Most of you know I have been a veggie for a long time, 15 years to be exact(ish). Not to bore you but I stopped eating meat basically because I could - simple as that. It doesn't sit right with me to kill another animal when I can live just as healthily with a veg diet. I don't lecture other people, I just get on with it which is what I'll do with this post......Can I maintain a healthy diet in an area where vegetarians are an absolute rarity?
(keep reading until the end by the way, I have a nice little story after the dull stuff!)
Just skipping back a couple of years for a moment, when I left uni I was a whooping 20 stone and needed to drop a couple of chins, fast. Well this slowly happened and when I started my travels I had nicely settled at a modest 16.5 stone. This meant I had said goodbye to my beer gut, love handles and man-boobs and had got a body back which was last seen walking into a pub at the age of cough cough, 18. Well now I seem to have lost another 2 inches on my belt which meant I needed a new hole in it - my swiss army knife finally got a new use other than peeling mangoes and opening beer cans. This new slender Ade seems to mean I can find Asian T-Shirts that can fit but also means I looks like a bloody skeleton on some of the pics, the one above being a prime example.
I guess this has all happened partly from me not sitting in front of a PC all bloody day and also a severe lack of wholesome veggie grub. Though eating as many fried rice and vegetable dishes as I could squeeze it just doesn't seem to cut the mustard (mustard is very rare in asia too by the way). Even when I hit the tourist places and stuff in a few pizzas it doesn't seem to make a big difference so I've started to shed more pounds.
'Should I eat meat' I thought at one stage? Well, considering that in many of the countries I would have no idea what meat I was eating, plus with 15 years of stubborn vegetarianism behind me I quickly shed this notion and replaced it instead with vitamin pills and trying a little harder to eat more. I have also had to become a little more open to the fact that it is nearly impossible to get a pure vegetarian dish ie one which is not cooked with meat or fish stock. This isn't perfect but I guess better than malnutrition and certain death of the trip. This new openness though didn't prepare me for something that happened in Laos.
Here I was, at the Elephant Festival staying in a homestay which basically means I was staying with a Laos family on their floor in front of the TV. They didn't speak English so with the help of a translation sheet and a copy of the Lonely Planet I explained I was a veggie and would be more than happy to join her for breakfast the next morning as long as it was only veg, eggs and cheesy things. At 6am the next morning, just as the sun was rising, I sat on the floor in the kitchen whereby food was served in front of me.
It's tradition in Laos to have a bunch of dishes served with 'sticky rice'. Everyone grabs a bit of this rice in one hand, rolls it into a ball and carefully pinches off a bit of another dishes before combining the two and stuffing it all into the mouth before it falls on the floor... not an easy task especially as being a left hander I was using my right hand to avoid the social embarrassment of using my er er 'toilet hand' for want of a better word. So there I was tucking into veg dishes made from a giant squash, hard boiled eggs and a lush omelet. It was lovely food and very romantic as the kitchen was lit only by the light from outside and a 40w light bulb. The omelet was particularly nice but hard to eat as I kept dropping crumbs on the floor. It was a nice savory omelet and contained spinach and rice shaped seeds which popped in the mouth. Well I thought they were seeds until the light came up some more!
As the sun broke through the window I saw I had dropped loads of crumbs and tried to pick them up. I noticed that they were all the same size and shape and thought they were the seeds I was happily popping away. I picked one up and with a little more light realised they were not in fact seeds but instead were eggs, not chicken eggs but bloody massive ant eggs! Oh my god I nearly puked there on that same homestay kitchen floor! Bloody lonely planet, could you not have put in a phrase which meant eggs are fine but only chicken ones! I can't believe it, my first digression in years and it wasn't the bacon sandwich I always expected it was a bloody ant omelet! Oh how I laughed!
So for those of you out there reading this as dietitians, mothers or general worriers you may have cast a concerned look at my photos, but please don't worry, Oz is coming which with the help of a few beers, pizzas, and mixed veg dishes will have me back on the way to being a well rounded person once again.
And for those of you who fancy cooking up an ant egg omelet don't bother, they're a nightmare to crack open on the side of a pan and take 6421,000 to fill up a grown man. Recipes and pictures can be found
herePS if anyone has any pics of me at 20 stone I would love to see them!!
