Torq's Field Guide to Fonts

"What is this font I keep seeing everywhere?"

Ever notice that you see the same fonts everywhere you go? No? Well, I do. And I verbalize the experience often enough that my wife gets annoyed and violently twists my nipples every time I point at a font and shriek its name.

There's at least a few good reasons that these fonts have stood the test of time and become so wildly popular for marketing and design. Though being bundled with Microsoft Office is one of those reasons, they're also just well-made and highly applicable.

The bad part of this is overexposure. Sure, you may not notice Helvetica everywhere you go, but Curlz sticks out like a 12-year-old girl's flowery-painted thumb. It's a bit like using the same word over and over again. I mean, there's only so many times you can say "cabbage" out loud before it begins to sound weird, and then completely lose its meaning.

However, you might see a font while riding around on your dirt bike and realize that it's perfect for your PowerPoint presentation, wedding invitation, emancipation proclamation or whatever else you're currently working on. And the deadline is in 6 hours because you procrastinated so badly. And the guy at the bus stop is too concerned about you riding your dirt bike on the sidewalk to offer you any help identifying the font.

So here's my Field Guide to Fonts. It's like identifying leaves out in the woods or inverted insects on your windowsill, but in true word nerd fashion, it involves letters.

Copperplate Gothic

You'll see it anywhere that a classy all-capitals font needs to be used. Signs, t-shirts, websites, book titles, and everywhere in-between. Copperplate Gothic is clearly legible from a far distance because of its wide letters and uppercase-style lowercase letters (a typography style called "small caps.")

This classic typeface dates all the way back to 1901, when Frederic Goudy created it for the American Type Founders. The glyphs are intended to resemble carving or etching into metal or glass. Now that you've read this, you will actually see it carved or etched into metal or glass everywhere you go.

Crimefighter BB

You can make anything feel like a comic book by using this classic handwritten-style font. It gets its roots from the Marvel Comic classics of the mid- to late-20th century.

Lots of people think that Comic Sans would fill this role, but it doesn't, and most people hate it. While Comic Sans is seen as a trademark of poor design skills, Crimefighter BB is seen as a secret weapon.

Curlz

Omigosh it's so cute! You might think that these characters had been lifted straight from the pages of a middle school girl's math notebook if I didn't know for a fact that two grown men whipped it up in 1995 for Agfa Monotype.

These were the times when many typefaces that had been popular for centuries were still being converted to vector models for use in home word processing. Carl Crossgrove and Steve Matteson noticed a significant lack in the market for girly fonts for girls that girls everywhere would print entire book reports in, and so began a trend of wacky out-there typefaces.

It's one of the most popular fonts for signs because of its lighthearted nature and easy legibility from far away. And if you never noticed it before, you're going to now. Sorry.

Hill House

Due to its erratic and high x-height and popularity on signs visible from roads, I've dubbed Hill House the new Papyrus. (You'll know what I mean if you read the snarky Papyrus entry below.)

Jon Hicks didn't want to just use Papyrus for his wedding invitations. How could a graphic designer allow that to happen? And for a marriage to another graphic designer, too! Nope, he could handle it himself. It was time to try his hand at typography and create something brand new.

The result was Hill House, an uppercase-only typeface based on the handwriting of renowned architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh, completed in 1997 — just in time for the Hicks wedding invitations to be mailed out at 29 cents a piece. Hicks went on to create all those sassy monsters you see gleefully chomping things on the Firefox website.

Hobo

This font doesn't generally live up to its name, because it's clean and doesn't carry a bindle. However, much like the nomads of the American railroads, it's been everywhere.

Hobo was cranked out of the American Type Founders factory thanks to typeface magician Morris Fuller Benton. In 1910. NINETEEN-FREAKING-TEN. You can imagine that this font looked like space robots to the people of that time. Yep, people wanted something that looked like a typewriter, which translated into very official-looking serif fonts. Hobo didn't catch on until relatively recently.

