No meat required

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Terry Nguyen interviews Alicia Kennedy, author of the forthcoming book No Meat Required (Beacon Press, August 2023).

Artists love to talk about their “practice.” I’ve noticed this mostly in conversation with visual artists, who often refer to their practice in oblique terms. Elements of a practice can range from abstract observation, like people-watching, to technique, like collaging or sketching, in preparation for creating a work. A practice is, in essence, a lifestyle. But few ever do refer to their practice as an ideology, even if their art-making is implicitly dependent on a system of beliefs.

For Alicia Kennedy, food is lifestyle and ideology. And it’s strange to her that conversations about what we eat, something that people have to consider every day, often overlook the systemic aspects of food. These conversations also fail to account for the manifold factors that implicitly affect consumer choices: the ethical, spiritual, environmental, economic, and political. In No Meat Required, a book for omnivores and non-meat eaters alike, Kennedy wants to change how readers think about meat. Whether they stop eating it after reading is beside the point.

Like most people in the world, Kennedy was raised an omnivore, “trained to be open to all the food the world had to offer.” One day in her twenties, Kennedy’s perspective changed. She became a strict vegan, eliminating every kind of animal product from her diet, including eggs and dairy. A few years later, she found herself eating oysters to cope with the grief from losing her brother. These days, Kennedy is a vegetarian. Labels aside, her honesty about these lifestyle shifts, combined with her decade-plus of experience in the culinary field, make her a compelling and compassionate food writer. I always read Kennedy when I’m in need of a reminder that “diversity of thought and diet are complementary.”

Kennedy and I spoke in February about her book, which will be out in August 2023. Our conversation has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity. Preorder it here.

Terry Nguyen: One of my favorite chapters is on the punk roots of veganism. You’ve talked and written expansively against the notion that vegetarianism and veganism is “mainstream.” For example, most people still eat within the corporate food system and consumption of beef has only increased. How did you encounter the overlap between zine and vegan cultures?

Alicia Kennedy: The overlap is really hard to miss. The zine Soy, Not Oi! Is so culturally important to veganism. People also assume that not eating meat is a frivolous choice, but veganism and vegetarianism has its texts, tenants, people, and history. There is so much writing about alternative cookbooks, and it’s understood that the counterculture was associated with vegetarianism. The same goes for the punks and anarchists. These movements weren't all vegan, but there's a very strong vegan strain of thought there. Like, Please Don't Feed the Bears and Raggedy Annarchy's Guide to Vegan Baking. A lot of these books are influenced by Soy, not Oi! This aesthetic or approach went mainstream as of the 2000s.

I’ve written about going to the Barnard zine library and encountering so much vegan stuff. I guess if you’re a person who thinks deeply about consumption and your role in a capitalist society, it’s likely you probably dabble in veganism and make a zine about it. There’s this culture of zinemaking that's sort of in the ether.

TN: I’ve written plenty about writers having to exist as a highly visible literary brand, and I found this point you’ve made so revealing: “Could people believe my food tastes good, that they should cook my recipes and read my essays, if it didn’t look good?” This seems doubly true for food writers and developers, in which readers base their first impression off the appearance of your food. It sounds ridiculous and highly dystopic. How do you manage it?

AK: There’s a parasocial element to it that is so intense. People are going to eat and physically make things that you have made. If you write a recipe that’s not intuitive or to a person’s taste, there is a betrayal of confidence they have in you. I do think recipe and food writers have been able to capitalize on people not having a real sense of self or developed taste in the kitchen. Social media takes away a lot of the work that goes into navigating your own tastes and preferences. It magnifies your relationship to that person.

I’ve written about how “bad food” photos are in and how the aesthetic goal posts constantly shift. I take all the photos with an actual camera and place it in the same exact place in my house. I decided that I’m not going to make myself fashionable to fit into any shifting aesthetic.

TN: You wrote that veganism “no longer [felt] reasonable to you” in your knowledge of agriculture. What led to that?

AK: I began to see how important animals were to my vegetables, my plant-based diet. I think I was working on a piece about bananas and visited a farm, and the farmers were telling me all about the manure they use to grow things. I saw how it all works and comes together in a farming ecosystem. They’ve developed knowledge systems to prevent spreads of disease and help with biodiversity of plant ecology. Having animals does help with plant diversity in specific regions. A part of it was also trusting the knowledge that people have had. Part of wanting the end of industrial animal agriculture, I think, is also realizing that these traditional practices and technological improvements made upon them have a real place in societies big and small. There’s a reason they exist.

I want to be clear that I stand by veganism as a response to corporate food and industrial agriculture. But a lot of being vegan comes with the sense that you're supposed to be evangelizing for it. I just can't evangelize anymore. I think being vegan is a fine personal decision. There should be vegan food everywhere. It’s great to cook with plants and mostly plants—not to sound like Michael Pollan. But our relationships with animals go far back and there’s significance there. To advocate otherwise would be culturally imperialist of me. Before the personal tragedy that changed my vegan diet, I was thinking, like, why the fuck am I not eating an egg? Why would I just not eat this cheese that’s made locally upstate? I had already been moving towards that mindset.

TN: What are some staple recipes that you find yourself returning to?

AK: I make Eric Kim's gochujang glaze every week and have it memorized. I make the glaze on its own, though sometimes I put it on eggplant. Often I cook baked tofu in it. It's the recipe that made me care about cooking again after months of pandemic-induced tedium in the kitchen.

TN: In your book’s conclusion, you mention how you’ve been distracted from the food that grows from the ground— real, nutritious food—by products that promise innovation. I love how you expand upon Carol J. Adams’ quote about how “the earth itself [has become] the new absent referent.” How do you work to re-center the earth?

I really try to make the “eat whole foods,” plant-based ideology make sense for people in a way that isn’t overwhelming. I've gotten more real life experience since moving to Puerto Rico. When I lived in Brooklyn, I was very silly about what I thought was possible for the average person. Then I moved to San Juan, and I had to go to so many stores to get what I thought was basic stuff. And I’m very specific with what I buy.

I have to maneuver so much more here. It's cliché to say this, but I do always think about someone who has kids and lives in the middle of America going to a big box supermarket, like Costco. What can that person do to make their life easier and better? How can I set it up so the recipe centers food that is more related to where they live. When I’m writing recipes, that’s when I’m engaging with food as food. Right now, I feel very far away from that because I haven’t done it in awhile.

It’s funny to me that every time I talk about going to Costco people are in my comments thanking me for admitting it. But I’m trying to normalize common things like that. You don’t have to buy a product to eat in a way that’s plant-based or plant forward. You don’t have to buy Impossible Sausage or tofu.

I’ve noticed people who cook with meat have started talking about which farm or butcher shop they’ve sourced it from. For a while, that wasn’t cool. It’s important to remind people that meat comes from a place. And embodied with the absent referent is this notion of place: Where is this food coming from and whose hands have touched it? One thing that’s transformative for people when they think about factory farming and meat companies like Tyson is how there are so many workers involved in the supply chain who have been mistreated. It’s understood to be a bourgeois affection to care about these things, but once you get into that cycle of thinking about where food comes from, that these packaged goods have an origin, it changes that relationship. That can just be a consciousness shift. It doesn't have to be a big change to your lifestyle.

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