Rainbow vegetable sandwich for Memorial Day? No thanks, liberal media

Hey Pa, what’s for supper?

Cucumber-avocado salad, fried green tomatoes, asparagus-feta pasta, sheet-pan pierogies with brussels sprouts and kimchi, rainbow vegetable sandwich with curried tofu salad, quinoa bowls and mackerel toasts.

Yum, Yum.

To understand this bit you kind of had to be there, “there” being in front of a television set c. 1975 tuned to the country-bumpkin parody “Hee Haw.” A chorus of voices would ask the overalled, straw-hatted Grandpa Jones about dinner plans and he would respond with a gross-out, entrails-centric, presumably hillbilly menu including stuff like braised buzzard kidneys and deviled turkey gizzards, to which the chorus of voices would react enthusiastically.

The foodstuffs in the second paragraph above, however, were certainly not on Grandpa Jones’ culinary radar. Instead, they were actual dishes suggested by the food sections of two national newspapers on the same day, the week before Memorial Day — a holiday, it scarcely needs to be said, that typically features ribs, burgers and dogs.

If you asked me which menu — the national press’ or Grandpa Jones’ — was less appealing, I would frankly have trouble saying. But that’s just me. A turkey gizzard or a rainbow vegetable sandwich may be somebody else’s prime rib, for all I know.

Metro newspapers can insist all they want that they have no agendas, but they very clearly want us to stop eating meat, be it for climate reasons or health reasons or animal-rights reasons or whatever reasons. They have made the judgment that meat is bad, and want the rest of us to fall in line.

That’s their right, and it fits in just fine with newspapers’ apparent goal of having no readers whatsoever. It dovetails perfectly with sports sections that no longer write about actual games so they can focus on some marathoner’s offseason charity work with lupus-survivor support groups.

I try not to let any of this bother me, I do. If I want some good brisket recipes I can go to the Traeger website, so what’s the harm? I also recognize that for the 50 years I’ve been reading newspapers, the food sections have been tailored to carnivores, so I should be gracious and let someone else take the wheel.

I even sympathize with non-meat-eaters who go to a restaurant to be greeted with one pathetic “vegetarian option” like Pasta With Chives and Tap Water, where you know the chef’s heart is not at all in it.

But it’s the implied sermon I resent. The unspoken but loud-and-clear, “Here’s what you should be eating if you weren’t such a caveman” selections that don’t even sound like food. Fried is bad, fermented is bad, I get it, but if, as they seem to want, I have to eat insects, my cicada is not going to be pickled, it’s going to be deep-fried, preferably after being wrapped in bacon.

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In my defense, I don’t like anyone telling me what to ingest, whether food, drink or medicine. Of course I want “clearer skin and less itch.” Who doesn’t? But not if you’re going to hammer it down my throat, particularly with disclaimers like “side effects may include headache, dizziness and death; stop taking Ozxphlemic if it kills you.”

It occurs to me that no matter what I think, we could be entering a new era in food where we are awash in quinoa bowls and mackerel toasts with nary a cheeseburger to be found. Perhaps there was a columnist in 1902 who wrote, “It will be a cold day in hell when Americans stop eating sweetbreads and mutton.”

Historian Michael Beschloss delights in posting menus from grand, 19th century hotels with their codfish hash and stewed calves’ brains.

Will Americans of 2100 be horrified when they read menus from our time that include chicken wings and fish and chips? Quite possibly. But I bet sheet-pan pierogies will appall them just as much.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Non-meat menus pervasive as summer holidays pick up