I didn’t suffer in my vegetarian Thanksgiving dinner

When I became a vegetarian 57 years ago, at the age of 20, that was cause for concern among friends and family who thought I was depriving myself of an essential food group: meat and fish.

That didn’t make sense then. It makes even less sense now, given how many more options vegetarians have when shopping in a grocery store or going out to eat at a restaurant. We’re still a decided minority, about 6%, with about an additional 4% embracing a vegan diet.

For Thanksgiving yesterday, I dug my last remaining Trader Joes Turkey-Less Stuffed Roast out of the freezer, where it had been languishing for a year after I bought three of them last Thanksgiving — joyful that the Turkey-Less Stuffed Roast had returned to Trader Joes in 2024 after having been discontinued in 2023.

Sadly, it was missing from store shelves this year. I’ll be complaining to Trader Joes about this, almost certainly along with other fans of the Turkey-Less Stuffed Roast, such as this person.

It could be argued by carnivores that since I haven’t eaten meat in well over half a century, I don’t know what I’m missing at Thanksgiving. Well, actually I do: a dead turkey carcass. In addition to the fact that I find killing animals for food unnecessary, unhealthy, and disgusting, the notion of eating animal flesh is utterly unappealing to me.

My vegetarian wife and I had zero sense that we were deprived of anything when we ate our Thanksgiving dinner last night.

I made the Turkey-Less Roast, which required brushing a couple of tablespoons of olive oil with a bit of smoked paprika over it, then baking the roast in the oven for 45 minutes. Super easy. Laurel made mashed potatoes and microwaved frozen peas. For desert we had a really tasty Marionberry Lattice Pie from the Willamette Valley Pie Co., a business right here in Salem, Oregon.

Being too hungry yesterday to think of taking a picture of our meal, here’s a photo of leftovers I had tonight. We ate all of the peas for Thanksgiving, which explains the lack of green on my plate. The Turkey-Less Roast comes with gravy. It’s highly satisfying, with great nutrition: 1/6 of the roast with gravy is 360 calories, just 2 grams of saturated fat, and 26 grams of protein (first two ingredients are water and vital wheat gluten).

Hopefully Trader Joes will bring it back for 2026. If not, I’ll happily drown my vegetarian woes in another juicy marionberry pie from the Willamette Valley Pie Co. The ingredients are wonderfully simple: blackberries (marionberries), wheat flour, cane sugar, butter, water, sea salt, cinnamon. I was surprised to see on the pie box that marionberries are blackberries, but that’s what Google AI says also when I asked “are marionberries the same as blackberries.”

No, marionberries are not the same as blackberries, but they are a specific type of blackberry. Marionberries are a hybrid cultivar, specifically a cross between two other blackberries, the Chehalem and Olallieberry. They are known for having a richer, more complex flavor with a balance of sweetness and tartness, a firmer texture, and are often called the “king of the blackberries”.