It's serifless like most fantasy fonts, which makes it ideal for large print. Couple this with its friendly, curvy lettering, and you have the perfect typeface to use for a sign or poster. Want more business, but can't afford a graphic designer? Print your store's sign in Hobo. And now you know why that happens so often.

Joystix

So you want the ultimate throwback font, eh? What screams 1980s nostalgia more than your standard, uppercase-only monospace video game font, pixels and all?

Joystix looks like it was screenshot straight off a Ms. Pac Man machine, which is almost exactly correct. Ray Larabie pieced together this font pixel-by-faux-pixel to recreate a typeface you'd see in just about every early video game — specifically those on the NES. Then he went on to be hired by an actual video game company. (See Pricedown.)

From the jagged A to the angled exclamation point, this font makes you want to go punch Donkey Kong in his stupid smug face.

Matisse

Also known as "Matisse ITC", this typeface was produced in 1995 by the International Typeface Corporation who have since eaten Letraset (owners of Papyrus) and Agfa Monotype (makers of Curlz).

Despite being an erratic and not particularly attractive font, it's got its share of fans who reportedly like its schizophrenic design. Unfortunately, it tends to look a lot like squiggles from far away.

Papyrus

A favorite of apartment complex signs worldwide, this is one of the oldest fonts in our field guide. Each glyph was hand-drawn by Chris Costello in 1982 using a calligraphy pen. He wanted to create a typeface that would embody the scribing methods from two millenia ago using English characters.

Any time a classy, yet somewhat whimsical atmosphere needs to be conveyed (think apartment complex signs), Papyrus is a viable option. It's such a ready-to-go artistic font that many high-profile individuals and corporations will simply type their name out using the font without changing much of anything. (See Edible Arrangements.)

Unfortunately, the font has become so ubiquitous that it's earned it place in the Graphic Designer Hall of Hatred. Even Costello himself has lamented its overuse.

Pricedown

Looking at Pricedown gives me this incredible urge to walk up to the nearest automobile, swing open the door, throw the driver on the ground, and run him over with his own car. It's not that I'm a bad person. It's just that this font is most well-known for being the main font of the ultra-popular Grand Theft Auto series.

Ray Larabie was the resident typographer at Rockstar Games during the early days of the series' heyday, and created this font to capture the feeling of legendary game show The Price is Right. I'm still not sure what that game show has to do with extreme criminal activity, but I'm sure the link is in there somewhere. Follow @torqtorq

Using "%s" Bookmark Shortcuts in Firefox

I sit at a computer from 7:30 AM to 5 PM. Seems like I have an awful lot of time to get stuff done, right?

Despite this, I'm always looking for ways to make my job faster and more efficient so I can spend more time as an amateur cartogrophile with Google Earth. Sometimes I just can't stand to spend all that time spelling out the entire word "thesaurus" to go to Thesaurus.com.

As a writer, I need an endless supply of synonyms to keep me from losing my mind. But man, I hate that word! And I hate having to visit the home page first to do a synonym query! If only there was some way to skip directly to the results, straight from the browser's address bar, without having to type out "thesaurus" yet again!

As it turns out, there's a simple way to do this with Firefox. If you're not using Firefox, then good for you—unless you're using Internet Explorer, in which case, please use Firefox.

Whenever you do a search query on Thesaurus.com, or Google, or Amazon, Youtube, Wikipedia, or just about any other site, you're redirected to a URL that includes your search keywords. For example, if I search Thesaurus.com for "yay," I'll be redirected to this URL:

http://thesaurus.com/browse/yay?s=t

I can bookmark this resulting URL, using the variable "%s" in place of "yay", and apply the keyword "the" in the Bookmarks folder to spawn this bookmark. Now, I can go to the browser's address bar and simply type "the yay" to get the same result. Way faster!

Here's how it works:

In the Bookmarks library, you can supply a keyword for each bookmark. These keywords can be typed into the address bar to take you directly to that bookmark. Anything typed into the address bar after the keyword will be inserted into the bookmarked URL wherever %s is.

