July 2, 2025
I've had like two food-related epiphanies in the past two years, which I can't help but feel like is two too many.
My first was upon finishing the series Dungeon Meshi. Through its 90-something chapters, it tells a tale of friends and food, and walks away to say the same thing it said at the very start: "Eating is the privilege of the living."
A simple sentiment, but a pure and honest one. To be able to eat something, to be able ot relish in it, to be able to enjoy it, and to be able to sustain yourself; it's a privilege that's easy to take for granted. And with that, I was suddenly more passively conscious of and appreciative of what entered my mouth, as silly as that sounds. The texture, the taste, the fulfillment I got from eating it. Honestly, my eating habits didn't really get much better, but the shift in mentality meant something. When I ate it was less about simply needing to satiate myself. I thought about it more for the experience it was.
Then, perhaps rather ironically for someone who had since finished reading an entire series about people who kill and eat sentient beings for munchies, I decided to become vegan. I quickly learned a few things: 1. Forget local joints, most major food chains don't have "options" for you, at least over here (Taco Bell, Saladworks and Chipotle always got me, though), and 2. Plant-based equivalents to the kind of stuff you might keep in your fridge like cheese, chicken nuggets and hotdogs tends to run you more. Things like "deli meat" and "cheese" become that much more of a luxury than they were before.
And so with those things in mind, I find if I want to eat consistently in a way that genuinely satisfies me, I must cook. More than I ever had before in my life, I cooked. And that was when my relationship with food went up another rank.
Tofu and soy protein in general are an excellent canvas, you know? The bad thing about a block of tofu is that it almost tastes like nothing. The good thing about a block of tofu is that you can almost make it taste like anything. From trying and trying to make protein dinners that I'd really enjoy, I learned how to do basically everything with those fucked up little blocks of bean. Freezing and unfreezing it gives it a spongier, more meatlike-texture. A little kala namak and nutritional yeast among other things and you can make a very satisfying breakfast scramble. Tamari, liquid smoke and a few other seasonings applied to textured vegetable protein and fried can make for a genuinely great "taco meat". It's through all these little manipulations that I came to appreciate not just the act of enjoying food, but the act of making food. I don't think I'd ever gotten so much use out of my spice cabinet before. Oops.
If I thought eating was satisfying before, then there was just no preparing me for this. This certainly isn't some kind of magical side effect of being vegan, of course — no doubt plenty of people had this epiphany before. But I suppose it's the fact that I was forced out of my comfort zone that I looked to creating my own pleasure and making what I thought would fulfill me; and that, by extension, gave me an even greater appreciation than ever before. The way ingredients meld together to invoke new tastes and textures... it's an art and a science and one I've loved learning. I'm spending more money than I was before, just because I keep spotting new recipes and going "I have to try this". When things turn out well, I smile with a spoon in my mouth and a feeling of a job well done. When I inject a little creativity of my own, that feeling goes double.