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Chapter Four

Cheez Whiz Is Vegetarian

I WAS SITTING AT the kitchen table with my new roommate, Erin, in Washington, D.C. She had a map of the city and a red Sharpie she was using to circle neighborhoods I should avoid. I was new to the city, a recent and hopeful college graduate, staying with some friends of a friend from high school for the duration of my summer internship with an environmental nonprofit. Erin had spent the last four years studying at George Washington University and wanted to make sure I could navigate the dense, complex city comfortably on my own. Here, she circled, was a great coffee shop on my way back from work. She marked Ben’s Chili Bowl and Kramerbooks and an independent record store where she knew I’d be able to find the kinds of obscure bands we both liked. Meridian Hill Park, just blocks from our apartment, was fine and beautiful during the day, but there had been a recent string of sexual assaults there after dark. Columbia Heights, the next neighborhood to the west, was a known drug hub. Needles in the street.

This was my introduction to the city, a place full of art and politics, of potential and promise—for the right people, in the right place, at the right time.

SHORTLY BEFORE MY college graduation, determined not to move back in with my parents, I’d gotten an internship with the Communications Department at the Wilderness Society, practically a dream job for a young activist writer. I arrived at the office on my first day—one week and two days after my college graduation ceremony—with feet blistered from the heels I’d walked in for three blocks from the bus stop. The building, the whole block, stretched before me like an urban dream, my Mary Tyler Moore fantasy come to life. Smooth taupe bricks, an enormous window etched with the Wilderness Society’s logo in gold, a courtyard dotted with blossoming cherry trees, and a stone archway marking the entrance. Directly across the street, I could see the fountain and sunken amphitheater courtyard of the National Geographic Society. I took a deep breath, ignoring the faint sweet rot of a mid-Atlantic city in the summer, and thought, This is it. I was living confidently in the direction of my dreams. My real life could begin.

My nervousness at meeting the people I’d only spoken to over the phone was unfounded. Within the first few weeks, I’d become comfortable and familiar with my coworkers: Pete, one of the three vice-presidents for communications, a kind father to a toddler daughter, with a beard and glasses, a man who looked like he spent his weekends in wool socks and hiking boots; Drew, a funny and sensible law school grad, just a few years older than me, who would leave in the fall to join his fiancée on a yearlong Fulbright to Lima; and later, Sharon, a young Korean American in the year between American University and Georgetown Law, with whom I gossiped regularly in the office.

My first task, after getting settled in, was to write a series of press releases, based on a template, about some of the monuments in the National Landscape Conservation System, a lesser-known, less-protected series of parks run by the Bureau of Land Management. The language of advocacy was already in the press releases, the result of months of focus groups and messaging meetings. My job was to write a brief paragraph about the beauty and conservation value of each monument so that we could personalize the press release by state: the Canyons of the Ancients in Colorado, Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah, Upper Missouri River Breaks in Montana. I spent my first few weeks as a college graduate studying photographs and fact sheets about some of the most beautiful wild places in the country and describing what I saw. This was perfect.

ONE NIGHT THAT summer, I returned home to my apartment around ten at night and realized I hadn’t eaten anything all day. Dizzy and grouchy and tired, I yanked open the door to my freezer and cupboards, tossing a series of cardboard boxes onto the counter. I ripped open the tab on a package of Near East Parmesan-flavored couscous and poured the grain into a plastic bowl. I sliced open the seasoning packet and dumped the white powder flecked with dried green herbs into the water, stirring quickly with a fork before setting the whole thing in the microwave to rotate on its glass plate. A fake chicken patty slipped from its cellophane sleeve straight into the toaster for a minute on each side. Ten minutes later, I sat cross-legged on our hand-me-down orange couch, a plastic dinner plate balanced on my lap, watching Martin Sheen play the president on TV and swirling fake meat through a small pond of ranch dressing.

This is what passed for a meal most of my first few years as a vegetarian. I was still young, capable of eating anything short of Tupperware and remaining healthy. I had no clue about budgeting for groceries. And I had spent most of my childhood hiding beneath a table, avoiding the feminine domestic, which is to say: I never really learned how to cook. Cracks began to form in my perfect activist adulthood.

The problem with being a vegetarian, I discovered, was that you couldn’t eat meat. Steak was my favorite food when I was seventeen—I couldn’t get enough of that tough, chewy meat, of the red-gray flesh peeling apart into moist strands under the pressure and slide of a knife. I’d let each bite drip bloody juice onto my mashed potatoes before I ate it, sucking the meat dry in the corner of my mouth. But being a vegetarian meant you had to eat a lot of vegetables, and I’d never really been a fan.

