Saturday, August 12, 2006

Meat salads

Here we are in New Orleans, this year's home of the American Psychological Association's annual convention. The city is hot and steamy, and sadly it's still fairly disheveled. But the convention's fun, and the air conditioning is divine, and hey, it's more or less a vacation.

New Orleans cuisine, however, leaves something to be desired. I realize I am biased, as I'm (a) vegetarian and (b) a picky eater in general. But dude. Everything here has meat, sometimes two or three kinds in a single dish. The red beans and rice has meat. The jambalaya has meat. The gumbo has meat. Even the salads have meat.

I am not making this up. At the convention center they are selling lovely-looking, pre-made green salads topped with meat. And not scoops of tuna salad, either. I'm talking strips of chicken, slices of beef, and some pretty sizable shrimp on otherwise perfectly appetizing beds of lettuce, tomato, and cucumber.

Yes, I know, this is the South, where the bigger and meatier, the better. But meat salads?

It's a shame I can't survive on coffee and beignets alone.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

....have you tried the cherry meat shake? How about the vegetarian stir fry, NOW WITH MEAT!!!!! How about the MEAT MEAT MEAT TOFU EGG f***ing MEAT MEAT with a side of pig's blood and the hind legs of a virgin goat? (I'm getting all Canaanite and everything).

When I was in Macedonia, there was this more-or-less jambalaya that had almost every meat yielding animal...cow...pig...duck...lamb.....another pig that looked at this one guy funny...fish….horse...chicken...tomato, plum brandy and ethnic tension