An interesting little surprise comes to light after an Indophile President has a meal at the magnificent Bukhara, Maurya Sheraton’s much-lauded restaurant in Delhi:
“Clinton was very careful while ordering from the menu. Post-surgery, he has become very conscious of what he eats and is trying to become vegetarian. However, he still prefers chicken,” says US-based hotelier Sant Chatwal, who hosted dinner for Clinton. Clinton’s signing-off line to the chef: “It was a great meal. I simply love Indian food. It’s the best thing about coming back to India.”
I know Bengalis who insist that they’re good wegetarians despite their fetish for fish. 😉 If they get special dispensation, perhaps we can let ol’ Bill have his chicken? While y’all think on that, I’ll tell you that erstwhile-“First Daughter” Chelsea Clinton is already an herbivore; I’m almost sure that she had a birthday party or two at D.C.’s exclusive, mirch-free, pretty-but-not-pleasing Bombay Club, which is conveniently located near a certain large white edifice.
Salon’s War Room take on Bubba’s new diet choices made me snort with glee:
Oh my God. What?
Bill Clinton not eating meat? A man whose very name brings to mind the word “pork”? Who has never met a nitrate he didn’t like? Whose all-night bull-and-barbeque sessions were sent up hilariously in “Primary Colors”? The man who once, after having consumed a 3,300-calorie lunch with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in 1994 that included meats, cheeses, seafood and veal-stuffed ravioli, ordered a piece of chocolate cake to go?
…The thought of Bill Clinton spurning meat is like the thought of him spurning blow jobs. Simply not possible.
I mean, doesn’t that just make you GUFFAW? He orders the chocolate cake…to go! That Bill. 😀
I think I can also speak for mutineer Manish when I say that we gladly welcome the big dog/Slick Willy* to our exclusive club of people who smell better and otherwise rule the world. 😉
:+:
*I use nicknames that are pro- AND anti- the Bill because we at SM are TOTALLY non-partisan when it comes to snarfing down the world’s best Dal Makhani. Mmm, daaaaal.
Chicken is meat.
People don’t understand the definition of vegetarian. “a person who excludes meat and fist from their diet.”
PEOPLE, those things are living, hence are meat.
And Bombay Club rocks.. got to meet Nelson Mandela there a few years ago…a lot of dignitaries eat there, and the food ain’t bad…
To Chickpea
I hope you meant fish, and not fist! Otherwise, what will those poor S&M Vegetarians do? 😉
P.S. Love Animals, Don’t Eat Them!!
This Clinton thing is gonna last a week. Or forever, but with so many exceptions along the lines of “There is no meat relationship” that it will be devoid of purposes. Speaking from personal experience, let me tell you that compulsive people probably ought not impose strict rules on themselves unless they want one long shame cycle for a while 🙂
I used to feel this way, but I’m trying to adopt a more flexible attitude. If you’re underlying reasons for not eating meat are animal welfare, environmentalism, blah blah blah (as opposed to, say, a food allergy to meat protein) then even if you’re vegetarian, you probably still do some things that are not really reflecting your udnerlying values, like:
Eating off a grill at a deli that just cooked bacon. Looking the other way when you order beans in a restaurant and pretending that there probably isn’t lard in that $hit. Drinking beer which, from what I’m told, has fish oil lining the barrels it’s made in. Eating a veggie burger and fries at McDonalds. Wearing leather shoes or a leather belt. Eating honey. Eating dairy or eggs.
Ain’t nothing wrong with a little moderation or a little tolerance for slips if you generally stick to your guns.
Flexatarian – Someone who is essentially a veg., but cheats often!
by true definition, yes, eating chicken would not be vegetarian, but there are other kinds of vegetarian that aren’t strictly “no living thing or byproduct thereof”
He probably heard all the sexy people are vegetarian and wanted to jump on that boat 😉
To paraphrase Hobbes, nothing is less reliable than a promise made to one’s self.
For a list of vegetarian / vegan beers (along with supporting emails from the manufacturers) try this list:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/geraint.bevan/Vegetarian_beers.html
You ever ate anything that wasn’t alive at some point of time? 🙂
hanuman—yes i meant fish too 🙂
and anil–nope, never had meat in my life.. inc fish/etc…
do do the dairy bit.. love my milk and cheese.. no eggs though..
IT’S ALIVE! “Cheese is made by coagulating milk… Milk is coagulated by the addition of rennet. The usual source of rennet is the stomach of slaughtered newly-born calves. Vegetarian cheeses are manufactured using rennet from either fungal or bacterial sources. Advances in genetic engineering processes means they may now also be made using chymosin produced by genetically altered micro-organisms.” Vegsoc.org
Most cheese is very much alive and kicking. It is also tasty tasty. But here are some veggie cheeses. Anyone care for some sweet Amish Butta?