I gagged over the grimy paste of lentils mashed between the flat plates of my teeth, the slimy flesh of an eggplant slipping towards the back of my throat, the grainy pulp of a soft pear. Broccoli tasted like plastic to me, hummus like dirt. I couldn’t so much as graze the fuzzed skin of a peach against my lower lip without convulsing in a shiver of disgust. Once, in a nice restaurant in California, I accidentally put a slice of mushroom into my mouth—masked under the thick Alfredo sauce on my manicotti, which I had ordered without mushrooms—and the gritty edges of it, the slickness against my tongue, made me so sick I had to run to the bathroom to spit it out into a trash can.

When I decided to become a vegetarian, I abandoned my family’s communal learning space. Stepping outside of my family kitchen meant I’d left behind any chance to learn what to do when faced with a diet dictated by unknown ingredients. Like most twentysomethings left to fend for themselves, I learned to cook cheap and easy. I just did it without meat. I ate basically the same diet as I had as a non-vegetarian, subtracting the meat and filling in the white space left on my plate with more of the something else. Think frozen pizzas. Think Tater Tots and cheese sandwiches. Think instant ramen. Lots and lots of instant ramen (only the mysteriously named “Oriental” flavor, without beef or chicken fat). Kraft’s blue boxes of dried macaroni and powdered cheese are vegetarian friendly and only about sixty cents apiece. After a few years, I became adventurous enough to branch into the “ethnic” food aisles at the grocery store, tossing cans of refried beans, flour tortillas, salsa, and pre-shredded cheese into the cart for quesadillas. Boxed rice, boxed couscous, boxes risotto mixes.

I never really added produce.

When I discovered meat substitute products, they were a godsend. No longer did I have to pretend a meal without meat was filling. Now I had fake steak strips for fajitas, fake chicken patties to eat between hamburger buns with ranch dressing, fake chicken breasts to toss into a stir-fry, Tofurky and soy and mycoprotein molded into new shapes.

A few years later, I saw an episode of The Biggest Loser, NBC’s weight loss show, during which their personal trainer took the contestants grocery shopping with a nutritionist. The muscular trainer stood, midriff bared, alongside the trim blonde nutritionist in her blue polo as she told the group they should do most of their grocery shopping around the perimeter of the store, because that’s where the “real” food is located: the deli and butcher for meat and cheese, the bakery for fresh breads, the produce section. Avoid the middle, she told them. This is where the processed food—highest in calories, lowest in nutritional value—lives.

I did my grocery shopping at eight o’clock on Sunday nights in the neighborhood Safeway, beneath a sign alerting me to constant surveillance of this street corner as a known drug exchange. And I did all of my shopping at the center of the store, weaving a sparse cart up and down aisles of boxed food, canned food, frozen food. But at least I wasn’t eating meat.

D.C. HAD NEVER been my plan. When I finished college with a writing degree, I hoped to find freelance work in Montana. Kevin and I had stayed together when he moved west, but after a year and a half, the distance was putting a strain on our relationship. Openings for writers were slim anywhere, let alone in a small Western town, and when I found the internship at the Wilderness Society, I was just smart enough to realize I couldn’t afford to turn it down for a guy. Despite all this, I fell in instant love with the city, where culture seemed to light a match beneath radical politics, igniting it with color and dancing flames. Impromptu drum circles flared up in the middle of Meridian Hill every early Sunday evening, my neighbors dancing in brightly colored clothes as the last slants of sunlight faded behind dense trees. When Kevin came for occasional weekend visits, we strolled through the Smithsonian’s museums, drank white wine with brunch, sat at the edge of the Lincoln Memorial, and watched the sun set into the reflecting pool. I took yoga classes in a basement-level studio painted purple and run by two women whose black labs meditated with us. I stayed out late on the weekends, ears ringing from shrill guitars amplified through massive speakers as independent rock bands played cheap shows at the 9:30 Club or the Black Cat.

My roommates and I were all young idealists, four girls in a two-bedroom apartment with a view of the Washington Monument, swapping stories from our various nonprofit day jobs: providing microloans to farmers in Southeast Asia and escorting pregnant women past the picket lines at Planned Parenthood. One of my responsibilities as a communications intern was the “hill-drop,” where I literally walked the halls of Congress, knocking on the doors of senators and representatives to ask if I could drop off a memo about preserving wilderness for future generations. I felt at home and purposeful. In a letter to a friend, I described my job as “the real deal,” a marriage of writing and activist passions.

