Where's the beef? Not on Prince Fielder's plate

I can't be the only one thinking this: Prince Fielder is the biggest bloomin' vegetarian I've ever seen.

Officially, at 5 feet 11 inches, the Detroit Tigers' new first baseman weighs 285 pounds. To the naked eye, that seems perhaps a trifle low.

Either way, we're looking at a lot of rice cakes.

Fielder, 27, has always been what we used to call big-boned. It hasn't hurt him any, at least at the plate-with-no-food-on-it; he's hit as many as 50 home runs in one season, and the Tigers are paying him $214 million through 2020 to hit a whole bunch more.

He seems to be a nice young man, and he grew up here, in a Grosse Pointe Farms mansion where his dad used to plant a billboard in the yard every December that said, "Happy Birthday, Baby Jesus." Dad was Cecil, a Tigers slugger, and he also shopped at the big and tall store.

He ate everything, though, possibly including the billboard. Since before the 2008 season, Prince has identified himself as a vegetarian, dispensing with meat and fish after his wife passed along a bestseller called "Skinny Bitch."

Say "vegetarian" and most of us picture a marathon runner, a scrawny figure who has to stand in the same place twice to cast a shadow. Now comes Prince Fielder, whose SUV has stretch marks, and there goes the image, and here comes George Vutetakis to explain.

Skinny stereotype false

Vutetakis, 55, is the director of research and development at Garden Fresh Gourmet, the salsa-and-chips company in Ferndale. He was the founding chef and later the owner at Inn Season in Royal Oak, he wrote a book called "Vegetarian Traditions," he has a Website called thevegetarianguy.com, and he does in fact know beans about vegetarian cuisine.

He says the familiar skinny stereotype is more a vegan than a vegetarian, meaning someone who turns down eggs, cheese, and anything else that stems from or once belonged to an animal. (Aardvarks are out, and so are Altoids, which contain gelatin.)

He also says that pizza is pizza, and whether you cover it with pepperoni or broccoli, a few large ones will stretch your uniform pants. Or to put it another way, "Once you start making butter sauces and things like that, it's pretty easy to maintain a good girth."

Though Vutetakis grew up outside Cleveland, his father, Spiros, was a Tigers fan who once received a letter from Ty Cobb.

"Athletes do need more calories," he points out, "because they burn off more calories."

But simple things can sneak up on even the swiftest and strongest among us. While the classic Middle Eastern and Mediterranean diets are heavy on healthy vegetables, "if you dip your bread in olive oil every day like people of Greek heritage do, that can add up as well."

Looking at history

In the very old days, Vutetakis says, you had to be the equivalent of an all-star infielder to afford a nice, yummy goat. "Meat was a luxury item."

That wasn't always a good thing. The North African aristocracy "was less healthy than the everyday population," he says, "because they ate more meat — more of the fatty foods."

Then came the modern agriculture industry, and everyone had easy access to cholesterol. Vegetarianism became an option, not a fact of life.

In the 1970s, basketball star Bill Walton was a vegetarian, but he was also a Grateful Dead fan and it was easy to dismiss him as eccentric. Three decades later, when a chunky power hitter announced he'd sworn off pork chops, that was news.

We just need to recognize, says Vutetakis, that a nice spinach and sun-dried tomato pasta will do more for a sleek physique than French fries cooked in peanut oil. Another consideration in Fielder's case is that according to the owner of Pappy's Smokehouse in St. Louis, he stopped by during last year's playoffs for a rack of ribs.

So perhaps he's not the most devoted of vegetarians, or maybe he didn't quite get to the end of that book his wife gave him.

Either way, Vutetakis says, "I understand he's performing well," and that's the wide-bottom line. There are plenty of slimmed-down carnivores who can't hit the curveball.

nrubin@detnews.com

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