Beef Stroggy tonight?
“Beef Stroggy” is a nickname my friends have given my poor-man’s beef stroganoff. It uses ground beef rather than steak and is served over egg noodles. Because of how easy it is to make and how filling it is (not to mention how many leftovers you get out of it), it quickly became a go-to for our friend group. I often made it on request and would enjoy sitting down with whatever roommate(s) I had to eat together. Eating it warm felt like taking a nap together while wide awake.
But this time, I hesitated as I looked at the message from a friend on my phone. That sounded good for dinner, I had most of the ingredients, and was in the mood to cook, but my conflict arose elsewhere. Earlier in the summer, I had been diagnosed with a gallbladder issue. The doctor said I needed to stop eating red meat, my body couldn’t process the amount of fat right and would cause my gallbladder to constrict in on itself. It was a small change on paper, but it changed my lifelong approach to food.
You see: both my parents are from Texas. Fun Fact: Texas has the most beef cows of any state in the U.S. As a family we grew up on steak and ground beef. It was a hard staple in my diet for my entire life. But the thing is, not eating it did immediately make me feel better. Not only did my gallbladder seem to be working again, but alongside that my mood improved, and I didn’t feel so fatigued. What wasn’t working was my mindset. Who even was I without beef? Who would I be within my friend group if I couldn’t make Beef Stroggy for dinner?
Beef connects me to my direct family, my parents and two brothers who all live a handful of states away. They are all in Texas, and in my mind sitting around a table eating steak and potatoes, while I am in Virginia, eating chicken. It is not a strange feeling to be distant from them, I always have been, but we always had food to connect us at the end of the day. It was very important in my household to have dinner as a family, all having the same thing. Now I’ll be getting a different plate.
Not eating red meat makes me see myself as less tough in a way. But not eating beef is the only thing that’s changed. I know way too much about cars and traffic patterns, sometimes pulling up the GPS on my phone to watch traffic on 95, and my roommate recently called me a “jock” in an offhand way, for my interest in football and other sports. Those are two things that should add to my subconscious “manliness,” but the lack of beef seems to nullify that.
I felt like a real traitor, however, when I finally tried fake red meat. I had never considered it before; I had a mild curiosity when the product first came out but had never felt a strong enough urge to answer the question myself. My girlfriend has a frozen block of Beyond Beef sitting in their freezer, but every time we remember it, it’s too late to try and dethaw it in time. I believed it was as good as people said. In other words, I thought it was probably terrible. But soon I discovered that was probably a false impression.
In a New York Time’s articles by Anahad O’Connor, he starts with “The meat industry has a warning for consumers: Beware of plant-based meat.” He goes on: “The new “disinformation” campaign, they say, is a sign that Impossible Foods’ mission – to disrupt the meat industry and replace animals in the food system – is working.” What I interpreted was that anything the meat industry was against had to be good, in the same vein that if an oil company tried to convince me that public transport was somehow worse in comparison to individual cars.
I tried Beyond Beef first, finally dethawing the rock-hard cube from my girlfriend’s freezer. We made our own hamburger patties, mixing the “meat” with an array of spices, breadcrumbs, and an egg. It cooked similar, though I felt it was more wet than what I would have expected from authentic beef. It may have been from using my girlfriend’s very fast heating stovetop rather than my own, but I found the patties got a crisp to them sooner. The taste was like beef, though the familiar spices helped with the correlation. I’m unsure if it was my mind that caused me to feel it was different or the actual taste itself, but after five hours I wasn’t lying on the couch in pain. Instead, I was in a food coma from a burger that was probably too big, and that by my standards was a win. I had a similar experience with other fake meats.
After that first taste test, it occurred to me that there wasn’t anything sacrilegious about it at all. Yes, I was losing this connection with my family, but that didn’t matter. I was living on my own, separated from them. I felt I had to prove something by eating beef, like it validated my existence as a “strong” person. But the people I felt I needed to prove this to were no longer physically seeing me eat. I wasn’t being observed anymore.
I have told my parents about my food restrictions. But I have yet to tell my parents about trying fake beef. Not because it feels blasphemous, but because I do not need to be the same as them to validate my place within the family. Growing up in our home with the Texas flag presented on throw pillows and framed pictures and wood cut outs of the shape of the state on our walls for decoration, I would often smell my mother making steak for dinner, the sound of the beef sizzling in the pan not far behind. Soon she would ask me to set the table and I’d put out red and white napkins that pay homage to Texas Tech University, where both my parents and one of my brothers graduated from. I’d fill up water glasses and set out silverware and soon we’d all sit and eat steak, potatoes, and broccoli. But that was then, and this is now. I will make my chicken breast for dinner and enjoy it without feeling that I am betraying some part of me.