On Airplane Food ✈️

Notes on selecting the vegan meals.

There are some things I’ll never make “traditionally” even though I’m now vegetarian. I learned to cook and bake as a vegan, and I know that there’s no better chocolate ganache than the one Lagusta Yearwood of Lagusta’s Luscious developed, which is coconut based. Why would I use eggs in cakes or cookies if I know how to do so without them? I once had to put cow’s milk in a cake while at my parents’ house and the whole time, it felt bizarre and vulgar. Many of my kitchen tendencies just are vegan in character, and I consider dairy and eggs to be precious: most delicious when used judiciously and effectively.

I’ve now been vegetarian as long as I was vegan, but it’ll be a couple of decades still before I’ll surpass my omnivorous upbringing. Sometimes, I miss the clarity of veganism, the ease of the decisions. This happens in places like New York City, where I was vegan for the entire time I lived there and where it’s easy and delicious, usually, to be so. (The vegan Caesar and garlic knots at Scarr’s Pizza alone will make one believe they could easily never need Parmesan again.)

The airplane meals reminded me of the seemingly minor weird ways in which people perceive what a vegan wants to eat that add up over the years into a grating exhaustion: all the boring, under-seasoned mushroom risotto, half-cooked cauliflower steaks, and mango sorbet that were part of being vegan in situations where I didn’t have full control—work dinners, weddings, traveling; all the assumptions that being vegan was about being healthy or ethically pure (or both) and thus unconcerned with deliciousness or complexity. Under perfect life circumstances, those are the only situations in which I flex into vegetarianism. Life isn’t perfect, though, and neither am I, and so I just made the flex permanent to allow me more room—to give others more room to feed me.