On Reading As Restoration

Reading 'A Life of One's Own' and writing 'No Meat Required.'

This has been the most exhausting and spectacular year of my life: I taught a semester of culinary tourism; I put out my first book; I gave workshops and talks; I figured out how to restructure this newsletter for the future; and, in the last two months, big things have happened that will be announced in the New Year. Through it all, I’ve been writing, but I have worried repeatedly that I would soon dry up of words, of thoughts. How could I maintain inspiration while productivity was constantly expected and demanded of me?

Reading Joanna Biggs’s A Life of One's Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again reinvigorated me over the summer; in early October, Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes restored and charged me; now, I’m reading Lauren Elkin’s Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art and am feeling the same sort of awakening back to myself. The answer is always to read. I have to relearn that this is always the answer again and again. Many lessons like this need constant repeating.

(An aside: I have not felt up to the task—neither intellectually nor emotionally—to grapple at length with current horrifying events in the world, though I am of course keeping up on the news. I would like to share Millicent Souris’s recent essay, as it was clarifying about how to exist in this moment, in this season, for me—her work always is.)

Today, I’m sharing a talk I gave as part of Boston University’s Pepín Lecture Series in September, a lecture to which I was late because of traffic getting there right after I also spoke at MIT about lifestyle and science journalism needing to learn from each other. The fact of my being late and out of breath and teary-eyed can perhaps add to the atmosphere of reading it. (This BU talk interpolates my LitHub “Craft of Writing” essay, if some of it seems familiar.) It was written in the wake of my restoration by reading A Life of One’s Own.

In my travelogue about the second week of the tour, I mentioned someone in the audience scoffing at my use here of the phrase “radical act.” While I thought she had a point—because I do hate leaning on unearned, poorly defined phrases—now that I’m reading Art Monsters, I decided to keep it here. It’s important to me to do food writing that is personal and embodied; it’s important to me to assert the significance of young women’s experience, especially when it makes me a side character in the very cultural history I’m documenting. I was and am side character; perhaps you are side character to the same. It felt natural that this was significant to me, which I realize is because I’m a pretty voracious reader of feminist autotheory: It’s absolutely normalized to me that the seemingly mundane can illuminate the profound, that the first time a girl born on Long Island in 1985 ate tofu can say something about its role in U.S. culture and cuisine. But, of course, you can be the judge of whether it was earned…

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In A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again, Joanna Biggs reads the novels of nine women authors and threads through literary criticism, chronicles of their lives, and how her readings are fitting into tumultuous times in her own life. She writes that “many feminist books”—and I consider No Meat Required a feminist book—“are part essay, part argument, part memoir, held together by some force, it seems, attributable only to their writers. It’s as if these books, to be written at all, have to be brought into being by autodidacts who don’t for sure know what they’re doing—just that they have to do it.”

“Part essay, part argument, part memoir”—I’d never seen the style of writing I pursue so succinctly named, much less positively categorized. In interviews around the launch of the book, I was asked repeatedly why this book. I could summon an answer, but the truth is that I had no choice in the matter for two reasons: (1) the publishing market wants books from writers on the subjects in which they’re a known authority, and contemporary vegan culinary history—niche as it may be—is my expertise and (2) it was something I had to get out of me, a set of ideas and characters and feelings that I needed to put somewhere. 

Biggs’s characterization of feminist books as “brought into being by autodidacts who don’t for sure know what they’re doing—just that they have to do it” was interesting to me to read because it had been how I was describing the feel of a “punk” restaurant to folks, because the chapter on punk vegan cuisine has proved the most interesting to many readers. It’s a place, like feminist restaurants, too, that isn’t born of chef-y ego but of the need for such a space to emerge, for such a milieu to have a space to call its own. My own writing has emerged from the same impulse.

When I gave up meat in 2011—gradually, and then all at once—I had what I’ve now realized was a strange urge to learn everything about the recent history of people who’d also made this choice. Who were they? What did they cook? What were the important cookbooks? I started a roving vegan bakery without much forethought, through which I got a crash course in the economics of a small artisanal food business trying to make the best possible choices: how pricey it is to use fair-trade, organic sugar; New York State flour; fair-trade cocoa powder and chocolate. Seeing how stacked against such choices we are, as business owners or as individuals, was my introduction to the way the U.S. food system works. 