Here's how to do it:

Go to a website and do a search. Bookmark the resulting URL by going to Bookmarks > Bookmark This Page.

 Now go to Bookmarks > Show all Bookmarks and click "Recently Bookmarked" to see the page you just bookmarked at the top of the window. Select it, and click the down arrow in the bottom left corner to expand more options.

In Location, replace the part of the URL that refers to your search terms with "%s".

In Keyword, include whatever you want.

You're done! Now you can type your keyword and your search terms in the address bar to run a quick search on the webpage you bookmarked.

There are tons of ways this can be used:

• Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s
• The Weather Channel: http://www.weather.com/weather/tenday/%s
• YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s
• Songmeanings (Artists): http://www.songmeanings.net/query/?q=%s&type=artists
• Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=%s
• eBay: http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p5197.m570.l1313&_nkw=%s
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/search/%s
• Google Image Search: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&authuser=0&ei=F6mZT6LZEoK69QTb0-D8BQ&biw=1348&bih=801&sei=G6mZT_jEOILo9ATr0rHvBQ
• Craigslist (Atlanta): http://atlanta.craigslist.org/search/?areaID=14&subAreaID=&query=%s&catAbb=sss

Hey, don't ever say I haven't saved you 8 seconds of your life. Follow @torqtorq

Why Does the Easter Bunny Exist?

Ever wondered how the Easter Bunny came to be? Seems kinda far removed from the whole "savior of the world being resurrected" thing, doesn't it?

On Good Friday (possibly the least accurately titled holiday ever), Jesus was brutally executed. On the Sunday after his execution, the tomb that held his body was discovered to be empty, and it was determined that he had risen from Earth to heaven to be with God. That's the reason Easter exists to begin with.

It's not called "Easter" because this all happened far east of the United States. The word is derived from the ancient German month Eostur-monath (what is now known as April) which was named for the pagan goddess Ēostre. 8th century pagan Anglo-Saxons held feasts in her honor during this time of year to celebrate the blooming of Spring.

It just so happens that Jesus was offed right around the same time that this traditional festival came to be celebrated. When Christianity made its way to the highly pagan realms of Europe, the festival was replaced by Paschal month (known to Jews as Passover) and celebrated the resurrection of Jesus. The original festival's name came along and evolved into the word Easter.

Christmas and Easter are two very similar holidays. They both celebrate the birth (or re-birth) of Jesus. They both have mascots that overshadow the whole Jesus thing. They both have traditions that seem wildly random.

Christmas has Santa, stockings, decorated trees, and seizure-inducing light shows. Easter has a bunny, eggs, candy, and baskets. Analyzing Christmas is for a different time, but why do we have such bizarre Easter traditions if it's all about Christ?

Remember that the resurrection celebration was rolled into an already-existing Springtime party celebrated by nature-happy pagans. Right around the month of April, stuff is growing. Flowers are blooming. Animals are coming out of hibernation to freely copulate with vigor. It just so happens that Jesus' re-birth is an excellent metaphor for fertility.

And what other symbol of fertility do we have? Eggs. Just about every animal comes from an egg of some sort, and chicken eggs are abundant and edible even after serving as holiday decorations. The tradition of adorning them most likely comes from ancient times in which eggs were boiled with fresh Spring flowers to create colorfully dyed hard-boiled eggs.

Rabbits, as well, have long been symbols of fertility. They're superfetative, which means that they can get pregnant with another set of babies before even giving birth to the first, and they hump like crazy when all the flowers are in bloom in the Spring. Maybe they find it romantic. (Also, they're cute. Frogs can lay 10,000 eggs at a time, but we don't have an Easter Frog.)

So, much like Christmas and Santa and the gift-giving frenzy that now defines it, Easter is marketed using a somewhat non-denominational symbol: The Easter Bunny. Businesses want to make money, and holidays are good times to catch people when they're willing to be less thrifty than usual because "it's a special occasion." Appealing to as wide a demographic as possible is generally more profitable, so rather than using Jesus to sell candy, the Easter Bunny became the official spokesperson of the season.

