Meat-Tasting Vegetarian Chef

In this week's Dish, Andre Christopher, chef of the new Grocery Bistro, explains how he deals with being both a vegetarian and the chef of a restaurant serving meat:

“I taste stuff, obviously, but I just take it out of my mouth,” he explains. “My palate knows. For taste you just need your tongue and your brain.”

This quote got me thinking about why a vegetarian chef would be preparing mostly meat dishes. I count one veggie appetizer and two veggie mains on the tasty-looking menu. Anyone else think this is weird? So, Chef Andre tastes and then spits?

When Chef Andre tastes and spits, animals die. In fact, if he is a vegetarian because he values animal life and the planet's resources, there are some big inconsistencies here: 1) What's a vegetarian doing serving (and thus promoting) charcuterie?; and 2) By spitting, animals die without providing Chef Andre with sustenance, and thus the chef must seek food elsewhere, which uses the planet's resources, if not also its animals.

Are there many vegetarian chefs serving up charcuterie, lamb chops, and ribeyes? Is spitting common practice?

Wikipedia lists a bunch of reasons for being a vegetarian. I'm wondering why Chef Andre is a vegetarian and whether his reasons are consistent with his job. If it's because of ethics or religion, you'd think that he wouldn't be comfortable handling animals and serving them to his customers. It it's because of environmental reasons, he himself is hurting the environment by wasting the food he spits out. Plus, if he is a vegetarian because of the environment, what's he doing buying and serving animals that deplete our planet's resources more than eating vegetables? There are other reasons for vegetarianism, but none that seem to fit here. For example, it can't be that Chef Andre doesn't like the taste of meat.

The only reason I can come up with that isn't plainly inconsistent with Chef Andre's job is that he is a vegetarian purely for health reasons. (Of course, some would dispute that a vegetarian diet is healthier than a balanced diet that includes some animal products. But, given that I'm searching for a reason for Chef Andre's choices, I'm going to assume that health is a valid justification for vegetarianism.) One could argue that he's made the choice to be healthier by being a vegetarian, but has no problem serving animals to his customers because that's what they want to eat. He's not judging his customers - - he's just giving them what they want. One could argue that eating vegetarian because of health reasons is not an ethical or moral decision. In this sense, then, Chef Andre is no different from a chef on a strict diet who cooks up fatty, fried foods. He just looks at food content, rather than fat and calories, in determining what to eat. (Of course, vegetarian food (french fries, anyone?) can be unhealthy, but I'll do the Chef the favor of not going there, either.)

I suppose, with this health-based explanation, I've worked myself out of the hole I found myself in this morning. If anyone else can provide some additional insight, though, that'd be great.

In any event, I think the menu + BYOB should make for a great evening and hope to find myself at the Grocery Bistro before too long. While I'm sure others will disagree, I have no doubt that a vegetarian can put together pretty great meat-focused food. For example, how good does this look?

Ronna

i dont trust a vegetarian chef to make meat dishes correctly. Maybe its just me.

I know several people who were meat eaters who had to become vegetarian for health, one has lupus and the other has colon problems. Both cook meat for others with great success however neither of them taste it. There is also a vegetarian chef at Citizen Kane in Geneva who makes great meat dishes but also has a number of vegetarian options on the menu.

Among the seemingly bizarre inconsistencies that exist in human nature, I think this one is low on the list. There are meat-cooking vegetarians, environmentalists who own gas stations, lawyers who knowingly disobay legal speed limits, and politicians who believe in anarchy. Maybe this chef simply needs the paycheck and/or likes other aspects of the job.

Not only vegetarians, but chefs observing dietary prohibitions refrain from eating the product they serve. In my work the vegetarian employees often rely on my palate to inform customers regarding our meat products.

While I agree that this is sort of low on the list of life's consistencies and if this chef wants to cook meat while remaining a vegetarian in theory, more power to him, but I wonder what other vegetarians would think about this practice and if they would think that he's no longer a vegetarian just by putting meat in his mouth. Seems akin to the Clintonian defense to smoking pot, i.e., I didn't inhale it so I didn't do it.

Is spitting and not swallowing meat a loophole in vegetarianism?

Perhaps this goes back to another discussion. I would assume that chefs become so to communicate something. If you're a vegetarian, for whatever reason, and in the business of communicating with your food, one would guess that you want to communicate something about vegetarian cuisine.

However, your customer base may not be interested in what you have to say - and may shun a vegetarian restaurant if you open one. I'm put in mind of Lidia Bastianich, who in her Chef's Story interview, described making Italian-American foods to keep her restaurants open, while offering traditional dishes from her home country - sometimes for free. I wonder if this Chef is doing the best he can to present his ideas within the limitations of a public who might not otherwise hear them.

Or, applying Occam's Razor, if this is about the non-health reasons - maybe this Chef is concerned only with his own eating behavior as regards consumption, considers cooking to be a job, and considers other people's food choices to be their own business - in which case, I commend him.

Mhays wrote:I would assume that chefs become so to communicate something.

That's a nice, romantic sentiment which I'm sure holds some truth in a small percentage of cases. Chefs become chefs for all sorts of reasons. In my experience, the most common of those is that they failed at holding other jobs or completing traditional schooling, and were desperate to find a set of like-minded misfits to give them a paycheck. I say that while holding the utmost respect and admiration for the profession and many of the people in it.

