by howardt » Tue Aug 20, 2013 11:31 pm
Just came back from our annual Maine vacation. The food has always been spectacular - lobsters, steak, pizza, fried clams, onion rings, blueberry pancakes, clam chowder. I've enjoyed it all, year after year.
But now I'm on the plan, can't eat it and don't want it. I've eaten at restaurants since starting the diet, but eating out now and then is different from eating out every meal.
Just some observations:
None of the restaurants we visited treated salad as a main course. The salads were uninspired, with 3 or 4 ingredients (iceberg being the main one), and the portion size was less than 1/4 the size I normally eat.
The best salad I had was at a cafe at the LL Bean store in Freeport, called Nuts and Berries - several kinds of lettuce, tomato, cucumber, walnuts, sunflower seeds, raisins and dried cranberries. Still not big enough, but compared to some of the other restaurants, really not too bad.
Italian - I tried ordering plain pasta topped with steamed vegetables. Whole wheat pasta was not available. I ordered it anyway, but the pasta was cooked in oily water.
Mexican food - the waiter claimed they were unable to steam any vegetables, and every item other than pico de gallo, including the beans, was made with oil.
At Jonathan's in Ogunquit, the waitress checked with the chef, and they made a terrific dish of rice, beans and vegetables. No oil at all. The vegetables were delicious, and were not wet, so I don't know how they were cooked. I was touched that they took my requests seriously.
Other than Jonathan's I wound up eating whatever tiny salad was available and a baked potato. From a local supermarket I bought salad in a plastic bag, fruit, some cans of beans, corn and chickpeas, and ate in the hotel after meals.
On the way home we stopped at a brewery that had quite a few vegetarian choices. My family had meat burgers and I had a veggie burger. The veggie burger barely held together and was about half the thickness of their meat burgers.
I assume a place serving vegetarian dishes has some familiarity with vegetarians, and therefore should know that we eat food for sustenance. We aren't all dieters, trying to shed pounds.
They ought to know that vegetables are less calorie-dense than meat. So what sense does it make to serve a 1/8 lb veggie burger, but a 1/4 lb meat burger? Assuming the beans and tofu in the veggie burger are half the calories of meat by weight, they should be serving a 1/2 lb veggie burger to provide customers with the same calories as a 1/4 lb of meat.
Put another way, if I ate all my meals there I would slowly starve.
I had a wonderful time with my family on vacation. But I am really sick of explaining my needs to restaurants, and was so happy to come home to my beans, my soup and my salads.
My plan for next time is to make better use of the hotel fridge and bring plenty of prepared meals, so I will have something better than canned beans and bags of lettuce to eat at the hotel.
Let's go invent tomorrow, rather than worrying about what happened yesterday.
-- Steve Jobs