And that's how we got from this:

To this:

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Diet Mission: No Whites

Fad diets don't always work, but they sure are popular. It seems like everyone's looking for an easy way to lose weight without sacrificing too much, so when a new one pops up claiming to be the easy weight loss solution, people jump on them.

I struggled to consider which one I should try first. Atkins? Guinness? And then a friend suggested one to me, championed by none other than Oprah Winfrey herself: No Whites.

No, this isn't a timewarping segregationist restaurant. It's a diet founded on the principle that things lacking in color aren't especially good for you and fill you up with empty calories, complex carbohydrates, and glue. Avoid white foods and you're probably eating pretty healthy.

The rules: Don't touch anything white. This means giving up:

• Milk
• Flour
• Rice
• Potatoes
• Salt
• Sugar
• Happiness

But hey, it's only a week. The literature on the topic suggests that dieters could lose as much as 5–6 pounds in one month with this diet. And with endorsements from Oprah and Cameron Diaz, I couldn't go wrong, right?

No Whites Philosophy

To abstain from eating foods that are white in color in order to avoid unhealthy habits and focus more heavily on natural, unprocessed foods.

Day 1: Oh God, What Have I Done?

I woke up motivated to cook a non-white breakfast and was suddenly slapped in the face by reality. I couldn't make eggs. I couldn't make hash browns. I couldn't make toast, or eat cereal with milk, or have a bagel. I ended up just eating a bunch of bacon even though it's got those white stripes of fat in it.

Thinking about the rest of the day, I realized I was pretty screwed. This wasn't just going to be a restriction on what to eat, it was going to be a puzzle of figuring out what to eat. I began to panic, randomly exclaiming such inane things as "Butter's not white! Ha ha ha!" My wife gave up mid-morning when she realized she'd have to drink her coffee black.

I made it through the rest of the day without cracking, making a cheeseburger with no bun for lunch. I understood that I wasn't eating especially healthy, but I was clearly following the rules, so I didn't care. (Beer isn't white! I'll have 15 of them.)

Day 2: Solving the Puzzle

I wasn't about to cook bacon before work because I didn't have the time. With cereal and bagels out of the question, I decided to eat a handful of strawberries and a piece of cheese for breakfast.

For lunch, normally I'd just eat ramen noodles or get a sandwich and eat a bunch of potato chips, but every one of those things was off-limits. I began to think about what was left over. My stomach was accusing me of being a traitor for feeding it strawberries for breakfast. My brain was suffering endorphin withdrawal. I had to figure out something fast.

Then my boss brought in a huge plate of ribs for lunch, which would have been really bad timing if this was vegetarian week. All red meat and barbecue sauce was exactly what I needed, and I ate thirty pounds of baked beans to make up for any weight loss that might have happened in the preceding four hours. I ate a bag of almonds for dinner.

Day 3: A Moment of Clarity

I determined that lunch for the rest of the week would be non-breaded hot wings and a fruit cup from the grocery store. Strawberries for breakfast, strawberries for lunch.

While joking with someone that dinner would be "nuts and berries I found in the woods," I had a sudden realization: This diet is basically all fruits, vegetables, nuts, and meat. It is closely analogous to the diet of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, who'd look for edible berries if they couldn't find a woodland creature to spear with a sharpened tree branch, except with less accidental poisoning. Aside from the slices of cheese I'd been eating, it was a pretty natural, primitive diet.

Sure, the meat is cooked, but it's not breaded or prepared in any fancy way. It's just basic, stripped-down, and hopefully good for you. As good as hormone-drenched flesh can be.

I weighed myself. I had gained 3 pounds.

Day 4: Taking a Closer Look

Day four's mission was to find a soup I could eat, since so many of them contain cream, onions, potatoes, salty broths, and all that stuff that tastes really great that I was obligated to shun. I decided on a broccoli cheddar soup from Panera. After all, it's just steamed broccoli with melted cheddar cheese, right?

