Reframing Vegetarian Eating with Alicia Kennedy

This week, we are reframing vegetarian eating with food writer Alicia Kennedy. We talk all things vegetarian — politics, the meat industry, how food and relationships are connected, and (in Alicia's words) her desire to make vegetarian food both compelling and delicious. We walked away from this conversation with a lot of new ideas to chew on.

Alicia Kennedy is a writer from Long Island now living in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her work on food and culture has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Eater, Bon Appétit, and many other publications. Her new book, No Meat Required, comes out on August 15 with Beacon Press.

Links:
From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy
No Meat Required
Hippie Food by Jonathan Kauffman
Appetite for Change by Warren Belasco
Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé
Brooks Headley's Fancy Desserts by Brooks Headley
Sweet + Salty by Lagusta Yearwood
The Bloodroot cookbooks
The Bloodless Revolution by Tristram Stewart
The Vegetarian Crusade by Adam Shprintzen
Red Meat Republic by Joshua Specht
For more from Alicia, check out her website and follow her on Instagram

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Chapters

• 0:00 This week's episode
• 1:29 Cooking as a vegetarian obligates learning
• 4:31 Findings from writing the book
• 6:03 Evolving ideas about food
• 7:27 The importance of volume
• 11:27 Industrial animal agriculture
• 16:43 The best argument for decreasing meat consumption
• 19:32 What is not quantifiable
• 24:27 Books to go down the rabbit hole
• 27:05 Relationships defining the eating life
• 31:38 Learning how to cook vegetables
• 34:19 Diversity of thought in the refusal of meat
• 37:01 Veganism's image
• 42:45 Grilling tofu

Transcript

Natalie
Hey, it’s Nat. 

Rebecca
And Bec — two very different sisters who come together to reframe some of life’s big and small problems. We’re moms, writers. 

Natalie
We have soft boundaries. We see the world differently, but we both lean into vulnerability together and with our guests, because we like deep dives. So come with us — let’s reframe something. 

Rebecca
This week, we are reframing vegetarian eating with food writer Alicia Kennedy. 

Natalie
Alicia is a food and culture writer who’s been published in the New York Times, The Washington Post, Eater, Bon Appétit, and so many more. She has a newsletter that we’ll link to in the show notes, and her new book No Meat Required comes out on August 15th with Beacon Press. 

Rebecca
With Alicia, we talk all things vegetarian — politics, the meat industry, how food and relationships are connected, and (in Alicia’s words), her desire to make vegetarian food both compelling and delicious. 

Natalie
We walked away from this conversation with a lot of new ideas to chew on (what do you think, Bec? Good one?) So we hope you enjoy: reframing vegetarian eating with Alicia Kennedy. 

Rebecca
By the way, I was so fascinated by this book, so thank you. I feel like I’m going to try to convert everybody in my family to vegetarianism, even though my husband, he does a lot of the Keto stuff, so he’s a big meat eater, and he’ll be the hardest, maybe, to convert. 

Alicia
Well, I mean, I don’t convert people. 

Rebecca
That’s true, I know you don’t. I know — and you say that in your book. 

Alicia
Yeah. 

Rebecca
But I do. I want everyone to be just like me. 

Natalie
And so just in terms of, like, a little bit of background about who we are, we’re sisters. So what’s a bit funny right now is that I’m sitting in Rebecca’s house, because my house has some stuff happening in it down the street. So I walked over here so I could sit in Rebecca’s office, but Bec’s, like, three hours away in the country on her farm. 

Alicia
That’s so funny. 

Natalie
So we’re like, you know, kind of Trading Spaces right now. And thinking about, you know, each other’s spaces and how that sort of informs food. I just spent, like, two weeks up at her farm, kind of doing most of the cooking, and it’s amazing how your book was informing our time there. 

Alicia
Oh nice. 

Natalie
Because we were doing a lot of thinking about it, obviously, and many chickpeas were cooked in an air fryer. But that brings me to my first question. So you open your book with the story of learning how to clean banana blossoms to ready them for cooking, which I just thought was such a lovely opening. And you live in Puerto Rico, and you describe bananas as ubiquitous to where you are. And yet your opening salvo was essentially about learning something new. So we just wondered: is there something about cooking as a vegetarian that obligates learning — like, in the world within which we live? 

Alicia
I think that any kind of cooking necessitates learning. But I think that because of the way we think about food, or tend to think about food in the United States specifically, there is more learning that comes with the territory if you do give up meat. There’s more learning, of course, further if you give up all animal products, because you have to figure out not replacements, but a new way of eating — a new approach to eating. And there is, as I write in the book, like, so much more diversity in the plant kingdom, and the fungi, and the, like, all the things that you can eat, whether you’re eating meat or not eating meat. But there’s so much more diversity in plants than there is in animals, you know? You can only get so deep into eating organ meat and that sort of thing, before you kind of hit the wall in terms of, like, how different everything can be. It’s funny because I keep wanting to say ‘reframe.’ 

