Tofu page

My parents didn’t keep kosher when I was growing up, but some of my friends’ families did. I learned at an early age that food restrictions serve not only to create a certain quality of life but also to separate one group of people from another. Nonobservant Jews like us lived beyond the pale: we ate pork and shellfish, and mixed milk and meat dishes (e.g., we ate cheeseburgers). Some kids I knew kept kosher at home “for Grandma’s sake” (mine couldn’t care less) but were allowed to order spareribs and lobster at the Chinese restaurant.

As a tyke I also understood that there were two basic food groups: Good-for-You and Bad-for-You. In those heavenly high-fat days we had bacon and eggs for breakfast several times a week because nobody realized they were Bad-for-You. Foods kids disliked—spinach, oatmeal, grapefruit—were Good. Food that tasted good—chocolate, especially—was Bad. The reward for eating healthy food was being allowed to eat unhealthy food. Grownups, of course, could eat anything they wanted, which led quickly to the conclusion that control of your diet equals control of your life.

After I came out in the 1970s, the saying “you are what you eat” took on new meaning. Oysters, those silky, slippery creatures redolent of ocean, quivering in their opalescent shells, became my favorite food for seduction, possibly because…well, let’s just say they evoked certain lesbian intimacies. I also developed a taste for soft-boiled eggs (3-31/2 minutes). As a child I’d refused to eat them because they felt “icky.” Now I gently nibbled the whites and caressed the unctuous yolk with my tongue. I ate a soft-boiled egg for breakfast every morning for years until the bad news about cholesterol finally reached me in my distant gourmet stronghold. Reluctantly I cut back to four eggs a week.

Most of my adult life I lived in France, where cooking is a fine art and eating is more important than making love (the French don’t care whether you “do it,” actually, as long as you can discuss is intellectually). French dinners lasted several hours and included at least four courses. Each course came to the table separately, with plenty of time in between for conversation. Meat figured prominently on French menus; everything else was a garnish. Traditional dishes, especially the heart country fare known as cuisine de bonne femme (“good women’s cooking), simmered for hours in wine-flavored sauces enriched with butter and cream. Nouvelle cuisine, which featured smaller portions on larger plates and replaced frying or simmering with poaching, steaming or broiling, offered an acceptable way to reduce calories without really counting them.

My French lesbian friends scorned “healthy food” as “diet food.” To them it smacked of straight urban women’s obsession with thinness. French lesbians also held vegetarianism responsible for the pallid, unassertive look of customers at the health-food store. Lesbians, their reasoning went, needed on the contrary to be tougher, more aggressive. Eating meat gave one muscle. After all, wasn’t Artemis, Greek goddess of independent women, a huntress? Not that we scorned vegetables—artichokes, asparagus, even broccoli and Brussels sprouts could be delectable when cooked al dente and coated with creamy hollandaise. We just didn’t want to eat them with tofu.

When I came back to this country in the mid-1980s I discovered a whole new way of life. Bacon was out, whole grain was in. Lesbian and gay Jews kept kosher by serving only dairy or veggie dishes at their events. Lesbian potluck dinners, I was told, featured mostly pasta salads, and the popularity of authentic Chinese cooking had made tofu fashionable.

For a while I attempted to be politically correct. One night a very cosmopolitan lover took me out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Since she had traveled in China, I let her order a tofu dish for me. The sauce was delicious, I don’t deny it, but the tofu had the texture of those soft sponges actors use to put on stage makeup. Another time my omnivorous housemate took an unaccustomed turn at the stove to make us a tofu stir-fry. This time it tasted like kitchen sponge—a little more bounce to the ounce but nowhere as sexy as marinated steak tips.

I took a large tossed salad to a potluck dinner given by our neighborhood lesbian social group. It sat on the table alongside two other green salads and no less than six desserts. Clearly, we were in trouble. I can’t remember who suggested collecting two bucks from each participant and calling the nearest Chinese takeout place, but I know we ordered shrimp fried rice, barbecued beef on skewers, and a chicken dish. The following month I bought two big packages of chicken wings, covered them with Shake&Bake Barbecue, and stuck them in the oven. Within half an hour of my arrival at the potluck, they were gone. Those gals gobbled up those wings as if they hadn’t seen a chicken since Colonel Sanders was a sprat. Later, someone explained to me that “lesbian potluck” had become synonymous with “prisoners of tofu.”

I became known as the dyke you could rely on to relieve the tedium with barbecued chicken wings. For special friends I sometimes made my mother’s pot roast smothered in onions, or roast lamb Greek style, rubbed with olive oil, lemon and basil and studded with garlic. In Greece I used to serve sautéed lamb’s testicles, known here as prairie oysters, but it’s hard to foist those on lesbian guests even though, come to think of it, their texture resembles tofu.

Then one day, at the YWCA, I had my cholesterol tested. I could no longer ignore the ill effects of saturated fat, salt and other noxious substances that made food so mouth-watering. I added a carrot a day to my lunch. I started eating brown rice, putting my breakfast herring on whole-grain bread, and snacking on popcorn instead of potato chips. When I was laid off from my job at a health-and-fitness-oriented magazine, I cut back on meat to save money. I ate fish more often (this was not a hardship) and bought lots of spaghetti at supermarket sales. Ecologically, too, it made sense to eat lower on the food chain.

One year, largely for economic reasons, I agreed to share my apartment with a vegetarian. Suddenly the pantry filled with cereal boxes, rice cakes and a giant jar of nonfat dry milk. The day a package of tofu appeared in the refrigerator, I discreetly stacked my cold cuts at the back of the meat bin and put the cheese and yoghurt toward the front.

My new housemate and I had different schedules, so we didn’t often eat together. She wasn’t even big on veggies—she rarely shared the artichokes, asparagus or even broccoli I cooked in the microwave. I think she was more of a fruit person. She liked fish, though, and even shellfish, though I wondered what she’d say if she saw me tenderizing a whole octopus with the meat mallet before cutting it up into little pieces and stewing it in wine. My next housemate didn’t take any chances; she sustained herself mostly on frozen and fast food and Chinese takeout.

I have less of a waistline than I used to, and more tolerance for culinary diversity. I also think the world would be a better place if all of us could sit down at the same table without choking. I do have my limits: I never ate horsemeat the whole time I lived in France, and I refused to eat whale steak in Brazil, long before moving to Provincetown (where Womantide, a now-defunct lesbian magazine, used to organize lesbian whale watches). Still, I’d rather define myself by whom, not what, I eat. Let’s uphold gastronomic choice instead of cramping one another with food restrictions. When it’s baseball season, just buy me a hot dog at Fenway. I’ll have a beer with that, please, and don’t tell the Food Police.