I researched the ingredients to make sure. There were 48 of them, including added cream, onions, potato, and tons of salty broth. Five of the ingredients contained sugar—in a soup that's not even sweet!

I looked closer at the black bean soup and determined that the small amount of potato flour in it would be negligible, but that had me thinking about what was in all those baked beans I ate for lunch on day two. As it turns out, baked beans are navy beans, which are entirely white. In fact, they're in a category of bean called "white beans." Oops!

I'd have to be more careful throughout the week. Yes, broccoli cheddar soup and baked beans are both non-white, but after my breakthrough on day three, I was motivated to cut the smart ass approach and really try to avoid those white foods.

Scouring the ingredients in the low-fat vegetarian black bean soup and deeming it legal, I checked the nutrition facts: 1270mg of sodium.

I never found my soup.

Day 5: Now Explain Yourself

As if free ribs wasn't enough on Monday, the office ordered pizza on Thursday. And while non-stop meat turned out to be the absolute perfect lunch for my diet, pizza was something that was completely out of the question. I had to politely decline to eat it.

"You're on a what diet?" someone asked me. I tried to explain how my color-biased diet would ultimately benefit me, but ended up sounded like an ass.

"Really, it just means that I can't eat anything made with flour," I lied. That would exclude pizza. I was off the hook—for now.

So continued my daily excursion to the grocery store to eat hot wings and fruit. As I passed a Taco Bell on the way into the parking lot, I suddenly had an idea. Tacos = corn tortillas, meat, lettuce, and cheese. I was quickly the owner of three of them.

Returning to the office, I passed by the open pizza boxes while toting my Taco Bell bag. Everyone laughed at me.

Day 6: Making it Work

My family was going to go to dinner at a mexican restaurant, which would have been perfect considering the abundance of tacos to be had. At the last minute, we switched to a sushi place where everything is made out of rice. Should I break my diet? I asked myself. No. I had come so far and had begun to embrace the diet as viable and effective. I made it work.

Instead, I fulfilled the "gatherer" part of my diet by eating edamame, steamed soybeans. Then the "hunter" in me ordered the tiger steak, eating rare beef in a lemongrass broth. Turns out you can find non-white food everywhere but Waffle House.

Day 7 & Beyond: Holy Crap, I Learned Something

On the last day of the diet, I was actually a little bit sad to give it up. I felt like I was eating better and actually making progress. If I really needed to lose weight, I probably would have continued with it. Instead, I woke up the next morning and ate every possible white item on planet Earth.

The rules were easy, yet not always simple to remember. At one point I ate a wintergreen mint out of habit and then realized it was white and filled with sugar. I nearly salted my food 100 times before catching myself. I had to give up garlic. Sweet, sweet garlic! That blasphemy alone was enough to slap me back into reality and welcome the end of the experiment.

I came to realize that potatoes are like a bad friend. You think they're cool and that they even help you out sometimes, but it turns out that they're pretty much just bringing you down and have an endless supply of bad advice. There's almost no nutritional value there. When I ate french fries the next Monday, my body reacted as if I hadn't eaten anything at all. I had to let the potatoes' phone calls go to voice mail and stop going to the bar where I might run into them.

Yet despite all this, I could keep it up for an entire month. I was promised 5–6 pounds of weight loss over that amount of time, so I had expected a fraction of that considering my regular workout routine. In the end, I lost 3 pounds—6 below the high point on Wednesday.

Verdict: Positive Results

I never felt sick despite actually losing weight, and I learned to hate some of the foods I previously loved that are bad for me. I'd say that you could sustain this diet indefinitely (if you can give up garlic). Follow @torqtorq

Madonna's MDNA Marks the End of an Era

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Color Reinvents Itself, Attempting to Stay Alive

It's been a year since mobile phone photo-sharing app Color made waves in the news with an astounding round of venture capital investment. The $41 million figure thrown at the company left many skeptical, including myself. After all, how could they expect to pay back all those investors?

