I don’t eat meat: Traveling with a special diet

As soon as I put it in my mouth I knew, even though I hadn’t eaten red meat for over 30 years.

“I’m so sorry,” said the server as she took the plate away. “The chef likes to add little surprises!”

I was definitely surprised. I’d told the main waiter in this high-end Helsinki restaurant that I didn’t eat red meat, adding, as I always did, “like beef or pork.” An apparently successful ad campaign from decades ago had called pork “the other white meat,” and people often argued with my definition of red meat as any mammal.

“But it’s not red meat,” he said, when I complained. “It wasn’t raised on a farm, it’s wild deer.” Sometimes it’s not just the language, but the culture.

I suppose it would be easier if I was a straight vegetarian, but I eat fish, seafood, and occasionally poultry. This restaurant offered partridge, so I’d ordered it as a change from the near constant fish dinners I’d been eating in Finland.

I’ve learned to be cautious in my ordering. In Spain this trip the tapas in Barcelona and the pintxos in Basque country often included meat that wasn’t apparent, and the most authentic restaurants didn’t have descriptions beyond names on a chalkboard. If I couldn’t see that it was obviously fish or seafood I didn’t take a chance.

Sometimes even a menu description doesn’t help. In a Paris bistro years ago my chicken dish’s description didn’t mention meat— apparently everyone knows that anything “à la grand-mére” was cooked with salt pork! It was similar in China— the description might say shrimp or tofu, but there was often ground pork mixed in.

Of course, things have improved greatly over the years. Menus list if items contain dairy, gluten, nuts or other allergens, and even a little pub in a village in Cornwall or a café at a gas station in Finland will have vegetarian and even vegan choices. An on-line translator on my phone helps if the menu isn’t in the English, French, Spanish or Finnish that I can read. At a buffet, foods are often labeled and there are many choices available to me.

In larger cities around the world there are vegetarian and even vegan restaurants. When there aren’t, Indian and Mexican restaurants often have meat-free options. I don’t pre-order vegetarian meals on a plane, however. Years ago the vegetarian or kosher option was a tasty choice, whereas now they try to do it all with one selection that is meat, gluten, dairy, nut, spice (and flavour!) free.

I only need to remember a dinner at a golf tournament in the Caribou almost 30 years ago to realize how much change there has been. I knew the main was prime rib but didn’t say anything as there was usually something on the buffet that I could eat. Only when I saw that the one salad had bacon and the potatoes were scalloped with ham did I ask for something without meat.

15 minutes later the server came out and slammed a plate in front of me— containing nothing but a whole carrot and a stalk of broccoli, cooked but absolutely plain.

Of course, my food preferences are just that. I don’t have to struggle with trying to eat safely while traveling, as some friends with life-threatening allergies do. I read menus and labels, but the stakes are not high.

I’ll take the risk of an accidental mouthful of meat, or getting a fish that looks back at me from my plate, in order to try local foods. After all, that’s a big part of my brave travels!