Rebecca
Yes! 

Natalie
You’re welcome. 

Alicia
But if you reframe your diet away from animal products, you start to find that there’s so much interesting stuff out there to eat that maybe you never thought of before — like something like banana flowers. 

Rebecca
So it’s really a book about what it means to remove meat from the centre of our plates. This is your quote: “If we do that, what do we find?” What did you find in the writing of this book? 

Alicia
In the writing, I don’t know what I found, really. I was just kind of chronicling work I’d already done for, like, 10 years. So the intention with the book wasn’t to find more, it was just to kind of condense a lot of information into something that would be not off-putting to folks who maybe eat meat or who are, you know, less inclined toward eating differently. Obviously, this is a book for vegetarians, for vegans, but it’s also for omnivores, and it’s also for folks who are maybe hesitant to consider the implications of how they eat. But for me, writing the book wasn’t about having new ideas. It was about just containing old ones. And, like, I have plenty of new ideas since finishing it, but in order for it to actually be done, it needed to be a very specific container for very specific concepts. 

Natalie
I think it’s really interesting, the idea of, like, almost like a container — like a Tupperware container for your ideas, for this very specific sort of set of these ideas that need to go forth, but with a direction, and how now you almost get to be freed a little bit to sort of do and experiment, and… 

Alicia
Yeah, and think differently about things again. Yeah, it’s interesting. 

Rebecca
So do you now, as you continue to evolve, have new ideas about food? 

Alicia
I mean, because I write my newsletter every week, I’m sort of documenting in real time wherever my brain is. I think an interesting thing I want to get into in the fall is a more nitty gritty look at what we mean when we say something is sustainable, or, like, what is a true sustainable practice in food. I want to, like, talk to folks about, you know, is it really better to make chickpeas from dried, or in some cases are you using less water and less energy if you’re making canned beans? Like, a lot of my work is about making things that are more, I guess, academic, accessible to folks, and, like, actually usable, and, like, turning it into an idea that you can use in your life. Like, is it really better to have an electric stove versus a gas stove? Or what kind of gas? And that sort of thing — especially when we’re talking about how many people are dealing with power outages in terms of different extreme weather events, too. So thinking about, like, what really is the future going to look like in terms of how we’re cooking is definitely one thing that I’m super-obsessed with right now. Whereas, like, this book is really, like, big picture — this is what it has meant or looked like or tasted like to not eat meat in the US for the last 50 years. 

Natalie
You mention Derrida early on in the book, and philosophy was kind of my jam for the longest time in academia for me. And it’s been interesting how different guests have come on to the show over time — and one was a chef, and another is a novelist, and it’s been quite fascinating how many of them have pulled Derridean concepts forward. 

Alicia
Yeah. 

Natalie
So that’s just kind of funny. And so now it shows up in food. 

Rebecca
I was just going to say, Nat gets so excited — she hears Derrida and she’s like, “Oh, Derrida...” 

Natalie
Oh, we’re gonna deconstruct something. Ok, well, here we go. But ok, so I’m just going to say you quote him, and you say: “He calls the conditions for quote-unquote ‘being understood’ as a full subject in the west carnophallogocentrism, which means being a meat eater, being a man, and being an authoritative speaking self.” And I loved that line, because I love how you go forward and then you say — well, you claim not only to be authoritative, but also loud. And I love that, I think that’s so great. But what do you think there’s about that — like, why is volume required in this ‘no meat required?’ 

Alicia
You know, taking the alternative position is always going to be seen as agitating or aggressive to folks. And, you know, I just got an email this morning where a woman was very mean and telling me that, you know, she’s really proud to eat filet mignon and feed it to her family and feed her four golden retrievers steaks every day. And I’m like, “Ok,” and she told me to go choke on a chicken bone. 

Rebecca
Oh my gosh. 

Natalie
Oh my gosh. 

Alicia
I mean, it’s funny because it was just so over the top, and so nutty. But, like, at the same time, I understand that the book is entering a world that is more friendly to vegetarianism, veganism, plant-based eating than the world has ever been — especially, obviously, in a western context. But it’s still entering a world where there is a lot of reactionary sentiment that is fearful of a perceived loss of freedom that would come with concerning oneself about the repercussions of how one eats. And so, you know, the book is going to meet that contingent, and frankly, a lot of the introduction where I’m being, I think, a bit loud and maybe aggressive in my own stance is to simply get on the offense. You know, it’s like, well, if you’re going to be (and I’m going to assume because I’ve had this experience, like this email today) — if you’re the type of person who’s going to find the necessary call for more plant-based eating to be off-putting, or, you know, confronting, then I am going to confront you with it. And so that’s that. 