The idea behind the app was simple and somewhat interesting, but would require widespread adoption by mobile phone users to be effective. The idea was that any photos snapped using the program would be immediately shared by anyone else within 150 feet running the app. A whole house full of partygoers would share photos with each other automatically. A crowd of people at the zoo would collect and share any photo they'd taken of silly orangutans. Sports fans would gather and broadcast shots of the game. But they'd all have to not only have the app, they'd need to be using it.

Why would this program cost $41 million to develop? My guess was that the money wasn't so much to feed the programmers as it was to advertise and bring public awareness to the system. If lots of people were convinced to use it and it took off, then the money could start to be made back, but a massive amount of people would need to get involved.

So what happened? Over the past year, I never once heard anyone speak about it out loud. It seems any buzz about the program remained on the Internet for critics to pan or praise. It never took off.

I decided to check in and see what ever came of the little photo app that sputtered out.

Visiting www.color.com, the expensive domain secured by the company as part of its marketing strategy, I initially thought I was looking at an entirely different program. Nothing looked the same. Was this even the same company? All I could see was a collection of silent 30 second films and copy encouraging me to broadcast live from my phone to Facebook.

Turns out Color jumped ship on the old buggy app and started over from scratch, no doubt turning the investors' hair grey in the process, and reinventing itself as a live video update for Facebook. Now the app is used to announce that a broadcast is about to happen, let your followers and friends prepare to tune in, and then watch 30 seconds of whatever is happening in front of your phone. The proximity aspect is gone, supposedly reducing the need for mass adoption.

But what good is it? Does anyone use it? The examples on the home page didn't change over the course of a month. The top video, posted by Jimmy Kuch (same last name as one of the company's founders), featured 30 seconds of a deer standing nearby and then an obligatory pan to the photographer's face. Jimmy's other videos were choppy, grainy, and featured mundane subject matter—wholly unwatchable and uninteresting.

Kuch's use is probably typical of most Color users. At first, he was posting as many as ten videos a day; by the end of the month, an average of one every 1–2 days. Less than two months after beginning to use the service, he had abandoned it altogether—about three months before this article was written.

Why Color's New App is Again Doomed to Fail

1. Cell phone video quality is still terrible. The choppy, grainy, blurry videos can't keep up with our expectations for remotely decent content in a 1080p world. Unfortunately, Color probably relies on this low quality to be able to "live stream."
2. Silence, in this case, is not golden. Color intentionally doesn't record audio because beta testing found it to be too "distracting." In reality, it may have had more to do with the extra data and processing involved.
3. No one is going to line up for live broadcasts. After being conditioned to the first few disappointing live videos from Facebook friends, people are going to ignore them (especially knowing they can just watch them later, which translates into never).
4. Superior systems for putting videos on the web for everyone to see already exist. YouTube, Vimeo, Twitvid, SmugMug, etc. have all done this for years, but without restricting the audio, allowing for a wide variety of resolutions, and displaying your content in a far better interface.

Color is a perfect example of what happens when an industry thinks way, way too hard. A bandwagon of investment gathered via what was no doubt an especially excellent PowerPoint presentation put unreasonable expectations on something that was expected to change the world. They bought an expensive domain for their pretentious company name. They spent several weeks around the launch of the product doing press everywhere they could.

And in the end, it was less useful than Foursquare. No doubt history will show that Color is the Segway of the mobile app world. Follow @torqtorq

Diet Mission: Vegetarian

This month's diet mission is a fairly simple one. I just have to avoid eating meat for seven days, eating three meals per day.

I've done this diet before, but as a pescetarian which is slightly different, so it's not something I'm entirely unfamiliar with. A pescetarian eats fish, or more accurately, seafood, but not any other types of meat. In other words, no mammals, birds, reptiles, or amphibians. (Those last two are pretty easy to avoid!)

Because I'm giving up meat for experimental purposes, I fully expect to miss meat, which is why I ate a bunch of wings on Saturday night before beginning my new diet. However, that doesn't mean the week will be bland; I'll be able to have all the candy I want! Hooray!