I’ll play the devil’s advocate here to argue why it’s not easy to draw a clear line between what’s vegetarian and what’s not.. 🙂
For the record, I prefer vegetarian food to non-vegetarian, but that has everything to do with taste and satisfaction and very little to do with logic/health/belief.
Good point, Anil! I always like to throw Fruitarianism out there, for a little shake-up. Plants supposedly do feel pain and suffer…
Personally, I’m veg by dictation of my palate, and meat makes me feel blah after I eat it. I do still enjoy my leather shoes with a clear conscience. But give me bhindi, sweet-sour eggplant, hummus or daal over a cheeseburger any day of the week!
Anil, here are some reasons to adopt less meat consumption (not really talking about fish as much…I equivocate on that one even though I don’t eat any…yet):
There is an Indian coworker who consistently has a shell of smell around him everyday, and is a vegetarian. When I say a shell, I mean it…in meetings there is always a conspicous space around him of people that bounced of the smell. Now it could be just poor hygiene, but I don’t know if being a vegeterian helps or not.
I doubt if it’s hygiene.. It could be that this coworker uses pungent spices during cooking (like turmeric) and forgets to keep the door to the closet/bedroom/wherever-clothes-are-kept closed. Sometimes people also forget how pungent hair oil can be (especially coconut oil). Indians usually have very good personal hygiene, but smells of spices/oil are inconspicuous in the plethora of smells you get in India, but they can be very noticeable in the US. You would do your coworker a favor by gently telling him/her about this in private.
Saurav, your points are well taken. The reason I prefer veggie food is that meat, while being tasty, gives me a horrid feeling after the meal. The satisfaction that I get with a simple vegetarian meal is just not there with non vegetarian food. That said, if I am on the road and have to eat outside, I’d rather not eat the grassy stuff that passes for vegetarian food.
My idea of good vegetarian food: Indian/Ethiopian or a salad bar like Sweet Tomatoes.
Not that anyone cares but the the link for Bukhara describes the cuisine as one served in the Frontier Province. This is utter nonsense. The Mughlai cuisine served in this restaurant or all over Delhi has nothing to do with the Frontier Province. The Mughlai cuisine as perfected in North India has very little in common with the cuisine in the Frontier province of Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Pathan/Pukhtun cuisine is completely different. The practice for naming restaurants Bukhara in that part of the World comes from the claim that the Mughlai cuisine of Delhi was strongly influenced by the cuisine of Bukhara, Uzbekistan. That may very well be true. There was a migration from Bukhara to North India. That is why you still see a lot of people with last names as Bukhari in North India and Pakistan. One famous one would be Imam Bukhari of the Jama Masjid in Delhi. They are the direct descendents of the Uzbekistani Bukharis. I was once watching a show on the Travel Channel and the guide was exploring the local foods in Bukhara, Uzbekistan. He identified items as Biryani, Qeema and one meat with potatoes dish whose ingredients were exactly similar to the ingredients used in making Aloo Ghosht. Sorry for going off on a tangent.
OMG, I orgasm over Ethiopian food.
I dont like the communal eating experience in Ethiopian restaurants.
Saurav said:
I hope you don’t serve Ethiopian food. 🙂
I cannot believe no one has brought this up yet.
The real reason that Clinton wants to be vegetarian, of course, is that vegetarians taste better. Duh. Link possibly NSFW.
😉
frankly, i don’t give a rat’s kundi whether “dignitaries” eat anywhere. if the food is shockingly under-spiced (and therefore underwhelming), the beautiful china, pristine tables, tinkling live piano music and other, absolutely lovely attributes of BC dont’ matter. there is no denying that it’s a very pretty space. you’re paying for all that pretty…which isn’t fun when you walk out with the slightly disconcerting feeling that what you had was definitely indian food for non-indians.
in contrast, give me heritage india ANY day– after all, the chef is from Bukhara (the one referenced in this post) itself. no, the decor isn’t flawless, but the food is phenomenal, the service is attentive and the experience leaves you satisfied.
oh, and i’m a strict vegetarian who doesn’t eat chicken/fish/non-veg cheese/drink beer and i STILL love heritage india, “frontier”-cuisine be damned. give me that creamy, buttery dal, fluffy chawal, delicate raita, pudina paratha and the only baingan dish i’ll eat anywhere (mirch ka salan) and i’m thrillllled. damn it, now i’m hungry.
did you say Sweet Tomatoes??? Oh how I love them!!
it’s quite frankly embarrassing, the scene I make as I scarf down heartily at their buffets 😉
I’m totally amazed at how certain people who claim to be divinely picked to be defenders of the cow and other animals, and make proclamations damning people who choose to be non-veggies, often do so while forgetting the leather shoes/bags/belts they are wearing, or in some cases, the tiger skinned and mounted on the wall behind them.
