Eating on the Road

By: Matt Frazier

Hey everyone!  Hope you enjoyed my little sis’ guest dessert post yesterday.  You can look forward to those for the next few Fridays.  Today I’m coming at you live from the great state of Massachusetts.  Go Red Sawks–NOT AT ALL!  In fact, one might classify me as part of Red Sox Hation.  But the people here are nice, so I won’t hate.

I’m here for a wedding in which Erin is a bridesmaid, so here I sit in the hotel room, taking weird pictures of myself holding an Amazing Grass Chocolate Green SuperFood bar, while she’s off doing whatever it is that girls in the bridal party do on wedding days.  I hung out with some of the other estranged husbands for a little while, so as I write this I’m just a few beers deep, which means that for the first time I’m doing what is known in blog circles as drogging (drunk + blogging).  Although I suppose a better word for me is buzzlogging, because surely I couldn’t craft such elegant prose if I were totally sauced.

This is the first time since I became vegetarian that I’ve had to eat on the road–if you’re even a little bit of a conscious eater, you know how hard travel can be on your diet (remember the nasty Roy Rogers sandwich I was forced to eat on the way home from the Tony Robbins seminar that started it all?).  I’m sure traveling has been the cause of countless blown diets for people.  Thankfully, I’ll never again be on the type of diet capable of being blown by a weekend of bad eating; when you don’t eat meat, it’s sort of hard to stray too far from a healthy diet.  But of course, traveling requires a certain amount of deviation from one’s normal eating routine.

I was able to eat breakfast at home yesterday before I flew up here, and on the plane I just had a cup of decaf coffee and an Amazing Grass Green SuperFood bar.  I’ve really enjoyed all of the Amazing Grass products I’ve sampled so far, but the bars have not been my favorite.  I love that they’re made from organic whole foods and that I was able to get some greens up in me while on the plane, but the taste isn’t much better than the fake protein bars I used to eat when I was really into lifting weights.  Imagine a spinach salad loaded up with nuts and too many dried sweetened cranberries, and you’ll be pretty close to the taste of the SuperFood bar.

Breakfast is usually the hardest travel meal for me–I’m lost without my smoothie–but thankfully the people we stayed with last night had some cinnamon raisin bagels for us since they knew we wouldn’t want bacon and eggs.  Nothing against eggs; I use them all the time in my cooking.  I just have not been able to eat them by themselves ever since I ate too many dyed, hard-boiled ones in an Easter-morning fervor one year when I was a kid.

For lunch both days I’ve had margherita pizza, with a salad yesterday and with two beers today.  Definitely not something I feel great about eating, but one can do much worse than this when on the road, and as I said before, my relationship with food is such that a few days of less-than-perfect eating doesn’t mess anything up.

At the rehearsal dinner yesterday, there was no vegetarian entree so I got by on sides.  Green beans with almonds, salad, and some baked ziti filled me up.  And half a slice of cheesecake.  It’s funny that most people probably ate this same stuff, plus a big piece of meat!  Skipping the meat has really become second nature already, and it feels great.

As for tonight, the bride was kind enough to make sure there’s a vegetarian entree for us.  When we specified two surf-with-no-turf’s on our RSVP card (we were still mostly pescetarian back then), I guess she realized something was up and scored us the veggie entree instead.  My money is on pasta with veggies, and you won’t hear me complaining if that’s what it is.

So you see, traveling doesn’t have to mean turning your meals into a free-for-all or being forced to eat the crap that fast-food places pawn off as healthy food.  You can eat well, even if it’s not what you’d eat at home, without making too many special arrangements or bringing your whole kitchen on the road.  And best of all, you can have fun while you do it and not look like a stick in the mud.  I mean come on, what would the other husbands have thought if I’d have ordered a salad and a water instead of pizza and beer at lunch?