Plus, I really like mushrooms, which are sort of like a vegetarian's meat. I know many people assume that's the role of tofu, but the notoriously tasty fungus is actually a more suitable meat alternative.

Vegetarian Philosophy

To live on a meatless diet, or rather one that does not directly lead to the death of any animal. (This includes any creature in the animal kingdom.)

Why the Vegetarian Diet?

There are three main reasons why someone would choose a meatless diet, and any vegetarian may be personally motivated by one or more of the following reasons:

1. Health. To avoid red meat, or meats in general and their high propensity for food-borne illness and the potential threats to cholesterol and other health factors. Usually, someone who avoids meat purely for health reasons will follow a pescetarian diet, which includes high protein and omega-3 fatty acid levels.
2. Personal taste. Some people just don't find meat appealing. This was the main cause of my previous meat avoidance. For some reason, I just couldn't look at meat without thinking about it being a dead body, leading me to imagining it analogous to eating roadkill, which made me want to throw up. I had nothing against others eating meat; it was just a matter of personal taste.
3. Political beliefs. A vegetarian is often motivated to give up meat because of their intention to not create demand that leads to animal slaughter. There are many, many differing beliefs in this category that range from abstinence for a clear conscience to a pursuit of the universal banning of meat production.

Substitutions

By day two, like any good withdrawal, I was beginning to truly lament my new diet. After more than 24 hours of eating nothing but mushrooms and candy, I was craving bacon. Steak. A hamburger. It was time to get the next best thing: A veggie burger.

This also allowed me the chance to explore the vegetarian options at a typical fast food restaurant. One thing that's great about this diet is that it encourages you to avoid eating fast food, because you can pretty much only order the fries. (Although, now that I think about it, I wonder if the meat at a fast food restaurant is so far removed from nature that it could be considered meatless…)

Never mind that. I went to Burger King to order a veggie burger, which is not listed anywhere on their menu. After all, if anyone was going to do a vegetable-only variation on the classic burger, it would have to be the King, right?

I had ordered this item a few weeks ago—with bacon, as a joke—and it ended up being pretty good. As it turns out, it was without a doubt the bacon that lent it that flavor. This thing tasted like a bunch of beans, corn, and carrots smashed flat, which is exactly what it was. It sucked. And it wasn't Burger King's fault, either. Veggie burgers just have nothing on the real thing.

Veggie foods in denial

Vegetarians in transition, and some who like to amuse themselves, will buy products from the grocery store that emulate things like ground beef, turkey slices, and chicken wings. It could be denial. It could be nostalgia. It could be the irony. Whatever the motive, meat-emulating products are relatively popular, and they're all terrible.

There's good news, though. After a while, the memories of the sweet, savory taste of bacon and steak fade away. You begin to honestly believe that the occasional veggie burger tastes "just as good as the real thing." You're so used to eating handfuls of nuts all day that you no longer feel the need to eat soybean hot wings anymore. Yep, eventually the only meat substitutions you truly need are mushrooms and beans.

Benefits

Aside from the aforementioned avoidance of fast foods, the reduction in cholesterol and saturated fats supplied by red meat, and the clear conscience of knowing that you didn't throw money at presumed animal cruelty, there's one very obvious and immediate benefit.

I rediscovered this as I did a round of grocery shopping at the end of day three. An entire cart of groceries that would normally cost well over $100 came out to just under $80. I had reduced my grocery bill by more than 20% just by not buying meat. How was this possible?

Rather than buying chicken, ground beef, pork chops, and steak, I was buying mushrooms, potatoes, and tomatoes—all significantly cheaper. I didn't need to buy any candy because I still had a ton left over from Halloween when no kids came to see the elaborate haunted house on my porch.

Why People Hate Vegetarians

On day four of my veggie excursion, my office ordered pizza for everyone. I always appreciate free lunch, but I had to consider my diet and realized that if I didn't speak up, every pizza would have pepperoni on it. I'd need to put in my request before the order was made. A special request—just for me.

