This week I’m in Los Angeles and writing from a cafe I’ve come to for lunch because I heard they have a good buffet. (If I were Renée Zellweger and all restaurants were Tom Cruise, I would say to them: “You had me at all-you-can-eat.”) But when I arrived, I began the spiel I’ve given waiters for as long as I can remember. “Um, so, I don’t eat meat. Or fish. Or, um...”
“No problem! This whole buffet is plant-based and just ask for any non-vegan options,” the waiter said. “Let me know if you have any concerns about gluten, wheat, nuts or soya, OK?”
It is heretical for a New Yorker to admit this, but I’m increasingly realising that LA is my spiritual home. There are the obvious things: I’m only truly comfortable when it’s over 20 degrees; I actually like it when people tell me to have a nice day; I even like traffic jams, because you just sit still and do nothing and no one can call you lazy. But the main thing is the food.
From Alvy Singer ordering a plate of mashed yeast in Annie Hall to the LA juice bar owner Amanda Chantal Bacon, who in an infamous 2015 magazine article claimed that one of her favourite foods was “soft and chewy bee pollen”, the laughably self-indulgent eating habits of Los Angelenos have long been one giant yeast-based or yeast-free joke. Ha ha, I’d laugh: pollen! And a secret voice inside me would think, “I wonder if Sainsbury’s sells that yet?”
Being a faddy fusspot is the only trend I’ve ever been ahead of the game on. Insisting you can’t eat various major food groups for no real medical reason has become an essential part of looking like a modern, fabulous person. But believe me, this was not always the case. I was four when I announced I was a vegetarian, after discovering that meat was a code word for animals (do other people know this?), and by the age of eight I had ruled out various other foods. Many of my childhood memories involve the mothers of friends looking pained when I came round for a play date – and really, who could blame them? “Here’s meatloaf for everyone, except Hadley, who’s getting crackers with peanut butter. Bon appétit, kids!” Because that’s what it was like being a nine-year-old near-vegan in the 80s.
Things are better now, if not perfect, and not everywhere. Recently I ordered a bowl of lentils in a Paris brasserie. They arrived with what looked like a giant femur sticking out of them.
“Er, je suis végétarienne,” I said to the waiter.
The waiter removed the bone.
“Voilà, c’est végétarien,” he replied. And really, who could blame him?
Once I was embarrassed about my fussiness because it was a hassle for other people. Now, I’m embarrassed because it’s depressingly similar to the kind of nonsense advocated by self-appointed nutritionists who take photos of themselves drinking a glass of what is apparently pond scum. Everyone knows that the current fad of randomly excluding food groups in the name of “wellness” is just dieting with an Instagram filter. It would be impossible for me not to see a through line from the fussy child I was to the anorexic teenager I became, but when I see people advocating that women exclude dairy, I worry: I know where this road potentially leads, so please don’t encourage others to take it.
The complicated truth is that while eating this way paved the way towards my eating disorder, it also got me out of it. As I started to recover, I felt safe putting weight back on by eating in my usual eccentric way – just a lot more of it. Now that I’m healthy, I no longer feel defined by what I (don’t) eat. I am still essentially vegan, and while I can worry about coming across like a cut-price Deliciously Ella until the tofu comes home, at a certain point you just have to know and accept yourself.
London is better than – let’s say – Paris at dealing with people like me, and there is almost always at least one thing on a menu I can eat. But sometimes it would be nice for there to be more, and could that one thing not be a stuffed pepper?
Enter Los Angeles. LA is like a Disney World for me, a whole city of restaurants with entire menus of food I want to eat, and, sure, you can argue that this is weird, even enabling. All I know is that here I eat more than anywhere else in the world and I feel, for the only time in my life, normal about food.
So tonight I’ll go to one of my regular spots, Cafe Gratitude, and the waiter will give me the menu and ask if I would prefer the vegan key lime pie or the dairy-free chocolate brownie for dessert? And I’ll look up at him with my cynical Jewish New Yorker face, smile and think, “At last, I have found my people.”