And I think that that’s a really important aspect of this book in particular, which I think I wrote from a kind of position of wanting the omnivore not to feel alienated, but to feel other. In reading this book, it’s not for the omnivore to feel comfortable, necessarily. It’s for the omnivore, yes, to feel confronted with, you know, what do these choices mean? Because they do mean something. And I think people who have default positionality are meat-eaters — are, let’s say, men in a patriarchal world where meat is commonly consumed. You know, they have a struggle conceptualizing themselves as subjects and not as default. And so the book kind of tries to be like: you are making a choice. And if your choice is the default one, it is. And, like, confronting people with that — as well as, of course, like, the greenhouse gas repercussions of this kind of eating. So I wanted to take that kind of approach, because I knew people would be antagonized already. 

Rebecca
And would that have been someone responding to your newsletter? 

Alicia
Yes. 

Rebecca
Wow. 

Alicia
Something they voluntarily subscribed to, which is very strange to me. 

Rebecca
I was just going to say. So our dad spends a lot of time in Bolivia, interestingly, and he has had it explained to him that meat there is a sign of status. We were wondering if that was a Western influence — he says no, they’re not paying attention to us in the west. 

Alicia
No. 

Rebecca
But I was curious, what do you think? And then I just want to segue this to just, for those who haven’t read the book yet, we should talk a bit about the meat industry. Are they being influenced by the west? Is meat just a status symbol in all countries? 

Alicia
Meat has had this kind of status as an affluent luxury item throughout history, throughout cultures. It’s not unique to the United States at all. But at the same time, what has happened in the United States, and the problematic aspect of it that has been exported, is the scale at which meat is consumed — as what should be a luxury item, what should be a sign of, “Yes, we have this meat, we have this animal, it’s time for the slaughter, it’s, you know, a celebration, it’s a feast, it’s something that is special,” has become something that people believe is their right to have every single day, regardless of the consequences. And so, you know, the meat industry in the United States is one that is, you know, terrible for workers at the meat processing level. We know that folks in this industry suffer, even before the pandemic, very, very high rates of workplace injury. They in the pandemic were one of the hardest hit labour forces in terms of getting COVID-19. And then they are also kind of underpaid and non-transparently paid by these giant companies like Tyson. 

And then you have the terrible ecological impacts. 80% of agricultural land is used to grow feed for livestock, which produces about 18% of calories that people are eating. It’s a wildly inefficient way of using land. And then of course you’re also having these animals stuck in these cages, basically, living very miserable lives, and in distress. And so I always say, you know, “It’s planet, it’s workers, it’s animals,” when we’re thinking about why industrial animal agriculture is such a destructive force in the world. It’s not just climate change. It’s also labour. It’s also animal welfare. And so it hits on all of these things. And so what I tried to say in the book, because even though I’m a vegetarian personally and I think people do need to move, especially in affluent nations, toward a more plant-based diet, the real problem is industrial animal agriculture. It’s not individual choice or individual desire for meat. It’s industrial animal agriculture. 

And the thing is, is that if we got rid of this industry, which is, you know, it’s also subsidized by the US government with $38 billion in subsidies every year, very strong lobbyists — but if we got rid of that industry, and we were using land smartly to grow a diversity of foods, if animals were grazing in the way they were intended to graze, and we were doing different agricultural practices around livestock that weren’t so intensive, people would still be able to eat meat. They just would not have the availability of, you know, 250 pounds of meat per capita in the US every year available to them. It would be a much smaller amount. And to a lot of people that is an affront on their freedom, despite you know, there won’t be anywhere to be free if we keep doing things the way we’re doing them. 

But I think a lot of my argument in the book is that yes, meat has this cultural capital, it has this luxury status, it has a lot to do with how wealthy you perceive yourself and your nation to be. And it’s ok if it keeps that status, so long as the amount that is produced and consumed decreases in line with ecological limits, and also in a way that is sustainable for labour and has better conditions for animals, et cetera. And so, yeah, I try not to tell people that they’re wrong for believing that meat has the status it always has throughout human history — but, you know, we’ve hit a wall in terms of the scale at which we can consume it. 

Rebecca
And now, some housekeeping. Hey Reframeables: do you get something from these conversations? Would you consider becoming a supporter on Patreon? For as little as $2 a month, you could help to keep this show going. It’s meaningful financially, and relationally — it feels like a hug. For our Patreon supporters, we do mini-episodes which we call Life Hacks and Enhancers — our five best things in a week. You could also tip us on our Ko-fi account, where Natalie’s recipe book is also for sale. Oh, and tell us what you want to hear more of — listener messages make our week. And don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter. All the links are in our show notes. Love, Nat and Bec. 

I thought it was interesting in the book how you… did I read this right? It’s almost pointless when you’re speaking about it to talk about greenhouse gases — like, people kind of zone out. Like, you found it more constructive to speak about labour, or people. 

Alicia
It’s more constructive to speak about labour and people. That has some motivating factors for certain folks — it depends on the person what’s going to be a motivating factor. Some people, yes, the climate change argument will be stronger. For some people, the labour argument will be stronger. For some people, animal welfare. So it’s about kind of trying to figure out your angle on who you’re talking to. But at the same time, the best argument for decreasing meat consumption is good vegetarian food. And so that doesn’t mean fake meat — that means, like, just really good vegetables, and that sort of thing. And so that’s kind of my point. 