"Can we get one that's just cheese? I can't have—" I stopped myself. Saying "can't" was a big pet peeve of mine last time I went down this road. On a voluntary diet, it's not that you can't have meat; you choose not to. If your throat swelled up like someone with a shellfish or peanut allergy, then yes, you could say that you can't have those items. So how to phrase the fact that I was making free lunch difficult merely to accommodate myself?

"I—I'm not eating meat right now," I said. I had figured the plain cheese pizza would be a decent compromise, since not everyone likes a massive pile of vegetables. However, the bean dip was out of the bag. I now had to explain the motivation for changing my diet.

My experiment offered me a great excuse. But when a long-term vegetarian describes their motives, it comes off a bit holier-than-thou. No matter how it's explained, a meat-eater hears this:

Health-seeking vegetarian: I don't eat meat because it's bad for you, and that's why you feel tired all the time and you're going to die before me.

Meat-taste-hating vegetarian: Meat makes me gag for some reason. Yes, I know this makes me completely insane.

Politically motivated vegetarian: I don't eat meat because I don't support vicious murder, like YOU, you MURDERER.

In the past, I found it easier to just avoid this situation altogether by not mentioning my diet. I don't ask someone why they don't eat the crust of their pizza, and I expect them to not question why I'm shunning pepperoni.

Dining Out

On day six, I went out to eat with my wife, son, brother, and sister-in-law. I picked a Thai restaurant because they tend to make meat-free food taste really, really good. There are a handful of dedicated vegetarian restaurants around town that we could have gone to, but that would have forced everyone into my diet for the evening. Plus, many of those restaurants tend to do wacky things like serving only room temperature water.

It's surprisingly hard to find restaurants that feature flavorful vegetarian food. Many places will have an obligatory option like a "veggie wrap" (which is about 90% bean sprouts) while others just don't grasp the concept at all. However, it's not their burden to provide you an option, just as they don't have to put diaper stations in the bathrooms. It's entirely up to them to determine whose repeat business they want.

But again, Thai restaurants are especially good at meaty and meatless options, and asian food in general is a pescetarian's paradise. However, no matter where you dine, there's always the chance that something will go wrong.

The Polite Vegetarian

On day seven, the last day of my diet mission, I went out to dinner with my wife's family at an Italian restaurant. Italian is great for a vegetarian, because there are plenty of tasty options that are meatless, consisting of pasta, sauces, garlic, and tons of butter. I ordered the baked cheese ravioli and enjoyed an endless stream of garlic rolls and vinaigrette-covered salad until the food arrived.

It was utterly and completely drenched in ground beef in a way that would make it impossible to just eat around it. There must have been a whole pound of it. I was excited, because I really wanted to eat meat but wasn't supposed to, according to the rules of my mission. I ate it anyway.

What were my other options? I could have asked them to take it back and make it again with no meat, or I could have just not eaten it, wasting my in-laws' money. Should I have known this menu item would have meat in it? It wasn't listed anywhere. Ravioli isn't a meat-covered dish unless it's specifically ordered that way, and there was a ravioli with meat sauce just underneath it. Either the menu didn't list it correctly or the server brought me the wrong thing.

The polite vegetarian breaks their diet and eats it anyway so they don't aggravate anyone with the nuances of their adamant chosen diet, and this is the approach I'd take every Thanksgiving when I'd be around ham and turkey, any time I'd go to someone's house and they'd serve me a roast or salad covered in bacon bits. I would be eating something I didn't really like just to appease the people providing it for me.

Sustainability

This was a pretty simple diet to get used to, compared to some of the others that have been proposed to me. If you can get past the initial meat withdrawal and find accommodations for yourself without aggravating those around you, there's really no problem. You may have to cook two meals for your family, but it's not too much of a burden.

Over the week, my weight didn't change at all. Any saturated fats I was avoiding from meat were supplemented by the saturated fats I was gaining in cookies. I didn't feel weak or lacking in any way.

I would say that this diet is highly sustainable if you make sure you're getting the proper nutrients and not just eating candy. Just try not to be too smug about it. Follow @torqtorq