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It's not that I carry a grudge against vegetables, it's just that the few times I tried veganism (more to save a pig or cow than anything else), I felt hungry all the time. Maybe I didn't do it right.

Here's the thing: I'm not a "foodie." I don't live to eat, I eat to live. I'm not highly motivated in the kitchen. But if I had someone like Mollie Katzen, author of the 1975 best-selling Moosewood Cookbook, to cater my meals, I'd tackle them with the all the gusto of a grizzly bear.

Better yet, if scientists developed a once-a-day pill you could eat instead of food, I'd be all over that like white on rice. Beige on butter beans. Green on tea.

This morning, I listened to a radio interview with Mollie about her latest cookbook, The Heart of the Plate: Vegetarian Recipes for a New Generation. Hearing her speak about vegetarianism transported me back to December 1978, when I moved from Toledo, Ohio, to Big Sur, Calif., for Esalen Institute's work-study program.

My work-scholar assignment during the first month was "lodgekeeper," which included the preparation each evening of a salad for the staff, the work scholars and the "seminarians," those seekers who came for the seminars, the hot baths and, (in their dreams), lots of sex!

Since the head honcho of the kitchen believed that using a Cuisinart would be spiritually cruel to the vegetables, and since Esalen had no difficulty attracting willing hands to do its sacred manual labor, I got to chop, dice, slice and shred for 150 people every night.

I paid Esalen $325 per month for the privilege of standing on my feet for 32 hours per week in the hot, crowded kitchen where I washed and prepared mounds of organic veggies picked that day from Esalen's fruitful garden.

At lunch and dinner, I took my position behind the serving line, offering up to the hungry seekers a choice of entrees, either a vegetarian delight or a controversial something-with-a-face.

"Lasagna or pork chop?" I asked Jackie, a long-term member of Esalen's famed massage crew, who had the scrawny look of a committed vegetarian.

"Lasagna," she said, narrowing her eyes in contempt as if I had personally gone out and killed the pig.

"Okay, fine," I said and scooped up what I thought was a rather generous portion, slapped it onto a plate and handed it over to her, expecting a polite "thank you." I heard a snort as she skirted away.

This was the first time I became aware that food, other than by its absence, could be a problem, an "issue." Midwestern cuisine was, well, not really cuisine but hearty, heavy, sometimes-gummy fare, which we were damn glad to have. "Pleases" and "thank yous" all around for chipped beef in a glue-like white sauce served over toast (which I later found out the Army dubbed "sh-t-on-a-shingle"), limp, pale iceberg lettuce and my mom's 24-hour salad of fruit cocktail and cottage cheese mixed up with Kraft's salad dressing and a dollop of Hellman's mayonnaise, but just a little because it was expensive. Refrigerate that mess for 24 hours, and you were on your way to Lutheran heaven.

And we mustn't forget "lutefisk," a Swedish Lutheran Christmas delicacy of codfish soaked in lye and served in an oozy white cream sauce. Makes gefilte fish seem like a gourmet treat.

In spite of an atmosphere of personal freedom and an abundance of tasty comestibles, what seemed to rule the day at Esalen was food fascism. The vegetarians looked at us carnivores in disgust. They, in turn, were divided into not-quite-armed camps: The dairy and the non-dairy, each regarding the other as poor relations in need of salvation.