Portland Peeps,
“I’m better than you are”
I love the food at Sweet Pea Bakery. As our resident Portland vegan* bakery, it tempts me with offerings of cheesecake, creme-filled donuts, decadent cupcakes, scones, and the like. And I can savor them all, reasurred that the bavarian creme in my creme-filled donut didn’t come from a mad cow injected with Monsanto rBGH (bovine growth hormone). They even offer a few gluten-free options to boot.
While their treats are tasty, their employees intimidate me. I can’t pinpoint why, except that in place of a friendly customer service smile is a scowl, which may be less a deliberate act and more a product of the employees’ mouths being physically drawn downwards by no less than a dozen piercings between their philtrim and chin. I envision the craigslist post advertising a job at Sweet Pea to look something like this:
Position opening at Sweet Pea. Must have at least a dozen piercings, and at least one fully-tattooed appendage. Preference will be given to applicants whose entire bodies are covered by tattoos. Must have air of superiority and be able to sniff out Portlanders who frequent Sweet Pea but are not strict vegans.
And I’m pretty sure they’ve sniffed me out, being, as my dear friend Scott calls me, a vegan fraud. That is, I am by no means a member of the Portland vegan culture, but I nonetheless accrue frequent flyer miles to Sweet Pea because I subscribe to the philosophy of eating delicious food with ingredients I can pronounce. At Sweet Pea, I also don’t have to worry about my body’s slight intolerance to eggs (too many and I have more hives than a beekeeper), which are a staple in most baked goods.
My daily occasional jaunts to Sweet Pea are not the first time I’ve been revealed as a vegan fraud. I have volunteered the past four years for the local vegetarian festival, at which every local vegan vendor sets up shop and samples their selection of vegan masterpieces disguised as something the average individual would actually want to consume. There are deli meats made without meat, coffee creamer made without cream, and cheese spreads made without cheese. (And they call me a fraud.) I volunteer in the children’s section, where we give children stickers with pearls of wisdom like “This fish was sad when you ate his dad”** and “This cow was happy because you ate an apple instead of his pappy.”** I wasn’t ashamed of my meat-eating practices prior to attending the vegfests, but it’s incredible just how much peer pressure one feels when trapped in a conference hall that holds every vegan in the greater Portland area (for those mathmatically-inclined folk, this breaks down to 4.3 vegans per square inch).
“Are you a vegetarian?” a fellow volunteer asked me at a vegfest a few years back as I strung vegan fruit loops on a piece of vegan string to make a vegan necklace for a five-year old vegan child.
I answered honestly, “No,” which felt like the right answer until her eyes narrowed and I felt the judgment of the entire vegan community in her disapproving glower.
So I cracked under pressure and added hastily, “Sometimes I eat fish.” Which was true, but with the intentional omission that I also sometimes eat chicken, turkey, and pork. And by sometimes I mean every single day. In fact, that moment found me already salivating in anticipation of a giant turkey burger from Burgerville at the culmination of my meatless volunteer shift.
At any rate, there’s a hardcore vegan community in Portland, and eating a few vegan brownies makes me no more a member of it than riding my bike once back in 2000 makes me a member of the bicycling community here. But one of the things that makes this community uniquely Portland is its variety of options for food minorities like vegans and gluten-freegans. And as a Portlander, I will continue to embrace these vegan delights, even if I’m not delightedly embraced by the vegans.
–Troi out
*Vegan: Contains no animal products or animal byproducts. No meat, fish, eggs, dairy, gelatin, etc. Different from vegetarianism, which exlcudes meat and fish but allows eggs and dairy products.
**Poems courtesy of Troi. For rights to reproduce these poems for use with your own children, please subscribe immediately to Troi’s blog. Yes, this is a shameless ploy to increase readership.