Let it be known: I like Spanish food very much. Put a plate of Iberico de Bellota in front of me and I'm in heaven. That's free-range cured ham fed on acorns. You don't eat it, it melts on your tongue. Seeing brick red ribbons of it bring tears to my eyes.
Still, there are nagging questions. Take yesterday. I ate a pile of food, but most of it was meat. Maybe the healthiest thing I ate, by American standards at least, was the morcilla. Morcilla is a black pudding made primarily of pig blood and rice. Mostly they form it into a log and fry it. I won't describe it as a Spaniard would, because this is a family web site. Suffice it to say that if you noticed a morcilla floating in a punch bowl you would turn and run like hell.
If you calculate all the animal fat and oil consumed by Spaniards, then applied American standards of eating healthy, you'd think the streets of Spain would be piled ten deep in Spaniards with clogged arteries. But still, they eat in restaurants from 2-4 pm and crawl the tapas bars from 8-10, then eat a proper dinner. And they're carnivores first and foremost.
So what's a vegetarian to do? Well, you can get yourself invited to someone's house, where vegetables are more common on the dinner table than in restaurants. Or you can go to Barcelona, which contains maybe half of Spain's vegetarian restaurants. You can look for lentil or bean dishes in tapas bars, but read below first. And the setas, oyster mushrooms grilled with olive oil and garlic, are wonderful everywhere.
If you're a vegetarian going to Spain, check the internet for restaurants in your destinations. It's the only way, some say.
And be aware, if you ask for the meatless dishes, that ham as an adjunct in food is not considered meat. Green beans with ham is a vegetarian dish in Spain, as it would be in Italy.
And you can always gorge on postres. But even then, if you cross into neighboring Portugal, you'll encounter an after-dinner pudding flavored with . . . bacon.
Good eating. Watch the ham.
Endnotes: Eating Times in Spain
Lunch: Restaurants open earlier in the North than the South, but don't expect much earlier than 2pm most places, 3pm in the South. Dinner is served after 9pm. You can go to a bar serving tapas or pinchos earlier in the evening to stave off residual hunger.
Vegetarian Restaurants in Spain
See our linkbox on the upper right for sites that list vegetarian restaurants in Spain.
