All the noise around Apple’s 50th anniversary has spurred me to reminisce about some of my early experiences with Apple. One such was in 1985 when Apple invited me to the 1985 World Wide Developers Conference. At the time, I was kind of a medium-sized fish in the very, very small pond that was the Macintosh developers community, but I had been operating in almost total isolation so it was fun to get to meet people whose names were familiar but who — if I’d met them at all — I’d only met in text exchanges on the likes of CompuServ’s MAUG forums.
Food was included in the invite, and they had us all (fewer than 100, I think) in a conference hall and served food banquet style. I had been a vegetarian for some years at that point, and had indicated a preference for vegetarian cuisine on my RSVP, but that information apparently got lost. When the waiter asked whether I wanted the chicken or prime rib, I asked about the vegetarian option. Apparently, I was the only veg-head in the room and it caused a bit of a stir. I told them it wasn’t a big deal, and I’d find enough to eat on one of the meat-option plates, but the waiter insisted.
And returned in about ten minutes with an absolutely gorgeous plate of pasta primavera. It was obviously prepared one-off and was hot and fresh, but delayed enough that everyone watched it being brought in as they were chewing through their rubbery, heat-lamp warmed chicken or prime. Let me say, too, that it really was excellent. At dinner the next evening, about a third of the attendees seem to have converted to vegetarianism.
My reasons for being vegetarian were many (health, environmental impact, animal rights…), but one was that I just didn’t particularly like meat. I don’t think I was fully cognizant of that until a time years later when some family members excitedly told me they were going to a special restaurant that they thought I’d really like. It was a traditional (in the San Francisco sense) Chinese restaurant with all the usual kung-pao chicken, sweet and sour pork, shrimp won ton type dishes except there was no actual meat involved. I’d guess they were mostly textured vegetable protein based meat substitutes and, while I wasn’t qualified to judge, I think they did a pretty good job. Everyone else at the table were exclaiming how they couldn’t tell it wasn’t real meat and they kept asking me how I liked it. Apparently, they were under the impression that I led a life of suffering and deprivation because I wouldn’t eat meat for some political or philosophical reason (and, yes, I had those, too). They expected me to be really happy to be able to get that meaty goodness while still staying true to my convictions. But the truth was that I would have enjoyed the meat-free options I usually ordered at Chinese restaurants much more than I did the fake-meat food. Because I basically didn’t much care for the taste of most meat, the better a “vegetarian” dish mimicked a meat-based dish, the less appealing it was for me.
Of course I’m speaking in absolutes; obviously I have had vegetarian dishes that I didn’t like and many quite tasty meat dishes, but I had so much steak and hamburger and occasional chicken growing up that I found veggie cuisine to be a refreshing change. In general, I’d prefer zucchini, fettuccine, or bulgar wheat over a big warm bun and a huge chunk of meat [warning: YouTube video] any day.
—2p