You could easily say the same about actors...but nobody becomes a successful actor without being able to communicate. By the same token, if you're running the show at a restaurant, and people have something to say about your food other than "mgrhp." you are using food to communicate.

Mgrhp

aschie30 wrote:Is spitting and not swallowing meat a loophole in vegetarianism?

Depends what "Is" is.

I am a vegetarian and have gone as far as removing the face off of soft-shell crabs for my husband's meal. He said they were delicious and I promised him that I could not ever do that again. I became a vegetarian for health reasons, but my entire family , including my little girl http://picasaweb.google.com/pairs4life/ ... 2914775266 eats meat.

I have heard of folks who eat pork and fish call themselves vegetarians, it used to bother me, now I just tell folks that I eat nothing with a nervous system or no animal flesh (that seems to get me away from the folks who want to serve me chicken or fish). It seems that there are a lot of people, not on this forum of course, who think vegetarians eat animals. Funny, my husband, an omnivore, is a fly-fisherman, but he always refers to the taking of a trout's life as killing it. He does not do it.

pairs4life wrote:...now I just tell folks that I eat nothing with a nervous system or no animal flesh (that seems to get me away from the folks who want to serve me chicken or fish). It seems that there are a lot of people, not on this forum of course, who think vegetarians eat animals.

In my experiences, many more people think all vegetarians are vegan. Which is just as confusing.

Also, do plants not have a very basic nervous system? I'm not as up to date in the scientific community as I once was, but I'll ask a biologist friend of mine. (Not trying to attack your statement, it just brought up a question in my head)

I've no way of knowing if what he is doing is inconsistent in any philosophical sense. It would interesting to know more about his vegetarianism. It does sound kind of bizarre to me. I was a vegetarian for between 5-10 years. My stated reasons at the time were "moral" but the word "aesthetic" might be more apt. I didn't like the whole idea of eating dead animals. Maybe that's why I can't imagine doing what he does. When I did happen to taste meat-- by accident, or the times I felt I had to eat it to be a polite guest-- it tasted really, really gross to me. It was just such a horrible sensation, I can't imagine signing up for that on a regular basis. I guess if he tastes it day in and day out, it doesn't bother him.

Llama wrote:
In my experiences, many more people think all vegetarians are vegan. Which is just as confusing.

Also, do plants not have a very basic nervous system? I'm not as up to date in the scientific community as I once was, but I'll ask a biologist friend of mine. (Not trying to attack your statement, it just brought up a question in my head)

It must be these small communities I travel in with my fishing husband, vegan would never even come up .

As to your botany question I don't think so but I guess I will keep saying animal flesh for now.

I read this item last night. I'd consider it an exotic and somewhat peculiar form of bulimia, in a way. No bingeing - just purging.

Also, while plants have a vascular system, they do not have a nervous system as such. How the Venus fly trap and the so-called "sensitive" plant figure into the scenario is a bit too far off-topic to be discussed here, IMO.

I saw this post this morning and have been trying to figure out what I think of it all day.

My first thought was that if he's a vegetarian cooking at a restaurant with a menu that meat-centric, he can't really care about the food he's cooking, right? I mean can you really be passionate about preparing food you don't/can't to eat?

But then I started thinking that just because he's not passionate about it doesn't mean he's not good. How many of us can say we're passionate about our jobs? I really like my job, I enjoy it, I'm good at it, but am I passionate about it? No. So why do I assume that a chef who isn't passionate about not only cooking, but the specific kind of food he's cooking at his current restaurant, doesn't put out good, even outstanding food? After all, being a chef is his job, and his personal likes/dislikes/convictions don't necessarily have anything to do with it.

I guess at the end of the day I think it's odd, sure, but I don't think I'd be any more or less likely to eat there because of it.

eli wrote:I saw this post this morning and have been trying to figure out what I think of it all day.

My first thought was that if he's a vegetarian cooking at a restaurant with a menu that meat-centric, he can't really care about the food he's cooking, right? I mean can you really be passionate about preparing food you don't/can't to eat?

But then I started thinking that just because he's not passionate about it doesn't mean he's not good. How many of us can say we're passionate about our jobs? I really like my job, I enjoy it, I'm good at it, but am I passionate about it? No. So why do I assume that a chef who isn't passionate about not only cooking, but the specific kind of food he's cooking at his current restaurant, doesn't put out good, even outstanding food? After all, being a chef is his job, and his personal likes/dislikes/convictions don't necessarily have anything to do with it.

I guess at the end of the day I think it's odd, sure, but I don't think I'd be any more or less likely to eat there because of it.

I think you make some very good points in this post. I know some superb chefs that are not all that passionate about food. They are passionate about making people happy, however. They experiment, practice, taste, and seek feedback constantly because they want more than anything to make food that people say they love. At the end of the day, what makes these chefs happiest is not perfecting some culinary school technique, but knowing that they made other people happy. Nothing wrong with that, in my book.

Kennyz wrote:...lawyers who knowingly disobay legal speed limits...

*gasp*

pairs4life wrote:... now I just tell folks that I eat nothing with a nervous system...

I have a good friend Terry who for years* would only eat the flesh of bivalves, since they have no brain and an extremely rudimentary nervous system of any sort. Might be worth considering...

-Dan

* He's now an omnivore