Meat

On Alicia Kennedy's new book, 'No Meat Required'

I really don’t like meat, which has made it easier for the past 20 years of my abstinence to skirt issues of politics and ethics altogether. I stopped eating it just when my adult palate was forming, so I never got a taste for steak, and all of my confidence in the kitchen originates in my teenage experiments with meatless food. The decision was one of my first ways of asserting who I was. So it’s a personal thing, about as personal as it gets — my body devouring another’s. But. It’s never just a personal thing. Like all choices, this one has roots in my body and my body’s relationship to the world. I want to approach it with as little violence as I can, and refusing meat is part of that.

I don’t like to talk about that because it sounds judgmental and if there’s one thing I’ve always known about vegetarians and vegans, it’s that they’re entitled, elitist (white) evangelists who think they’re better than you. I’ve spent most of my life trying to put so much distance between myself and this stereotype that sometimes I think I’ve lost touch with what vegetarianism means to me as an ethical framework.

Alicia Kennedy interrogates that stereotype and opens up the tangled, pluralistic history of veganism in the United States in her new book, No Meat Required. She writes about the non-white thinkers and cooks who “historically used their diets as a form of resistance,” the significance of veganism in ecofeminism and punk movements, and the problematic wellness leaders (they’d be called “influencers” now) who contributed to the negative reputation vegans accrued in the 90s and early 00s. Veganism has meant many things to many people, and often means many things to a single person, but its relationship to the counterculture and food justice has for the most part upheld it as a way of life that seeks to tread more lightly on the earth. The book is an argument for conscientious eating, that doesn’t shrink from a point of view but contextualizes and energizes it with history. What it means to me directly is a way to give voice to the undercurrent of my diet. To politicize the personal, which have always been entangled.

Politically, the decision to avoid animal products isn’t everything. I know that, we all know that. Personal consumption choices alone won’t change the world, Alicia acknowledges early on, but that doesn’t make veganism meaningless. She likens individual choices to “tiny bricks thrown against the windows of tyranny” and also points out that if everything good came to pass, if factory farms were eradicated and the food industry held to account for its ruthlessness toward its workers and the environment, then there would be less meat available and most people’s diets would have to change anyway. Our current consumption of meat is unrealistic: it’s made possible physically through depleting the planet’s future resources, logistically through exploiting immigrant labor, and economically through lobbying and subsidies. Alicia refers only marginally to the emissions statistics or UN reports that we’ve all heard about, but returns again and again to the point that the centrality and amount of meat in the American standard diet is unsustainable and necessitates an “imaginative revolution” in how we think about meat.

Since meat-eating is the default way of life here, most analysis of what meat means seems to come from those outside it like Alicia. I found her chapter on meat as a symbol to be one of the most interesting ones, particularly in the wake of increasingly meat-like fake meats that convolute its meaning even further. I encounter meat’s meaning frequently, through omnivores opposed to vegetarianism. Meat is about masculinity and power and comfort and security and abundance. It’s the gusto of Anthony Bourdain and the bluster of conservatives who post steaks on Twitter to own the libs. It’s a celebration, it’s every holiday, it’s almost* every Michelin restaurant, and it’s always the center of a plate. Even as a vegetarian, it took me years to uncenter a hunk of protein (soy, seitan) and learn how to cook vegetables. Fake meats like Impossible and Beyond do nothing to change our relationship to meat as a symbol, but transfer our dependence from the meat industry to their own patent-holding corporations. And the dominant idea of meat, whether real or fake, does disservice to the diversity and culinary potential of other foods, positing them as dull and secondary in contrast to its sensuousness and prestige.

The sensual, personal relationship many people have to meat in the context of their family’s cultural cuisines is something I’ve never felt comfortable questioning (even while I built a mini-business recreating pork buns with mushrooms and tempeh). Alicia tackles this head-on. She writes about non-white vegan chefs and thinkers, like Luz Calvo and Catriona Rueda Esquibel who authored Decolonize Your Diet: Plant-Based Mexican-American Recipes for Health and Healing. We tend to think of a culture’s cuisine as something static, a grandmother’s diet that modern industry pulls us away from, but that grandmother’s diet was just one point fixed in time. Pre-Colombian Mexican cuisine was mostly plant-based, so there were centuries more of culinary development before it came to be associated with al pastor, originally a version of Lebanese shawarma, or birria, made from the goats brought by the conquistadors. So many traditional dishes around the world came from the entanglement of two cultures through colonization, which complicates the notion of “authenticity” in cuisine. Cuisines are living and they evolve. What if we allowed their evolution to be influenced by social and environmental consciousness? It might look like the mushroom, cabbage and eggplant trompo made by Evil Cooks in LA or the burdock root crawfish at Seasoned Vegan in NYC.

For any of this to work and a new diet to take hold, people have to want to eat the food. They have to be excited about making it themselves. This is where I want to work and teach: at the heart of cooking as joyful, creative expression, and inspired by vegetables (and mushrooms). Alicia describes the work of Lagusta Yearwood, who makes exquisite (vegan) chocolates and candies, as “activism through hedonism.” Again, this is not the only kind of activism we need, but it must be a foundational part of any movement to change food culture. And it’s the part that feels easy to me. The plant and fungal kingdoms are gigantic and incredibly diverse. I will never stop encountering new ingredients that give me ideas for textures and tastes and combinations I haven’t experienced before.

My favorite restaurant in NYC is Superiority Burger, helmed by punk drummer/chef Brooks Headley. SB’s menu is plant-based in the sense that most of the dishes focus on a single plant or a surprising combination (the burnt broccoli salad with eggplant purée is a classic), designed with the fastidiousness of a James Beard award-winning pastry chef to always have the perfect texture, flavor pairings, garnish. It’s all vegetarian and mostly vegan. I went there last Thursday, for the third time since they reopened in the former Odessa Diner, with some friends of friends who weren’t familiar with it and who tried to order their burger “medium-rare.” I diverted their order to the yuba verde sandwich, which doesn’t resemble a burger but has the kind of chewy bite that I thought they might be looking for. They liked it, but wanted to know why I loved the place so much. I answered carefully. “I always appreciate when a restaurant executes their dishes perfectly. But I don’t go out to eat that much, so what gets me excited about a menu is when it makes me think about the ingredients in a new way.” Isn’t that what a lot of chefs aspire to? Meat’s been done. Don’t you want to find out what we could do without it?

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