This is a guest blog written by one of my friends while procrastinating on her Masters.
I should probably begin this blog by acknowledging that I’m not a vegetarian – although my boyfriend is. However, I don’t eat a lot of meat and I generally try and eat mainly organic meat.
Because of my semi-vegetarianism, I buy a lot of vegetarian food in cafes and restaurants. When I do this I almost always find that the dish I have ordered contains pumpkin. Cafes and restaurants put pumpkin in the weirdest things when the dish is for vegetarians – dishes that meat eaters would never expect to find pumpkin in.
I have found pumpkin in vegetarian lasagna, fritatas, burritos, paninis, pizzas (why?), pasta dishes, salads and so on. I’ve even had pumpkin in a burger. Sometimes, they advertise the presence of the pumpkin, which is marginally ok. But lots of the time they just pop it in.
I feel very strongly about this issue because I hate pumpkin and have always done so. In fact, in general, I’m not a big fan of sweet, starchy foods such as kumara, taro, pumpkin and corn.
However, even if you like pumpkin, you should be annoyed about it’s incessant presence in NZ vegetarian food in cafes and restuarants. Why? Because it’s presence represents a larger trend in vegetarian food in New Zealand which is that it’s typically very poor value. This is because most NZ restaurants and cafes clearly think that when you’re serving a vegetarian meal you can just take the equivalent meat meal, remove the protein (which is almost always the most expensive raw ingredient) and replace it with either a) nothing or b) some really cheap vegetable.
The vegetable of choice is often pumpkin which is (I assume) because it’s really cheap and it’s also fairly bland. Kumara also gets heavily used for the same purpose. But this practise is NOT ok.
I still remember how annoyed I felt when I went to a pub (my brother chose the venue, he eats more meat than me) in Wellington a few years ago. My brother ordered a steak and it looked great. He paid about $25 for his meal and the steak looked as if it would have cost him $8 in the supermarket at least. It also came with chips and some veggies – fair enough value then, after all they have to pay the chef’s wages, the waiters etc as well.
I ordered the vegetarian pasta because it was the only veggie option on the menu. It cost $20 and what I got was a bowl of bog standard pasta (raw cost $0.50) and some tomatoey sauce which had clearly just come out of a Watties can (cost $1). They had added some onion and a few dried herbs (cost $0.50). There were no other vegetables in the sauce. The nutritional content of this meal was minimal. There wasn’t even cheese! I had to go and ask for some.
So repeat after me, it’s NOT ok to charge meat eaters $30 for a meal with meat, in which the meat cost say $8 and the other raw ingredients cost you another $5 (cost $13, surplus which goes to restaurant $17), and then charge a vegetarian $28 for a vegetarian meal in which all your raw ingredients cost just $5 (surplus to restaurant $23). The vegetarian is getting ripped off and, what’s more, they’re going to end up with serious nutritional deficiencies if you keep on feeding them pumpkin instead of protein.
Instead you should replace the meat with a vegetarian alternative of similar value and taste. So, for example, if you take out the steak then add haloumi! If you take out the chicken, then add eggs. If you remove the lamb then put in chickpeas AND some nuts instead. And NZ cafes – stop making vegetarian dishes that are intended to be savoury (like, not sweet) with pumpkin and kumara and other god-awful things in them! Shell out a few extra dollars and chuck in some cheese, or feta, or put some pine nuts in the salad on the side.
Because vegetarians know that you’re ripping them off and they eventually will find the one cafe/restaurant in their area which does good vegetarian food and never visit your premises again.
Vege Burger here again. Reading this reminded me of a time I went to dinner with a friend and the only vegetarian main was a vegetarian tart, which consisted of a sheet of pastry smothered with creme fraiche with a dull salad on top. More recently with that same friend I went out for dinner and the only thing listed in the menu that was vegetarian was a side dish of “white fungus”, what an age we live in.