skinny vegetarian

Bob and I have started a diet. Now that the worst of the move is over with and we're living in a part of the city with good, fairly cheap vegetarian, vegan and health food restaurants, it is easier to commit ourselves to losing the excess we comforted ourselves with during the past year. The weight has been affecting our health for a while now. Bob is pre-diabetic and my cholesterol is way up. And granted we're both in our late forties, but our joints have been aching way more than they should. So for two weeks we've been eating healthier and walking in the evenings, and the pounds have begun to come off.

Last night we ate at Angelica's Kitchen, one of the most popular vegetarian restaurants in the East Village. It is a classic vegetarian restaurant in every sense of the word. Men with thick heads of hair, beards and Birkenstocks, women in macramé vests, tall white guys with tiny Asian girlfriends, cat hair on everyone's coats: if it were 1978 and Vermont or Berkeley I might understand, but these were 20-somethings in New York City in 2006. Where did someone in his or her twenties learn to wear macramé?

What struck me the most was the number of patrons who were bone skinny. I mean Karen-Carpenter-in-her-final-weeks skinny. I felt compelled to do an intervention on the whole crowd. I wanted to stand up and yell, "Eat something! Everyone of you! Order at least two more things from the menu."

At the table to my right was a gaunt man and his girlfriend in a puff-sleeved, high-button-collared "Victoriana" sweater that she must have hand knitted from a pattern she found in a Portland, Maine thrift shop, circa 1974. And (I'm not joking), she wore her hair up in a bun with spit curls on the sides. Each time I looked at her, the edges of my vision went gauzy and Pachelbel's Canon in D Major played in my head. They spent a half hour looking through a packet of photos of his cat and his sister's new baby, ate only half their food and had the rest wrapped up to go.

There were two small women at the table to my left who were each no taller than 4' 8" and whose weight together couldn't have added up to my target weight. They both spoke with little girl voices to the waiter as they ordered the mixed sprouts and the "Wee Dragon Bowl" (I kid you not), which they were sharing. You have to cultivate smallness of these proportions, I thought. I was waiting for them to sing the "Lullaby League" song.

But I was particularly distracted by one extremely gaunt woman as she and her boyfriend waited for about ten minutes to be seated. She had rail thin legs, sunken cheeks and boney fingers. I wanted to scold her and her boyfriend for even walking in the door. "You get out of here and go eat some meat, damn it!" I wanted to march right up to them wagging my pudgy finger. "And you, don't you let her come back in here until she's put on at least twenty pounds!"

There wasn't much humor in the crowd either. People were polite, smiling, friendly, like librarians at a particularly good OCLC seminar. But there never were any real bursts of hearty laughter or wise cracks from the wait staff.

When I asked for seltzer with lemon, our skinny waiter replied, "We don't have seltzer. Nothing with bubbles."

Before I could think, I replied earnestly, "Bubbles aren't bad."

"Who said bubbles are bad," he replied humorlessly. I didn't know how to respond to that. I just assumed that in vegetarian restaurants omissions from the menu are made for some good PC reasons, like, someone discovered that bubbles affect leaf digestion or fish are force-fed beans to produce carbonation in captivity.

At any rate, the important thing is that the food is very good at Angelica's, if stereotypical. Spices and herbs are a little over used to mask the taste of soy products and the house salad was big enough to choke a cow. The three bean chili was tasty, so I left feeling full. But I realized that part of my problem, and Bob's as well, is that we love good food: foie gras, confit, tandoori, osso bucco, hasenpfeffer and all. The skinny vegetarians will not be able to save us from ourselves. Their pallets are not ours and I'm not sure they'd have the energy to do so on their diets anyway. We've got work of our own to do.