The city was like a bolt of lightning: brief and luminous, electric. One Friday afternoon I had off from work, the skies burst open with a sudden hot rainstorm. Thunder shook the building and wind whipped bare tree branches down the empty gray streets. I opened up our fourth-story living room window and sat on the ledge, closing the window over my face to protect the room from the water and myself from my fear of heights, and let my bare legs dangle out into the summer rain.

A GRAFFITI CAMPAIGN sprung up around the city that summer, a single four-letter word spray-painted all over our Northwest neighborhood, on metro station walls and cement park trash cans and stone pillars around Dupont Circle: BORF. For most of the summer, I didn’t know what it meant, just saw the word as it grew, lacing itself around the city. In mid-July, a young student at a city art school was arrested on a tip and made to explain himself. “Borf,” he said, was the nickname of his friend Bobby Fisher, whose image he had also used in stencil, a friend who had committed suicide by hanging when he was sixteen. The campaign was an homage, a mourning but, most of all, an act of outrage, the frenzied, messy, artistic expression of a group of students who had nowhere to put all their hurt.

In a video piece released the next year, the Borf Brigade, as they had by then become known, spoke over images of secret stenciling: “This epidemic cannot be medicated into remission. It is not a problem confined to our family bloodline. ‘Trouble at home’ is not the only trigger for depression.”¹ Although seeing the mysterious letters on traffic lights and skate park slopes was always a little thrill, a discovery, once the story came out, the whole campaign seemed haunted, a reminder that there were forces at work in this city that I could only guess at, could barely see.

One night, some friends gathered at the apartment of my roommate’s boyfriend and his brother, the two of them sharing a studio in a secure building in Columbia Heights. We played Scrabble, ate cheese with wine, played at being thinking, cultured adults. I wandered around the small, single room they shared, admiring the construction-paper artwork on their walls. Red smears on a yellow sheet of paper. Thick black lines on green. One of the residents of the apartment was an art teacher at an elementary school in Southeast D.C. He explained that these were portraits he’d asked his second-grade students to draw: the red smears were how they painted the view outside their apartment windows; the thick black lines were drawn by one boy when he was asked for a portrait of his father, in prison.

In the summer of 2005, we were two years into a war I had protested on these streets, on the same streets where some of these children lived, on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, where rock attacks on buses were so common drivers were advised to wear safety goggles. The Southeast quadrant of D.C., where my friend worked, had a population that was more than 90 percent African American, only two grocery stores per ward, and diabetes rates higher and household incomes lower than anywhere else in the district.² Just blocks from the White House, where I had once marched.

The heat of a mid-Atlantic summer oppresses slowly and softly, a heavy wet blanket of lethargy that spreads gradually, first up over your legs and then onto your shoulders. Finally, your chest heaving in sleep, you’re unable to breathe through the weight. We didn’t have air conditioning, so we slept with the windows flung wide open, the sirens and shouts of 18th Street echoing into our dreams.

In mid-July, the nonprofit I worked for threw a company picnic. We drove a fleet of rented vans to Maryland’s Rock Creek Park, about an hour away, and spent the day grilling hot dogs and veggie burgers, playing volleyball, wandering by bike or on foot the loops of wooded trails. Almost as soon as we arrived, a few other employees and I walked down to the edge of a small river running through the park, to a patch of warm sand where we could take off our shoes and wade in. I stood ankle-deep in the cool water, my toes curled and digging into wet, murky sand, and realized this was the first time I’d stood outside, barefoot, all summer long.

Summers growing up had always been barefoot: the burn of hot pavement, the tickling of cool grass, the stickiness of dripping fruit juice popsicles. But now, rather than playing outside, letting my toes burrow into the soil, I was spending my summer, cardigan shrugged over my shoulders against the office air conditioning, phone pressed to my ear, speaking to unknown reporters in Montana on behalf of the great outdoors. Over the last eight weeks, I’d researched and written about some of the most beautiful, exotic wild places in the United States: the archaeological treasures still undiscovered in Colorado’s Canyons of the Ancients, the sunset striations on the stones of Utah’s Grand Staircase. But I’d been staring at a photo on a computer screen. How would I visit them? When would my palms know the warmth of that rock, if I continued working for them, in the city?

