Have you always been vegetarian?

At a party a few years ago, a woman asked me if I had been vegetarian all my life and I responded yes. She was visibly shocked but shocked me as well with her next question. "You seem to have such lovely soft skin and you are telling me you do not eat any fish or seafood? May I touch your skin?" As embarassed as I was, I said "Sure", thinking to myself does this woman really live in New York in the day and age of food choice excess? Quite pleased with the results that human skin does not grow scales or thorns or what ever else the lady expected, she wasn't quite the newly converted vegetarian but slightly more educated.

It is one of the most common questions I have been asked ever since I moved to the US and especially in my work environment. "Why are you vegetarian?" or "Have you always been vegetarian?" No one asks me why am I Hindu or why do I wear glasses or some other mundane facet of my life that sets me apart. However the ability to resist mountains of meat swimming piled near my restricted valley of greens on the table does not fail to get a laugh or two.

Recently my standard answer is that I don't eat anything that had a mother or a pair of eyes (the idea is to try and retain the microbacteria in food and eggs out of the filer). It is debatable whether potato fails my filter because it has eyes - that is why the emphasis on "pair".

As an Indian who grew up in a vegetarian family, there was no reason to break the family tradition and and go looking for the mountains of meat from my green valley. When I moved to Boston, thankfully being a town populated by students from all over the world, finding vegetarian food was never a problem. It was during my years at school when thanks to one of my best friends, I discovered the dormant cook in me. Those evenings of cooking potpourri, bonhomie, random conversations in the common kitchen of my dorm with assorted residents are my brightest memories from school years in the US.

Once I started cooking, I expanded my array of cooking ingredients manifold but there was even less reason to visit aninal kingdom for my ingredients list.

Over the last few years, it would be fair to say that I have changed in many ways, some superficial and some fundamental. Being vegetarian is the one thing that hasn't changed and it is almost like an anchor to my personality. I have no motivation to change now. I cherish this strand of continuity between life in India and life in the US.

So there, I have answered the question I am asked most frequently. Watch out this space for some of my favorite recipes, NY restaurants. If my voice could reach Zagat, I would shout aloud for a vegetarian's Zagat but till then....