How Not to Starve on a Cruise, part 1

Let me end the suspense right now. Kathryn and I took a cruise and we did not starve. It was my first cruise and was just four nights. I was concerned about starving in the midst of plenty. Cruises are known for creating tempting arrays of food which most people cannot resist or use to excuse their penchant for overindulging. I was not going for the food, however, but mainly just for the experience. By booking with short notice, we got a very low fare. We paid the extra five bucks a night to get an ocean view, meaning a window. That was a great decision. Sleeping in an interior cabin with no view outside would have felt like prison to me.

It is summer of 2014, I have been eating whole food, plant-based for nearly five years, since November of 2009, and I no longer perceive dishes containing meat, milk, cheese, or refined flour to be food I consume. I also avoid added oils of any kind, but I knew I would have to stretch this point on the cruise. You might say we were testing ourselves, but that is not quite right. We have both eaten this way for long enough, and under difficult enough conditions, to be confident that we would not “give in” to the temptations of filet mignon or chocolate lava cake. We were not worried about our self-control. We were worried about finding real food, food that we could eat.

We boarded the Carnival Inspiration Monday afternoon in Long Beach, California. We were hungry, having missed lunch. Everyone boarding had to fill out a form basically promising not to have Ebola. So it was mid-afternoon when we found the Lido deck, where the buffet lines were. Outside by the pool, they served grill items such as hamburgers and hotdogs. I was astonished to see how many people use the occasion of their dream vacation to scarf down school cafeteria quality burgers. Another line had a meat carving station. Next to it, wondrous to behold, was a Mongolian Wok line.

At home, a Mongolian barbecue is one of my favorite restaurants. I load up my bowl with vegetables, eschewing the noodles and all the meats. The chefs know I don’t want them to add any oil, and I always get a delicious, highly filling plate of food. I am not squeamish, as some vegans are, about eating food cooked on the same grill used to cook meat, and the cooks clean the grill for me when I reach it. It was much the same on the Inspiration. The line had fewer veggies, but it was certainly adequate. I took two bowls, knowing it would cook down to one. There were three choices of meat, which varied a little day to day. I asked the chef for no oil or meat. The first time, he sprayed quite a bit of Pam cooking spray into the wok. Then he added a ladle of broth, which I guessed to be chicken broth. Each day, I went back for lunch. He came to recognize me. “Szechwan sauce, no oil, no Pam, no broth, no meat,” I would inform him. Good lunch.

There were no mushrooms on the wok line, and Kathryn knows I love mushrooms. She befriended the pizza chef stationed at the far aft of the deck. He made custom pizzas for her with only veggies. It is a shame he had no whole grain crust. He had no pineapple at his disposal, but agreed to make her a pineapple pizza when she brought some to him from the salad bar. He gave her a bowl full of sliced mushrooms to bring me in the wok line. The other people in the line wondered where I got the mushrooms.

Gluten-free eating’s popularity has reached the cruise world. Every line had some kind of gluten-free bread. The ones we tried varied quite a bit, from being nearly normal in texture to seeming rather like savory sponge cake. I did not consider them “whole-food, plant-based,” and we did not eat much of them.

We decided to try having dinner at our assigned time in the formal dining room. It seemed like a major part of the whole cruise experience, a chance to make friends with people we would see each evening. Our assigned time was the late seating at 8:15pm. Since we were used to having supper around six, we knew we would have to snack between lunch and dinner or we would get too hungry.

The Mardi Gras dining room has a printed menu for each evening meal, and they varied in details around a common template. There was always a vegetarian Indian cuisine option, a number of meat and fish based entrees, and a “rare find.” This was an appetizer containing some animal that many people have not tried eating, but might take a chance on under the inhibition reducing influence of the cruise. The four nights of our cruise, the “rare finds” were alligator, rabbit, frog’s legs, and escargot.

Our dinner mates were a Canadian couple, a father and daughter celebrating her recent graduation from university and new job, and a pair of obese women friends about my age. None were trying to eat healthy, except to the extent that they might think chicken or fish to be healthy options (they aren’t). One of the fat women ordered three entrees and four desserts at the final supper, and ate them all.

The unifying principle of a cruise is consumption. We were constantly accosted by photographers as we walked, ate, boarded and disembarked at port. A guy dressed as Captain Jack Sparrow posed with his toy sword around each guest’s neck at supper. Prints of the photos were posted for our perusal. I mistakenly thought they were included with the cruise, and carried three of them off. Later, I learned that we were supposed to have paid for them. On the back of each was a security sticker that makes an alarm sound if you carry it through the security gate. We had not heard the alarm, and neither had anyone else, because it was so crowded and noisy when we committed the crime. Once I was informed that there was an extra charge for the prints, I carried them back into the display room, causing the alarm to sound, and disposed of them properly in the bins provided for photographs the subjects disliked.

Continued in part 2