HERE’S HOW IT should have worked: I became a vegetarian. I began trying new vegetables: asparagus and leeks and bean sprouts. I used only cloth grocery bags. I shopped entirely at the local farmers market. I learned to bake my own bread, white knuckles kneading fresh dough daily, or how to make my own cheese, weaving long rubbery braids of mozzarella. Through my food, I communed with the landscape around me, raising my own diet up from the soil, cradling little green pots of basil, chives, cilantro in the warm light of a kitchen windowsill, constructing a raised bed out back and planting rows of sweet red peppers. I walked amid my produce, fingers running lightly along tomatoes staked in the ground, their green vines reaching towards the blue sky like hope. Yellow squash and cucumber flowered along the ground, their spiky skin pricking my hands as I picked them every Saturday morning in the sun.

But that’s not how it worked. I ate frozen, microwave-ready meals, vegetarian tofu potpies topping a thousand calories per individual serving. I didn’t even think about the bleached flour and sugar in my processed white bread, the chemicals in Miracle Whip, or the sodium content of fake bologna slices. Potato chips and Cheez Whiz were vegetarian, not to mention cheap. I heated and reheated chemical compounds, oblivious to the carcinogenic potential of red dye #40.

I had the best intentions, but I was a child of the suburbs, changing my diet without changing any world view. These meals were ethical by only one standard—no meat—vegetarian by technicality. In college, being a vegetarian seemed easy—I was surrounded by young upper-middle-class suburban radicals, most of them vegetarian. My boyfriend was a vegetarian. The campus dining hall had a vegan station. Here in the city, I was eating bad food because I couldn’t cook for myself, and I was alone. I was living the reality of most people in inner-city environments—fresh, healthy produce was difficult to find, and either of poor quality or too expensive to afford when I did. And the fake meat products that became my dietary crutch were chemical creations with a big environmental impact. I began to feel overwhelmed by how much work it was going to take to live and eat true to these ethical ideals. I wasn’t well prepared for what vegetarianism or postgraduate life would entail.

ONE NIGHT, I went out into the city alone, to wander along the neon signs of 18th Street, smoking cigarettes—which I smoked for years without realizing how incongruous they were with my goals for a healthy, vegetarian lifestyle—and feeling despondent. Lost. I don’t think I admitted it to myself then, but the city was too much for me. Sure, I’d learned plenty about poverty in college, but I couldn’t handle seeing it up close, in the stark reality of limited food access and homelessness and addiction. I wandered the streets and thought about leaving, wondered whether leaving would make me a hypocrite.

A man rode a bicycle towards me on the sidewalk, plastic grocery bags slung heavily over both handlebars, the gray hood of his sweatshirt pulled up and masking his face. Although the sidewalk was wide, I stepped aside to let him pass. But as he rode by, frustrated with the awkward dance of who-goes-which-way, he barked, “Bitch, I’m not in your way!”

I barely made it back to my apartment without crying. The man on the bicycle had seen an out-of-her-element white girl, a scared upper-middle-class girl pressed against the side of a building by a black man on the street. I wasn’t that girl—or I didn’t think I was, or I didn’t want to be. I hadn’t stepped aside because of the color of his skin. But I knew I lived in a different world now, one burdened by the reality that I needed more than good intentions. Becoming a vegetarian had been a gesture of activism, but putting it into practice was more difficult than I’d expected. Moving to a city was what I thought I wanted, but I felt lonely and out of my depth. When I think about it now, I see my liberal privilege exposed, no longer sheltered by the safe confines of a college classroom, or the sterilized enclave of a suburb.

I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but there was something complicated about the city: something uncomfortable in the space between the progressive I wanted to be and the discomfort I felt walking through Columbia Heights at night. I was living in the midst of systemic poverty and institutional racism, and deep down I knew that no amount of boycotting, no well-organized rally, could fix that. I also felt a little hypocritical. I worked in an upscale air-conditioned office, cold-calling reporters and putting together press events to raise money and awareness for wild spaces that were as far removed from this city as possible. How many children from that Southeast elementary school would ever visit Zion National Park? Did the work I was doing matter, in the context of the crime rates and rampant addiction right outside my door?

When my roommates asked me what was wrong that night, I was too embarrassed to tell them that a man on a bicycle had yelled at me, so instead I just said, “The city makes me sad.” Knowing that they, in their liberal hearts, would understand, I told them, “There’s so much broken here.”

I began to daydream about the West, a place where I could escape these messy complications. A place, I thought, where I could live fully: where there would be easy access to the local food and fresh produce I knew I needed to be a better vegetarian, where it would cost less to live and I would have more time to write, where there was more space to wander and fewer people, where maybe I could dig down deep and truly join the community. I set my sights again on Montana, where Kevin was still in college, where I could start over.