This was the experience that has grounded my food writing, and this particular strand of my work culminates in No Meat Required. In my research back into how the current vegan and vegetarian cuisines came to be, I identified the major cultural markers: the hippies, feminists, and punks. In the 21st century, there’s the raw vegan wellness strand that takes the forefront, but all along, a vegan cuisine is emerging. We are, right now, in the moment of its infancy—yet its foremothers are obvious, from Mollie Katzen to Deborah Madison, from Miyoko Schinner to Isa Chandra Moskowitz, from Angelica Kitchen to Dirt Candy.

How I see this culinary history and lineage is, of course, based on research and also on my personal perspective: I could’ve seen Tofutti as more significant than The Political Palate as published by the Bloodroot Collective, but while Tofutti has become a nostalgic relic, the Bloodroot Collective lives on, in their restaurant and in their influence upon a new generation of chefs and others in the food world. I found it very telling that the food with the most longevity and the most influence was the food that had a political backbone, whether countercultural at The Farm commune or ecofeminist or anarchist-punk. It was also important to me to foreground cooking, not those products considered “innovative,” and to champion the women’s work specifically that has fed—no pun intended—into what we can now see as vegan cuisine.

I didn’t read Biggs’s book while writing my own because it wasn’t out yet, but I was reading similar works like Lauren Elkin’s Flaneuse and Kate Zambreno’s Drifts: These helped me to see a way toward what I wanted this book to be, which ends up as a manifesto but also a love song: This is how I eat, and why, and these are the people who’ve influenced me. I write about the good and the bad—the TFT and the wheatgrass shots, the heavy casseroles and lightness of a miso soup. I learned how to do this through women’s literary criticism, woven through with memoir.

And so, I couldn’t write my book until I put myself in it. No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating is a cultural history and culinary chronicle, as the subtitle suggests, and any writing on vegetarian or vegan food usually contains some sort of apologia for the lack of meat. Rather than do that dance, one I think unnecessary, I simply wrote about myself: how I grew up eating, why I decided to give up meat, and what I learned because of that. I wrote a book about why, where others see lack and restriction, I see abundance.

Memoir, personal narrative—these things can be cliché for a woman writer. It’s hard enough to be taken seriously as a food writer: How could I expect to be considered a serious intellectual (though—is that even my goal?) if I were writing about seeing Moby when I was 13 and being inspired to give up meat so I could be as cool as the bassist with the “GIULIANI SUCKS” sticker? 

I think, yes. These touchstones give people a way into a topic that, for many, feels antagonistic off the bat. Excessive meat consumption is understood as absolutely normal, even in some cases necessary for reasons cultural and political, and to suggest otherwise is to attack a deeply held cultural norm. And, let’s be real, vegans especially do not have a good reputation for listening to people who don’t think as they do. I wanted to make this book a place where omnivores feel challenged but not uncomfortable. The way I could do that without sacrificing the strength of my argument was by putting myself in it.

To write about food means always occupying the realm of the ordinary. This is where it gets its frivolous reputation. We can be reporting on deforestation for palm oil production, the destruction of mangroves for shrimp harvests, or the atrocious working and animal welfare conditions in industrial meat-processing, but, for the reader, it will all come back to the grocery store, the kitchen, and the menu they’re faced with at a restaurant. How do we navigate this terrain—thorny terrain that includes labor rights, climate change, loss of biodiversity, corporate greed, colonialism—without overwhelming but empowering, entertaining, and encouraging that reader? 

For me, as an essayist and cultural critic who’s nonetheless a food writer—meaning, at the end of the day, that I am trying to entice my reader to consider what they eat and occasionally instructing them precisely on how to cook a dish—it requires that I implicate and insert myself into this human dilemma. After all, I have to eat too. How do I do it?