Hello Mr/Ms Carnivore!
Have you ever heard of pleather?!! Vegans do not use ANY animal products!!! In this day and age, there is no reason to!
Don’t forget the Konkani people, Anna. We, like the Bengalis, make the exception in our religion to eat fish. God said it was okay for us to eat fish but no other meat.
So, I eat fish. It’s in my blood. I want to stop, but I can’t. PLUS, I hear its brain food and its what I need to pump it up right now for the bar studying.
It’s not really religion for us. It’s more like a totally inability to understand how one could survive or even want to survive without eating rice and fish on a daily basis. I’ve heard stories about people coming home from dinner parties furiously searching for some rice to eat.
Also, many of my introductory convesrations about being vegetarian go someting like this:
*”Oh, no thank you, I’m vegetarian.” *”Oh okay. But maach ta khabe tho?” *”No, I don’t eat fish either.” *”Maach khao na!?!?1?” (You don’t eat fish?!?!?!) *Recovering, the person says, “Akta maach now…kichu hobe naa.” (Just take one…there’s nothing wrong with it.”) *”naa, naa, aami ono jinesh khabo. aami daal khai” (i’ll eat other things. i like daal) *”daal khe thaakbe?” (you’re only going to have daal?)
Then they look a little annoyed or bemused or amused. At some point during the meal, afterwards, or in the future, it continues:
*”pet bhoreche? kichu tho khelana” (did you eat well? you didn’t eat anything)
no matter how much I ate. Henceforth, my reputation is established as someone who doesn’t eat anything, and this will be repeated to any other people that cook that this person knows. And they will chuckle over it and look sadly and condescnedingly at me as if I am somehow developmentally disabled.
Such is life for the Bangali vegetarian or fish-hater. Keep in mind that my family’s birthday rite is to have the birthday boy eat a huge meal on steel thalas centering on an enormous fish head that the person is supposed to consume in full.
fish heads are edible?? 😮
i thought my friends who mentioned this were just trying to gross me out! my family has always been veg, so i’m no expert on malayalee “meen” preparation, but i thought i saw my omnivorous aunt toss the head. eek! poor birthday boy saurav!
anna–the food isn’t that bad.. and hell if you meet a few amazing people, it’s bonus..(i mean how the hell would anyone ever meet mandela otherwise?) heck, i went with my dean from med school, and trust me, it was indian enough for him 🙂 obviously, it’s not ‘real indian’..hell nothing in america is… you gotta go to the streets of india and eat off the banana leaves… now you’re talking..
Or…go to a S.Indian wedding.
PS: grin at kundi. Gotta love that word! Kundi, Kundi, Kundi :)))
What’s non-veg cheese? Is that like head cheese? Don’t ask — it’s a really gross upper-midwestern thing with which I do not associate.
What does vegetarianism have to do with drinking beer? Thoughts on wine??
My mom’s a strict vegetarian who won’t even touch an egg, but she eats cake and icecream. On being questioned about it, she said she can eat egg as long as it’s “invisible and odorless.”
Then there’s my grandma who can’t lay eyes on onions and garlic. It gets even more pathological from there on back …
Most kinds of cheese and beer use animal products in their processing. Many cheese makers use an enzyme called rennin to coagulate milk, traditionally this came from the stomach lining of young calves. Similarly, many beers use a fish product.
I love the onion and garlic thing. When I was really little, I wasn’t allowed to eat pizza or chips or anything during Durga Puja, but that rule mysteriously disappeared at some point between the ages of 5 and 17 🙂
The convenient cover some of these rules provide to OCD and other diagnosable illnesses is truly amazing.
I think it’s called rennet, that’s used in cheese production. In addition to being a problem vegetarians, it’s a conflict for anyone who keeps kosher (mixing dairy product with a product from a calf)
Some cheeses are made with vegetable rennet. In this area the only commercial cheeses that I’m aware of, that are made with it, are from Cabot.
Neha posted a link to a list of vegetarian (rennet-free) cheeses above. Here it is again:
List of vegetarian cheese brands (not safe for vegans! 😉 )
And here, again, is the list of vegetarian/vegan safe beers, ciders and wines.
Mighty surprised to see that Leinenkugel’s products are veg-friendly. Wait until Wisconsin hears about this.
My beloved stout did not make the cut, however. We don’t need no steenkin’ fining agent. Good thing I’m not weg, though.
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