I am what I like to call a fishitarian, and have been that way for 10 years: I don’t eat red meat, pork, or poultry, but I’ll gladly stuff my face with (nearly) anything hauled out of the water. I settled on this dietary lifestyle after watching my family’s long, convoluted metamorphosis through various forms of vegetarianism.
When I was about 10, my dad decided he wasn’t going to eat red meat anymore; by the time I was in high school, this personal decision of his had evolved into the near-complete vegetarianism of the entire family. Except me. A moody adolescent, I wasn’t buying what they were selling. I worked at McDonald’s at the time, and would luxuriate in lavish displays of lip-smacking over Quarter Pounders brought home from work while my parents and brother would sneer in disgust. I remember their 5-year experiment with a vegan lifestyle after I moved away from home (ah, that disappointing first Thanksgiving!) as a blurry, horrifying time in which my parents lost their sense of humor and spent hours reading package labels in the grocery store. My younger brother, who had morphed from a passive participant to a raging militant, was one of those vegetarians (we all know at least one) who hated vegetables. He subsisted almost entirely on a diet of bean burritos (hold the cheese, please!) from Taco Bell.
Having this kind of history, it was a bit surprising to find this gift from my parents on our doorstep a few days before Christmas:
It’s a Coleman Road Trip Grill LXE [$149.99]. Quasi-vegetarians and carnivores alike will find this cute contraption nothing less than a pleasure to incorporate into their cooking arsenal. It’s tiny (just 36 inches and 50 pounds), easy to fold and pull with a handle, and its gas heat packs a surprising wallop. The legs even come off so you can use it on a tabletop. Our car has a picnic table built into the trunk (I admit it swayed me to buy the car, what can I say? A BUILT-IN PICNIC TABLE, people!), so it’s only natural that we should need other similarly collapsible outdoorsy stuff. Dare I say our next purchase should be a tent-thingy?
Weirdly enough, I’m now the only person in my family who closely approximates a vegetarian; my parents and brother shocked me this year by admitting that they eat poultry again. I wouldn’t be surprised if soon they are drying their own raccoon jerky and attending Ted Nugent concerts. For former vegans, surely this is a small conceptual leap.
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