You know, I write how Upton Sinclair with The Jungle in 1905, you know, tried to wake people up to the problems of meat processing as a job. And, you know, it had some good labour effects — I mean, the labour movement as a whole had those effects on changing the conditions. But what really got people riled up was that their meat might have been mishandled, or, you know, covered in bacteria. That was what was troubling to people. And I think people are still not motivated 100% by the labour issues around meat. 

It has a lot of similarities to fast fashion too, where people aren’t as motivated by understanding that the conditions are unsustainable for the production of this thing that they feel they need to consume. And when it comes to fast fashion, you know, very rarely does someone have an absolute desperate need for a brand new dress that’s very on trend and costs $10. But similarly, you know, how many people have an actual, like, deep-seated need for bacon five days a week, you know? And so like, these things have a lot of things in common, but it all comes down to, like, a consumption style. The things that we used to believe to be luxuries, like buying a new outfit, or having a big steak, became kind of something too easy. 

Natalie
Yeah, it’s like we’re built for challenges, and then we’ve forgotten how to, like, strive for them or something. 

Rebecca
Isn’t there something even in health — you know, this idea that you put yourself in a cold bath because that’s good for your body to struggle? And it’s true, we do all these things to make ourselves not struggle. 

Natalie
There’s something in that, right? I mean, like, this kind of constant flipping of, “I want to strive, but I don’t want to strive,” and what does that say, obviously, about our larger social makeup? We talk on Reframeables a lot about desiring nuance. We’re not into the this-or-that type of argument, and that’s maybe one of the reasons why we were attracted to your book, and I’ve been reading your newsletter for a while. I appreciate that that’s never the way forward for you, right? I mean, it’s never just a, “Take a one angle and then that’s kind of the end of it,” because that does shut down so many conversations. And as you just said there, I mean, you have to almost find your way in with different folks. 

I find that interesting and useful, because I think even with this conversation around buying local, which can be deified a little bit — certainly, like when you move out towards like the summer and farmers markets, and how that type of conversation can also become a bit flat, because it’s not paying attention to a larger story, which also involves all of those statistics. I mean, when you said in the book about actually, the transport trucks are not putting out the main emissions that are causing those greenhouse effects in the same way. So all that to say, you have written here that: “Numbers aren’t all that matter when we talk about the food system, because the quality of the ingredients we’re cooking with, and the good feeling of talking to the person who grew that ingredient, those things aren’t quantifiable.” So I want to talk about feelings like that idea of all the big feelings. 

Alicia
I think it’s also, you know, when we talk about local stuff, too — I saw someone posting supermarket prices in New Zealand today, and it was like, “Oh, these things are so expensive.” And it’s like, “Well, because they’re not in season.” Zucchini right now would be wildly cheap, one would think, right, because it grows like a weed. But because people have in their mind, like, “Oh, I make this, this, this, and I need this for that, but it’s not in season, but I just go get at the supermarket, and then it costs $12, and I’m gonna be upset.” But it’s like: of course it costs $12 — which is besides the point a little bit. But for me, I am always thinking about how food affects not just the greenhouse gas emissions, but also the feeling of being in your community, and having a relationship with the people who grow your food. 

You know, the reason I had those banana flowers that I talk about in the beginning of the book is because a farmer I go to every week, I asked like, “Hey, can you bring me some banana flowers?” And she was like, “Sure, no one wants these,” and she just gave me a sack of them. And I was like, “How much?” and she was like, “It’s free, because they would go to waste anyway.” So like, these relationships allow you to try new things, they allow you to keep money within your communities. Obviously, coming from the context of Puerto Rico, where over 80% of food is imported, local agriculture isn’t very supported by policy for myriad reasons. Changing the ways in which you buy things here has a really demonstrable effect on what’s able to happen. You know, if you keep supporting the local farmers, the local farmers will continue to grow things, and they’ll continue to be able to come back from disasters and hurricanes and extreme weather, and they’ll bounce back. You know, we had a really bad bout of heat recently, and you know, for a couple of weeks, the farmer’s market was very slow. But, you know, they have their consistent base. They know that whatever comes, when it comes, they will sell all of it. And that’s a huge thing to give a farmer — like, this is a very historically uneven business. That’s why farming is so heavily subsidized, but the subsidies are in favour of agribusiness rather than small farms. 

And I think, yeah, you can’t quantify the good feeling of having a community whether it’s around food or something else. And I think that a lot of people who rag on local food as just some bourgeois affectation really miss the point that what would our world look like if we just were eating genetically modified corn and soy, and we just had wheat from a very central plant? That’s why I think in the book, I’m very focused on the aesthetic pleasures — I mean, the gastronomic pleasure of food. Like, you can’t discount that to everything else. And so it’s about finding all the different ways to talk about these things that will reach a specific person, because everything’s going to hit everybody differently. The feeling thing is very important, and I think people don’t consider feelings enough when we talk about these things, because it can get so bogged down in statistics and everything like that, you know? I mean, I have all the numbers in my head — like, yeah, 80% of land for 18% of calories. 220 pounds of meat per capita per year. Like, I have all those numbers, but they don’t really mean anything if they don’t get at what people really want to eat every day. 

