo I made for the first time (one of the coolest, healthiest, why-didn't-I-try-this-years-ago? surprises so far), and my own homemade bread. Today, eating out with a friend, I had tofu and broccoli with Thai basil sauce -- no different from what I would have ordered at this restaurant two months ago in my non-vegan vegetarian days. The day before yesterday I had roasted vegetables over greens at a favorite lunch spot, where I now merely have to choose certain delicious options over other delicious options I used to order (i.e., those with cheese).

Having my options narrowed in certain places doesn't seem like a hardship at all when the discoveries multiply every day.