In the Whole Foods produce section a man in his late 40’s is standing, inert, with an empty shopping cart. A woman of the same age, perhaps sensing prey, asks him if he needs any help finding something. “I’m just trying to remember a recipe,” he replies.

“Oh?” she says. “What kind of recipe?”

“It’s, uh, complicated,” he answers, in a tone that indicates he’s not interested in her cooking advice or anything else. Then, perhaps thinking he was too brusque, adds, “I’m a raw-foodist.”

“A raw-foodist.”

“Yes, I don’t eat cooked food.”

“People who eat raw food call themselves ‘raw-foodists.’” It’s not a question.

“Only to people who eat cooked food,” he replies sourly.

To me she says, “Welcome to Cambridge.” Then she pushes off into Seafood.

Visiting Nashoba Valley Winery during apple-picking season is the closest that eastern Massachusetts gets to the wine tourism madness of Napa. There are too many tasters, not enough cashiers, and like a lot of stops on the California wine buses, the ratio of human density to wine quality is not favorable. But our vintner choices out here are limited: there’s the excellent sparkling wines of Westport Rivers (previously reviewed in Wine Sediments) and a few other wineries that are part of the Coastal Wine Trail in southeastern New England, but the only sizable winemaker within 50 miles of Boston is Nashoba Valley.

[ More in Wine Sediments ]

I’ve started writing for The Well-Fed Network, a series of food-related blogs. My first article was published today: Oh sherry! In keeping with their editorial policy I’ll be attempting to post once a week or so, primarily on their wine blog.

Thanks to various people for their editing help.

Last night I made a vegan version of Jasper White’s Southwestern Corn Chowder via Matthew Amster-Burton. Here’s what I did:

• 3 ears yellow corn, grilled
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 red onion, cut into half-inch dice
• 1/2 teaspoon minced fresh thyme
• 1 teaspoon ground cumin (roasted whole, then ground)
• 1/8 teaspoon turmeric
• 1 pound red potatoes, peeled and cut into half-inch dice
• 3 cups corn broth (see below)
• salt and pepper
• 1 large poblano chile, grilled, peeled, cored, and diced
• 2 teaspoons arrowroot
• 2 tablespoons minced cilantro
• scallions and cilantro for garnish
• 1 dried chipotle, soaked in warm water

1. Grill the corn per Cook’s Illustrated: remove all but the last layer of husk, leaving the kernels barely visible. Grill for about 6 minutes, turning occasionally.
2. Grill the poblano: core and remove seeds, then split and flatten, smear with olive oil, grill until the skin blackens. I couldn’t be bothered to peel all of the skin and we all lived.
3. Dry-roast the whole cumin. There’s a trend here: I wanted to maximize the flavors of all the major ingredients since we were doing without the bacon. I’m not sure if this was detectable in the final product, but it felt like Cooking.
4. After husking, cutting and milking the corn, I put the cobs into 4 cups of boiling water, added some garlic, peppercorns and parsley, and made a broth while preparing the other ingredients. I had bought some commercial veggie broth but the corn broth actually had pretty good flavor, so I never used it.
5. Follow the recipe as given with obvious substitutions.
6. At the end I added a few tablespoons of the chipotle soaking liquid. I could’ve added more, and probably gone ahead and added actual diced chipotle, but I didn’t want to end up with chipotle soup.

I used red onion instead of yellow because that feels more “southwestern” to me. The store didn’t have Yukon Golds so I went with low-starch red potatoes, but I think in a vegan soup a better mix would’ve been diced red potatoes for substance, but a baking potato for starch. I’ve been told that Potato Buds® are a popular vegan trick for making thick chowder.

People seemed to like it, but there was still plenty left over, which strikes me as ideal.

In high school I gave up eating red meat. I was interested in becoming a vegetarian, but I didn’t really see how it could work. I didn’t eat a lot of different kinds of foods and I was smart enough to know that cheese fries and milkshakes, while delicious, did not constitute a meal plan.

In college I was introduced to Thai and Indian and sushi and chiles and everything else that’s awesome about food. Eventually it occurred to me that, hey, I could swap tofu for chicken in most of what I liked and not notice the difference. So I became a vegetarian — specifically, a lacto-ovo-vegetarian, as opposed to a vegan.

Anyway, I think that lasted a few weeks until I realized that this plan omitted sushi so I switched to being a pescetarian. Specifically, a lacto-ovo-pescetarian, and that’s where things stood for about ten years.

I was never extremely exclusive about it. I know that if a restaurant doesn’t say its soup is vegetarian, it’s got chicken broth, and probably even if it does say it’s vegetarian. As long as it didn’t explicitly say “made with chicken broth,” I considered that lacto-ovo-pescetarian and went with it. Don’t ask, don’t tell.

In my late twenties I got more serious about cooking. I started learning more about the traditional cuisines of places like Italy and Spain and Southeast Asia. Once in a while I let some fancy pork products into my diet, if I was in a restaurant. Then I started buying them. Then I included regular bacon. It’s a slippery slope.

Just before the New Year I took stock of the situation. I was still sort of considering myself to be a vegetarian, except I ate fish, chicken broth and cured pork products, or anything if I was eating at Babbo. I realized that there’s a word for this, and it’s not lacto-ovo-pollo-porco-babbo-pescetarian. It’s neurotic.

So, that’s it. I don’t want to be one of those crazy women with food issues and a borderline eating disorder. I’ve come to believe that the environmental load of a soy burger made in an industrial farm — processed and heavily packaged — is worse than some local organic lamb. Maybe it’s just an excuse.

After I made my decision we went to Christopher’s in Porter Square and I ordered a burger (made with natural beef, of course). I don’t think I’d had a burger since I was 16. You know, it was really good.

The rest of the week I ate eggplant and beans and cheese and salad.

Words used by Artisanal, a fondue restaurant in New York City, to describe their cheese selections:

• Grainy
• Unctuous
• Explosive
• Grassy
• Herbaceous
• Minerally
• Fluffy
• Varying
• Spoonable
• Sassafras-wrapped
• Extra daring

I am going to be preparing a vegan meal, so I am turning to the cookbook I own which contains a lot of complex and interesting vegan meals: The Modern Vegetarian Kitchen, by Peter Berley.

The recipes are all excellent, but some of his advice is kind of dubious. He recommends “real, unrefined, coarse gray Celtic sea salt” which contains “the eighty-four mineral elements originally in the ocean” because these elements “harmonize with the human body’s own fluids.”

Conscientious cooks may also want to note the following sidebar:

The next time you drain water from a sink, notice the direction it flows — this will tell you what the natural force of the water is where you live. Water spirals in a counterclockwise direction in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere. I like to maintain this harmony by stirring foods steadily in the natural direction.

Uh, okay.