Natalie
Yeah — and care about. 

Alicia
Yeah, exactly. 

Rebecca
You introduce us to so much literature in this book, actually. I was like, “Oh, wow, all these books I could be reading.” Can you talk about some of the classics that you would recommend, or a book that you think, “This is a very important read”? 

Alicia
I wanted the book to be a starting point for anyone else who wanted to go down the rabbit hole here, you know? Again, it’s a container, I think. And so, yeah, Hippie Food by Jonathan Kauffman is huge for understanding the emergence of counterculture cuisine. Appetite for Change by Warren Belasco, similarly, is how counterculture cuisine became kind of normalized in the United States. Diet for a Small Planet, obviously, by Frances Moore Lappé. I talk a lot about cookbooks in the book. I think, you know, the cookbooks of people like Amanda Cohen, who’s the chef-owner of Dirt Candy in New York City. The Fancy Desserts by Brooks Headley, who has Superiority Burger. Sweet + Salty by Lagusta Yearwood, the Bloodroot cookbooks. You know, anything by Mollie Katzen and Deborah Madison. There’s definitely a lot of, like, nonfiction reference, like The Bloodless Revolution by Tristram Stewart. The Vegetarian Crusade, Red Meat Republic. 

So, like, depending on what hole you’d like to go down, whether it’s the counter-cuisine, the cookbooks, like, the eco-feminism, or it’s the, like, understanding the role of meat in society. Like, there’s something there for you in the bibliography — which was kind of the point, too. I’ve taught — I taught culinary tourism at Boston University, and I really like doing a syllabus. Like, I think that my newsletter every week, I’m contextualizing and I’m writing, obviously, but I’m also just kind of, like, trying to give people more things to read so that they can go deeper on it. Again, like, a lot of what I see my work as is just making ideas accessible and easy. 

Natalie
I love making links with my index — like, when people kind of go there, they can find the words that maybe will show up in other places and see where those can direct them to. So there’s something about indexing, and bibliographies. There’s an art, right, to those important spaces, because it does — it sort of facilitates the option forward for folks to kind of keep doing the reading. That’s beautiful. 

Rebecca
I feel like I just have so many nuggets in my head from reading this. I’m just, like, learning about how they mimic blood in vegetarian burgers. 

Alicia
Oh, the heme? 

Rebecca
Like, just random stuff like that. I’m like, “That’s interesting to think about and learn about.” So just the whole collection of facts. 

Natalie
Yeah, those facts are fascinating. And yet, I’m going to go back to feelings, because I want to talk about relationships. Because you make mention (again, very early on) about your grandmother as being a key influence in terms of your eating life. And I just really liked that turn of phrase ‘eating life,’ because we do spend a ton of time in our family thinking about eating, really carefully preparing, and yet our grandmother on our dad’s side — wonderful, amazing woman with great influence on us… she was not a great cook. You know what I mean? Like, she grew up super poor. Food for her was fuel. It was like Irish potatoes, just get stuff on the plate, that’s what it was about. And in the end, though, she made a really wonderful pie. And maybe there was something about the care that was kind of infused in the dessert. I don’t know, I kind of wish that one of us had spent time talking about that with her. But your grandmother — on your mom’s side, right? 

Alicia
Yeah. 

Natalie
Was really a powerful influence for you. And so I just think listeners would be curious to know what that means to you in the sort of bigger picture. 

Alicia
Well, it’s really interesting. My mom’s mom, my grandma, was an only child of a single mother and grew up in Brooklyn, in Bay Ridge, around her German family. Well, I always get, like, bits and pieces — now that my mom and all her siblings are, like, in their 60s, sometimes they talk more about these things and people they remember. So there was someone who had a jam factory — made plum jam. There was an aunt who was a fantastic baker and, like, wanted to be a painter, but used her artistic skills in cookies and different baked goods. We still have a Christmas tradition in my family of making kransekake, which is a Norwegian, like, cookie tower that forms a Christmas tree — but we have no Norwegian heritage. It’s just that this particular aunt, there used to be a Little Norway in Brooklyn, and in Christmas season, she would pass a bakery and she saw this and she was like, “I want to know what that is, and I want to make it.” And now, like, we randomly make this thing every year, too, even though we make it very terribly. But it’s a tradition. 

And so from that kind of side of my family there’s this clear love for food and using food as a creative outlet. And my grandmother was certainly in that lineage, and like I write we used to watch Julia Child on TV, and I loved watching The Frugal Gourmet, though it emerged later that he was a terrible person. But I loved the Vivaldi in the theme song. And she would just cook me a lot of different things, and I was just happy and well-fed. Because both my parents worked, I spent, like, every day with her until I went to school. She passed away when I was five. But I’ve said that, you know, because it was such a momentous loss for me, like, all of those memories that would have probably been lost if she had lived longer really are so vivid in my mind, because I would have to replay them in order to retain that relationship with her. 