I write in the introduction that in order to trust someone on the subject of food, I need to know about their personal eating history and appetites. This isn’t because I want to measure my own appetite against theirs to ensure we line up, but because it provides significant context: What purpose does food serve in your life? I want to know, so that I can understand why you’re choosing to take it as a focus, whether in a writing career or just one essay. It’s a uniquely parasocial genre, for good reason: We’re entrusting each other not just with words, but with our bodies, our tastes, and our time at the cutting board.

I’m a vegetarian, former vegan, and once vegan bakery owner who’s worked at Starbucks, Panera Bread, and an East Village wine bar. I met my husband while he was a bartender and I was on assignment. I grew up on Long Island, spent years in Brooklyn, and now live much of my time in San Juan, Puerto Rico. My upbringing consisted of all the Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and Greek food one might imagine a kid just outside New York City would eat, plus Puerto Rican food influenced by my paternal grandmother’s heritage. In my family, we make a kransekake at Christmas not because we’re Norwegian, but because a Bay Ridge–dwelling ancestor was taken by the sight of this cookie tree when walking through Little Norway during the holiday season one year. I spent over a decade eating vegan food in New York and anywhere else in the world I found myself, chronicling and documenting the emergence of plant-based food as a cuisine. 

My eating biography, while without specific allegiances, includes a lot of experience—as eater, as server, as cook—and a commitment to what tastes good. All of this is useful knowledge for my perspective, and it’s why there is a touch of memoir threaded throughout what is ostensibly a cultural history: If I could grow up eating everything, how did I end up with all these ethical concerns and commitments around the food system? 

The answer is in the coconut-based vegan butter I used to use in lieu of palm-oil-based Earth Balance—because I was a baker before the non-dairy butter innovation that has swept our natural grocers’ refrigerated section. Learning how difficult it is to make food choices in alignment with our ethical and political concerns didn’t, for whatever reason, sway me toward giving them up, but made me dig my heels in.

And so I take the ordinary, the everyday, the ancestral, and the political with me when I write about how we eat today, how vegetarians and vegans in the U.S. have eaten for the past 50 years, and how we could eat in the future if we were to remove meat from the center of our plates. Personal narrative, mixed with cultural and culinary history, is how I do that.

My hope for this book is that, yes, it gets people more curious about both the fascinating history of plant-based cuisine in the United States and the evils of industrial animal agriculture. I actively want people to make more considered choices when they do choose to eat meat—I can’t deny or hide that fact. But I also want the book to show that the cultural history of plant-based eating includes 13-year-old girls going to see Moby in 1999. It includes our friends driving us to cafés where there are tofu wraps and servers with blue hair. It includes me, in my kitchen, unpeeling banana flowers because of the seeds planted by those teenage experiences. I want us to write our lives into the canon, whatever canon that may be, because it’s still a radical act.

This Friday’s post for paid subscribers will be a preview of the new monthly cooking supplement, The Monthly Menu, running down where I’ve been eating (and what I’ve been ordering); notes on what I’ve been cooking, with plenty of recipe links (to my own and others’), and any new ingredients I’ve tried; and always a monthly wine recommendation.

Programming Notes: Next week’s, December 4, will be my last Monday newsletter of 2023, and I’ll be sharing a reading list of all I plan to re-read to finish the year. Then I’ll be sending paid subscribers that Friday, December 8, the full list of The Desk Book Club choices for 2024 and giving my vision for how to discuss them—and welcoming input! First up in January and February will be Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen, which partner book shop Archestratus has made available for 20 percent off. And if you pitched me for The Desk Dispatch, I will be getting back to you by December 15.

My birthday lunch at Il Buco with friends.

News

The Oxonian Review asked me about my note-taking process for their series with authors and academics. They called my writing “embodied cultural criticism” and I’m running with that!

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An interview at Spanish website Hule & Mantel with Maura Sánchez Escudero about my slim book of essays in translation Desde mi escritorio.

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My small capsule jewelry collection with By Ren, whose designs are handmade to order in Philadelphia, is live through the end of 2023. There are cocktail picks with a pearl on them, which are my favorite thing ever! Perfect gift.

Reading

Art Monsters! And plenty more—next week, a reading list for putting my brain back together!

Cooking

Notes coming Friday to paid subscribers!