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Image: ONA
Throw your preconceptions in the wok; veganism and ‘foodie’ culture may not be as at odds as you once thought. By ancient logic, the two should be enemies, but by modern logic, there’s nothing stopping them from buddying up like red wine and spaghetti.
As
CNN Travel reports, “The Michelin Guide has awarded one of its coveted stars to a French vegan restaurant for the first time.”
“ONA, which stands for Origine Non Animale or Non-Animal Origin, has been handed the accolade in the newest edition of the long-running culinary guide.”
ONA is located in a small village called Arès, near Bordeaux. It is the first vegan establishment to ever appear in the Michelin Guide to France. The guide has been going since 1900.
Grains, begone!
Credit: Josy Bloggs
Back in 2002, the science writer Gary Taubes was, to much of the medical establishment, a pariah. Taubes had authored an article for
The New York Times Magazine called “What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?”
From the piece’s beginning to its end, Taubes cast doubt on the medical orthodoxy that low-fat diets were helpful for weight loss. Low-fat diets, he said, were likely to be partially responsible for America’s ballooning obesity crisis (mirrored here in Britain). The evidence was beginning to indicate, Taubes wrote, that a diet low in carbs and high in fat, however – eggs, bacon, butter and so on – would, counter-intuitively, make its eaters slimmer and longer-lived.
In his incredibly entertaining book The Body: A Guide for Occupants, Bill Bryson opens the chapter Food, Glorious Food, with a quote from Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s 1825 treatise on the mouth and ingestion The Physiology of Taste: “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are”. Overweight.
I have my reasons. Being passionately curious about food and enjoying the experience of eating, sharing, celebrating, and using food to reconcile the conflicts of the day, are some of them. And when I pick up Nathan H. Lents’ latest book Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, From Pointless Bones to Broken Genes, and read that as humans, we have a tendency to gain weight easily and to lose it with great difficulty because this is what made sense in the Pleistocene savannas, I am consoled.
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Before I say what I’m about to say, a declaration: I love my children. The crystalline beauty of their minds – unexpected insights at every turn – and guileless love of me, and humanity, often make me feel that
this is what it means to be alive.
But: I can hardly stand to be at the dinner table with them. It’s not the vision I had of myself, before I became a parent.
Credit:Illustration: Dionne Gain
So, most nights – for, oh, a year or possibly two – I haven’t been. The second after I plonk their dinner plates in front of them at the kitchen table, I casually say, I’ll be back soon, and nonchalantly saunter to the stairs like a dinner party guest who’s heading to your bathroom to snoop around your cabinet. Once I’m out of sight, I