And so I actually didn’t get into making food for a long time, because I just thought it was something I didn’t want to do. You know, even my mother told me, like, “It will trap you to cook, because, you know, if you end up married to a man, you’re going to end up just cooking all the time, and it’s a trap.” Which is, I think, how a lot of people feel, and so I didn’t get into it until I was older and in my 20s, but then it started to make sense. I’d wanted to be a writer, I worked in magazines, et cetera, but I had this kind of, like, feeling that there was a creativity that I couldn’t access, and that was frustrating to me. And when I started to cook and I started to bake, like, everything kind of fell into place for me. And when I found food as a lens to look at the world, or began to use food as a lens to look at the world, everything kind of fell into place. And, like, I’ve never not had ideas or, you know, ideas about recipes, ideas about, you know, food systems, et cetera — like, ever since that moment in my life. And I didn’t realize until later, I think, that I had idealized my time with my grandmother — but I don’t think I had realized until later how formative it was for me in terms of why I find food so rich. Not just as something to enjoy as pleasure, but intellectually rich and creatively rich. And it’s because it was the most important thing in that house with her for all those very, very formative years of my life. 

Rebecca
Yeah, our grandmother — I’ve only recently discovered that you can barbecue turnips or do something really interesting with them, because she would just mash them — just as a mash with no flavour. 

Alicia
I write in the book too, I think, about how a lot of change in terms of how people respond to vegetables and to plant-based food has happened with learning how to cook vegetables properly. Like, we don’t look at vegetables anymore and say, “The only thing I can do here is boil it and mash it.” Like, we understand, like, how to create the reactions that cause browning that make things delicious, how to use salt, how to use spices, how to use olive oil, and not just, like, butter to impart flavour. There’s a lot more technique and thought that goes into creating vegetable dishes now that I think we just didn’t have in the past, necessarily. 

It’s so interesting to think of something like Brussels sprouts. I grew up, and you probably did too, just like Brussels sprouts were the most disgusting thing you could eat — or, like, a lima bean or a split pea. Like, these things had terrible connotations in the culture, they were just used to say, like, “That’s gross.” But it’s because people used to just boil the Brussels sprouts, and that was it. And now, one, they kind of started to create a new kind of Brussels sprout that would taste better. And then people started to realize they could roast them and get that caramelization and they could sauce them, and, like, kind of realizing that there’s as robust, if not more robust possibility with vegetables. You have a lot more control over fat and that sort of thing, because obviously they don’t have any. And, you know, realizing that you can glaze Brussels sprouts. You can make a cauliflower steak in the oven, or grill a cauliflower, or batter and fry a cauliflower. 

There is all this stuff that is possible if we just take a little bit more care with them. Whereas historically, people literally were just mashing the turnips and that sort of thing. And so it’s like, of course no one wanted to eat them. Of course no one wanted to eat boiled Brussels sprouts. I mean, I would, I guess now. But, like, things like olive oil and, like, flaky salt and, like, understanding, like, you don’t want table salt for everything. Like, there’s little things you do here and there to make things a little better. Like, because people would say, “Oh, it’s fancier,” but I would say it’s like, “No, it’s like we learned how to, like, take care of things a little bit better.” And that’s I think what’s happened with vegetables, especially in the last, like, 30 years. People stopped mashing them and boiling them to death, so... 

Rebecca
I’m thinking of this phrase that you say: “There is more diversity of thought in the refusal of meat than in meat eating by default.” And I’m thinking about how when you speak to people, you’re trying to come at the argument that will be compelling for them. And I think for me I found this very compelling, because I like to think of myself as a really creative thinker. Like, that’s part of, you know, my identity — is that I think creatively. So I was like, “Oh my goodness, it’s more creative to refuse meat, in a sense.” Can you speak to that? 

Alicia
Yeah, it comes again with how much more diversity in vegetables there is for us than in meat. Like I’m saying you can take a cauliflower and make it, you know, 10, 15 different things without even breaking a sweat. But can you do that with, like, a steak or something like that? You know, you’re not going to do that many things with it. Maybe you put some chimichurri today, and you put, like, a ginger soy sauce tomorrow, but like, you know, there’s only so much you’re going to do with that. And when you have beans, herbs, vegetables, you know, nuts, all these things available to you there’s just so much more possibility and there’s so much more creativity there. And I think that people find that when they start to make more plant-based food, they like cooking more because it opens up a new creativity for them and new ways of thinking. Because we have so much knowledge. We have so many great cookbooks of vegetarian and vegan food. We have so many great cultural histories and lineages to draw from to make vegetarian food. 

