A vegetarian walks into a Chinese cookbook.

It is a fascinating experience to read Fuschia Dunlop as a vegetarian. In a chapter about Hong Kong cheekily titled “Chanel and Chicken’s Feet”, for instance, I’m accosted by images of prawns wrapped in delicate rice wrappers, raw mud snails swimming in Shaoxing wine, char siu buns torn open to reveal, as she tells it, “a smile of barbecued pork in a savoury-sweet sauce”. In a rare occurrence, she casually remembers eating “chopped Indian aster leaves with dry beancurd and sesame oil”, and the sudden absence of animal parts ambushes me. Cue the feverish sacrificing of valuable bytes on a limited data plan to Indian aster (Kalimeris Indica)_ then and there. The onslaught of information about this plant overwhelms me and I’m left with more questions than answers (the most relevant being, why is it called Indian aster when it seems to have no connection geographically or culinarily to India?), and certainly no idea as to where I can get my hands on some here in Chicago (where I was when I wrote these words a million minutes of procrastinating ago).

My hopes for recreating one of the dishes she enjoyed enough to mention being waylaid yet again (unless of course, I want to replace every boiling bird and belly of pork with tofu and mushrooms), I come to a startling – if obvious – realization. Unlike most people I surround myself with everyday, my physical location on the other side of the planet (if we’re taking sides) is not the only thing stopping me from considering dim sum in Hong Kong’s Lin Heung restaurant as an entertaining and fulfilling use of my time and money. What would it feel like, I wonder, to read Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper if shark fins and chicken feet were plausible culinary adventures for me? How would my friend A, who enjoys a good steaming bowl of hand-pulled noodles in beef broth on our outings to Noodle Feast (“The Taste of Northern China” in cold, dry Edmonton, Canada) experience this book? Would her thrills be limited to contemplating a different culture and its people, like mine currently are? Or would she picture herself traveling to Chengdu and visiting every hole-in-a-wall dan dan noodle shop she read about one October many years ago? Certainly, this book has been immensely enjoyable for me so far. Even as I am frequently shocked by the various creatures Dunlop has deemed appropriate to taste and eat, I am always equally fascinated by and almost in unrequited love with the existence and the intricacies of a gastronomic way of life so different from my own. And still, as another woman invested in the idea of food as more than just a means to keep myself alive, I find myself struggling to comprehend that I may never actually experience the sensations that she writes about. Sure, neither will most people I know who can actually eat meat and are willing to do so, but if we’re all standing on the outside looking in, the window is just a little more fogged up, a little more opaque for me.

It’s a strange dance, this. My own reasons for my vegetarianism are a sort of murky broth to me that feels discomforting to sift through. There’s a pinch of environmentalism thrown in there, as well as some unwillingness to perceive sentient beings as food, and lest I forget, subconscious – and I’d like to believe unintentional – remnants of caste-derived puritanism. With a little bit of logistical navigating around ethical consumption (I don’t actually have any remote desire to try shark’s fin) and a lot more rational thinking, most of these could be overcome. My parents won’t be the happiest, but they also aren’t the kind to ruin a perfectly imperfect parent-child relationship over something like this. Overall, the consequences wouldn’t be too bad if I chose to cross over into the dark side. The only real obstacle to that life of gastronomic hedonism, the one that makes it unlikely that Fuchsia Dunlop and I will have something to talk about over a cup of tea other than the tea itself, is the fact that I don’t want to eat meat. I’ve tried, twice I’ve maybe even enjoyed it, but never have I actually wanted to go back. It’s a perplexing fish-sauce-free loop I’m stuck in, where I don’t want to eat the thing I wish I didn’t not want to eat. And as if an analogy would make the mental gymnastics here any more comprehensible, let me offer you one. It feels like I’m holding my own hand, and rendering it unusable for other purposes. I don’t want to let go, but I wish I had never held my hand to begin with so I wouldn’t have to consider that it is being held, and that I like it being held. On that confusing note I leave you, friend and reader, and I wish you nothing but good food and lots of it as I head home to an evening of (vegetarian) hot pot and 2000s TV with my (vegetarian) partner. Maybe I’ll channel my inner Dunlop and try a quail’s egg again tonight.

(Editing this a few weeks later, I can tell you that I did in fact give the dreaded quail’s egg another try that night, and well, it’s not for me. Maybe it had something to do with it coming out of a can? I do enjoy a good chicken’s egg though!)