If you’re wondering about it from my vegetarian posts, no, I haven’t become a vegetarian.
What drew me to explore vegetarian restaurants is what I’ve learned about food these last few months, which made me look for places that serve nutritious and environmentally friendly foods.
This post is about that learning journey, but I want to warn you that it’s slightly over 2000 words long. If you don’t want to go through all that, Mark Bittman summarizes the important points in his much more entertaining TED talk, which will only take you 19 minutes to watch.
Living the Life
It all kick-started for me when a friend introduced me to British chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall‘s TV show River Cottage. I instantly fell in love with it.
In 1997, Hugh moved from the big city to the countryside for an experiment in self-sufficiency. He learned how to grow his own crops, rear his own animals and every episode he took the best advantage of these beautiful harvests, using his culinary skills to whip up delectable dishes. Here’s a taste of the first episode:
Watching River Cottage made me realize how far removed I was from where my food came from. Whereas Hugh grew and slaughtered his own meat for example, I thought of my meat coming from the supermarket in clear plastic wraps. The sources of my food were intellectual facts in my head, but never something I had experienced firsthand, and it made me interested to learn more about food and where it came from.