But when you actually get in the kitchen and start doing it, it kind of really does open up new kind of pathways in the brain, it feels like almost. Where it’s like, “Oh, like I can do this and this and this. I didn’t think like that.” Like, you know, because we really have let a lot of us (or in the US), like, the dominance of meat kind of take over our creativity when it comes to food. Like, it’s not just taking over our plate, it’s not just taking over our grocery cart, it takes over your brain because you start to be like, “Ok, I’m building this meal, and this is the centrepiece.” Whereas when you have vegetables, it’s like there doesn’t have to be a centre, there can be just an array of items that compose a dish. And so I think that some people would find that scary, maybe. But I think once you start to get into it, you realize that there’s so much more freedom when you’re not just focused on, like, “How do I make this dish really protein-forward,” and that sort of thing. Because, you know, there is so much protein in all plant foods anyway. 

Natalie
I wrote a piece for Chatelaine magazine, so I don’t know if you get that one up there. 

Alicia
Oh, the Canadian one — yeah. 

Natalie
Yeah, yeah — about veganism, and specifically kind of the white-centric, especially online. So the piece was focused on Instagram, and I was interviewing Instagrammers, who were basically changing the Instagram face of veganism away from kind of like a super white-focused avocado toast kind of focus, and it was really fun to kind of meet some of the different folk who are right here. Like, I mean, a couple of them were from Toronto, and just anyways… around the country. And I just was thinking about that in terms of your work, because obviously you work so much around diversifying not just, like, what’s on our plate, but what’s happening in our minds around who it is that’s bringing food and these stories to our table — and none of this is new. Like, that’s the whole thing — none of it’s new. I mean, obviously, we can talk about, like, Instagram specifically, but just thinking kind of a little bit bigger than that, like, why is the image of veganism in most omnivore’s heads so white when it comes to what’s been presented to us? 

Alicia
Yeah, I think it has a lot to do with the culture at large. And, you know, the first chapter in the book is ‘Diet for Whose Planet’ because I love Frances Moore Lappé’s work. Frances Moore Lappé’s work has been so crucial in changing the conversation around why it would be significant for people in affluent countries to not eat meat and redirect resources, et cetera. But at the same time, I think that the media in the 70s used her book to kind of drown out what was already fomenting in the civil rights movement around a more vegetarian or vegan ethos that had a different philosophy behind it. And they used her book, you know, it was because it was relatable, it was legible to that big white middle class audience in the United States. And it really did change the conversation for that demographic, but it drowned out those other voices. And we’ve seen this happen in different cultural spheres, we’ve seen this happen in many different ways. You know, this is the insidiousness of white supremacy — it just kind of makes itself the default, the neutral, the most clear. 

And what’s happened in the aftermath of that over the last 50 years is that going vegetarian or vegan has come to be seen as an affluent white thing to do, a choice that only a few people have. And so that picture in people’s heads has been very easy to ridicule because, you know, throughout history, vegetarians are seen as cranks or strange and humourless, and that sort of thing. And I think that in the US when vegetarianism, veganism started to get this more secular face, there had to be a new way to ridicule it. And so it became, “Oh, it’s a white thing. It’s a bougie thing. It’s for silly people who have nothing better to do, who have too much time to think about these things. It’s not for everybody.” And that image of, like, a more animal rights vegan who’s very, very aggressive with their beliefs took over. And you know, there were terrible campaigns that were very misguided around things like comparing animal agriculture to slavery or the Holocaust. You know, these are terrible, terrible analogies that the animal rights movement did a lot of damage to itself with in terms of its public image and perception. 

But I think we’re finally kind of coming around, and it’s undeniable now to folks how diverse veganism and vegetarianism are. There is this whole history of black vegans, there are African vegan cookbooks coming out from different African nations. The last two years of the James Beard Awards, the vegetable-focused cookbook award has gone to The Korean Vegan in 2021, and this year, it went to The Vegan Chinese Kitchen. You know, like, we’re seeing so much new diversity that is actually getting the cultural backing and the cachet that it deserves. It’s getting the conversation it deserves. And I think that that’s going to do a great service to letting people understand that this isn’t just a white thing, it isn’t just a bougie thing. It can be for everybody, and it can encompass all cuisines, and it’s really just a different way of looking at building your meals. 

And that narrative is finally shifting a little bit, but it’s taken so much work. And I think a lot of people who want to see people continue to kind of eat meat with abandon are probably upset that this narrative is taking shape. Because what it means is that people don’t have to give up their heritage, and they don’t have to give up the diversity of, you know, being able to eat just because they’re cutting back on meat or cutting meat out altogether. There’s going to be a new series of cookbooks that’s really exciting: Plant-Based Mexican by Andrea Aliseda, Ria Elciario who’s based in Toronto is writing Plant-Based Filipino Food, plant-based southern food — Vegan Barbecue just came out from Terry Sargent, Plentiful by Denai Moore, which is a vegan Jamaican cookbook. Like, everything is being reflected more and that’s only going to help this new era, I think, take shape. The last 50 years have been good but, like, very problematic in moments and, like, we’re ready to kind of, like, take this conversation forward and show that it’s a very, very compelling and delicious way of being in the world. 

