tomorrow!

#5 | food for thought

Welcome to post #5 of tomorrow!

Windows

Due to the outer edges of Hurricane Erin, the weather has been more mild in New York, and the air quality much better than before. Higher temperatures lead to ozone sinking closer to the ground, and the windless heat domes make it stay--another upsetting effect of climate change. The temperatures have dropped to a normal level though and I can finally open the windows in my apartment.

I live in a very old townhouse that originally did not have AC. Air behaves strangely in it. All the heat accumulates and concentrates, making everything stuffy, and it can only be relieved by opening every single window and letting wind freely pass through the house. But when the weather is hot and humid and making the air quality poor, I have no choice but to close all windows and run the AC, which sucks.

So lately I've taken joy in being able to open every window and breathe in fresh fresh air, and listening to the sounds of the city around me while I cook, clean, and work. People having a beer and a chat on the corner, kids riding scooters, the faint melodies of jazz at a nearby restaurant patio.

I've been thinking about vegetables.

I'm making an attempt to become vegetarian. I don't know if I can quite say I am vegetarian yet. I'm kind of just doing this as long as I can, which so far has been about two weeks. My estimate is I'll end up somewhere around mostly-vegetarian-sometimes-pescetarian.

This is a lifestyle change that has been in my mind for a while. My girlfriend was pescetarian for a couple of years, my housemate is vegan, and I'm extremely lactose intolerant. I already rarely cook meat at home because touching it is a little disturbing to me, and I've always been interested in trying new cooking methods and reducing the use of animal products whenever I can.

A breaking point came recently because of the combination of two things:

  1. I traveled to the UK on vacation and ate at gastropubs for a good amount of it. Eating so much meat and heavy food made me feel a little sick when I got home.

  2. I've had a whole fish in my freezer that I bought in the winter and forgot about. I finally cooked it recently according to a recipe my mom used to make for me all the time. It wasn't pre-gutted, and cutting out the guts made me feel so awful that I barely wanted to eat it afterwards.

I cried. I felt so sad for the fish: it probably lived a meaningless life on a fish farm only to feed me twice. But I also cried because I realized that over time, I've been losing my taste for meat/fish, and this means that I don't enjoy some of my favorite foods, and might not eat some of those things ever again. I wish that this move to eat less meat and fish were for a happier reason, but it's actually to mitigate my feelings of sadness and despair at the world.

But we move on. I'm going to try and create lots of new recipes :')

In memory of the foods I used to love!

#posts #writing