Losing my religion

My invitation to a seven-course feast, cooked by traveling vegan chef Joshua Ploeg, arrived in the midst of a personal dietary crisis. After nine years of devout veganism, I’ve begun eating Paesano’s garlic bread. If you’re unfamiliar with the special hell of equating self-worth with food choices, that won’t sound like any big dilemma, but I’m extremely conflicted about it. The guilt has only worsened now that Pronto sells the same buttery loaves; the two eateries flank my home with readily available, decidedly non-vegan temptation.

I don’t know how my commitment to ethical eating and boycotting factory farming got subverted by a piece of toast. One day a tiny little voice said, “Life’s too short not to taste what you love” and I requested two pieces of buttery bread to ride shotgun on my pasta plate. I wish I could say I’ve never looked back, but, in fact, I’ve been beating myself up ever since (while continuing to indulge my garlic-bread jones). I’ve stopped calling myself a vegan. I feel ethically—and culinarily—lost.

Needless to say, I had high hopes for this dinner. I thought a little vegan luxury might set me back on track. I looked forward to the rare opportunity to adventurously eat whatever was served, no questions and no guilt.

I entered through the kitchen of my friends’ home. Every surface was covered by bottles, bags and vegetables. Ploeg was at the stove in a white chef’s coat busily frying what looked to be huge onion rings.

I headed into the living room where the rest of the party’s 23 guests were assembling. Several partygoers said they’d already been to a Ploeg-catered dinner that week. Some had even been to two or three of the 10 parties Ploeg booked for his two-week Sacramento stay.

Ploeg travels the country roughly eight months a year, relying largely on word of mouth for clients, so it makes sense that many dinners happen within the same social scene. And given Sacramento’s limited meatless options, local vegans catch as many of his meals as they can. At $15 per person for parties of 12 or more, they’re easily affordable, and with more than 1,000 recipes in his repertoire (many his own “European-Pacific Northwest fusion” creations) it’s unlikely a host would choose the same menu twice.

Ours began with the onion rings, officially termed “breaded deep-fried onion wheels with ale barbecue sauce.” It was lucky there was only one Gardenburger-sized disc per plate, because I could have eaten them until I passed out. I nearly wept at the second course, a plantain crepe with rum sauce. I haven’t tasted a crepe since 1997. I ate mine in tiny bites, as if it were the last on earth—which, for me, it might have been.

A refreshingly crisp cucumber and apple salad quickly was followed by a semolina and carrot soup with ginger-lemon broth. Then we were on to the main course, fried “chicken” stuffed with herbed “bacon.”

At this point, conversation turned grisly. An unpleasant aspect of veganism is the fact that people often ask about your diet at mealtimes and you spend your dinner discussing the animal cruelty that put you off meat in the first place. I thought I’d escape this at a vegan party, but people quickly revived the “if I were stranded on a desert island, I’d skin a bear” talk. I weathered it fairly well, but when someone said, “I once saw a guy chainsaw a pig’s head off,” the food literally dropped from my mouth.

Fortunately, the subsequent almond tea and coconut roll in chocolate sauce soothed my nerves. I scraped every trace of chocolate from my plate and went to thank Ploeg, who was just sitting down after four hours of cooking.

I didn’t want to wait another year for a meal like this, and I briefly considered kidnapping him. Luckily I won’t have to, because he told me he’s moving to Sacramento in March. After five years of travel, he’s hoping to open a restaurant here. If he does, I’ll probably eat there every day. Until then, I’ll be the one in Paesano’s with a hood and dark glasses.