A Love Letter to Fries
A heartfelt ode to my forever vegan valentine
The scenarios are endless.
Visiting your small hometown, 90 miles from the nearest almond milk. Or meeting friends at a local bar, and you foolishly haven’t eaten since breakfast. Perhaps it’s so late at night, it’s now morning again, and acquiring fast food is the last hurdle to clear before crashing into bed. No matter the context, there is one pre-prepared menu item a vegan on the hop can count on.
Fries.
Oh, fries! You stalwart entrée, you platonic ideal of the Maillard reaction, you precise meeting point between the humble and the sublime. Who among us hasn’t protectively guarded their small bowl of fries at a cafe, while friends around us, chomping away at enormous meals, nevertheless eye them intently? “Just ketchup, hold the aioli please,” becomes second nature. And sure, I don’t personally wish to contribute money to gigantic corporations responsible for processing vast quantities of meat, but if eating is crucial and there’s no other options, I might buy McDonald’s fries [Editor’s note: Fries and hash browns at McDonald’s are vegan in New Zealand, where Laura lives, but in the U.S. they still contain beef fat], one of the minimal choices available to me from their menu. With limitation the mother of invention, I once made a rudimentary…