Natalie
I like that — compelling and delicious. 

Rebecca
Alicia, could you share a recipe that’s on your mind lately, or tell us what’s for dinner in your house tonight — or both. 

Alicia
I don’t know what I’m cooking today. We might grill some tofu — I’ve been grilling tofu a lot with a hot oil marinade, because we bought a barbecue a few months ago, and I looked up a way to do it. And the New York Times has this recipe for grilled tofu, and that involves, you know, slicing it and then marinating it for a few hours in oil where you’ve kind of, like, made ginger and garlic fragrant in the oil. But I do a kind of shwarma-inspired spice for it. I use Reem Assil’s khalta hara blend, which has, like, cumin and coriander and cardamom, all this good stuff, and some smoked paprika in that, other stuff, whatever I feel like throwing in there. Yeah, we’ve been making pita and eating that grilled tofu with pita and mint and feta, or maybe hummus — whatever’s around. And so that’s been my favourite thing to eat lately, is the grilled tofu. 

Natalie
I’m buying a barbecue tonight — that was actually on the docket. So my plan, as you say that, is going to be to use it, and then I’m going to post it, and then I’m going to tag you, and then we’re going to talk… 

Alicia
Oh cool. 

Rebecca
Natalie had read that boiling tofu first… 

Natalie
Oh yeah, there’s this one influencer, this one vegetarian guy — he’s from England, I forget his name right now off the top of my head. But anyways, that’s been his way of changing the texture of tofu to something that he finds that people like. So he’ll boil it for. like, two to three minutes and then cool it and then do all of the things like coating and arrowroot starch and then do a quick bake it so it gets crispy. So that’s his way, have you ever tried it? 

Alicia
I haven’t boiled tofu. Going back to my earlier point, when you say that, I’m just like, “That’s a waste of water.” I’m like, “We have to be conscious of water usage in general.” And I’m like, I don’t boil unless I’m, like, going to use the water again, and that sort of thing. Like, so I’m a bit of a loon about boiling right now. 

Natalie
No, that’s so good to think about. I mean, like, that’s part of this whole process, right — is, like, thinking about each of the steps. 

Alicia
Exactly, yeah. People are big into freezing tofu. I find all of this is simply too much. Like, I’m literally a food writer and I write recipes, and I’m like, “I just take the tofu out of the fridge. If I need to press it, I press it. That’s it.” I think the gimmicky things about, like, “Do this and this and this,” — I mean, freezing for sure gives a new texture and it makes it very absorbent. But at the same time, again, thinking about what actually entices people to make a choice to eat tofu, you can’t give them that many barriers to entry. Like, the freezing the boiling these might be for people who are, like, deep into their journey. But I think that if you tell people that they have to do, like, a bunch of stuff, to have tofu for dinner, they’re going be like, “Forget it, I’m going to have a hamburger.” So, like, I try to be very conscious of that, too. 

Natalie
I like that idea, though, about the water boiling. 

Rebecca
Yes, that’s so important, actually, because we have a well on our farm here and we’ve had some water issues. So we’ve all become super-conscious. I was boiling water and then keeping it on the stove. I was like, “When am I going to use this again?” And that it’s interesting that it takes a crisis for me to become so aware. 

Alicia
Yeah. 

Rebecca
But I wanted to ask you about the air fryer. Are you into the air fryer? 

Alicia
I don’t have an air fryer — it’s more that I don’t have counter space, really. The funny thing is, like, I don’t have an air fryer but we have an Ooni, because we have a patio — like, tiny kitchen, but a good-sized patio. And so, yeah, we have the barbecue, we have the Ooni. I don’t have the air fryer, because I just don’t like plugging things in a lot. I don’t know, I don’t know what it is. But I’m like, “I don’t want to plug things in.” I use the immersion blender a lot rather than use, like, the standing you know… if I have to use a standing blender, it has to be, like, really worthwhile. Because I have to, like, move the machines, and plug… anyway. So I’m, like, very anti-plugging things in. 

Rebecca
But that, for you, is about electricity usage? 

Alicia
No, no — it’s not even about electricity. It’s literally about space and my own weird thing that I have, which is I don’t like to move appliances around. 

Rebecca
Ok. 

Alicia
But no, yeah, we use the Ooni and the barbecue a lot, so… obviously a perk of living in the tropics is that. 

Natalie
You can be outside. 

Alicia
Unless it’s raining, you can be outside every day, yeah. 

Natalie
It changes flavours, right? 

Alicia
Oh, it’s so good. It’s so good, yeah. And talking about getting people to eat their vegetables — just throw them on the grill. Yeah. 

Natalie
Throw it on a barbecue — yeah, totally. Alicia, thank you for this wonderful chance to, like, unpack such a… you’re right, it’s an accessible book, but it obligates thought. And that is something that we are obviously here for, but I think that lots of our listeners will get really into. So thank you for that. 

Alicia
Awesome. Thank you so much.