Meat not required
An interview with Alicia Kennedy about her book "No Meat Required"
I am going to say this upfront: I am an omnivore and I eat meat. There. That’s the admission. There’s no going back.
I understand what this means for both my and the Earth’s health. At the same time, I am worried about climate change. I am scared of the future. I think about it every day. Yet, there are only a few ways I can make a difference directly — outside of calling government officials and hoping they listen to my pleas to stop giving the world over to the rich oil barons that fuel their election campaigns and lavish lifestyles. But one of those ways is eat consciously, which means giving up meat.
All of this brings me to Alicia Kennedy’s masterful book No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating. Kennedy doesn’t so much preach. Instead, she uses the platform to explore the history of modern plant-based eating and how it should and could fit into our lives, while looking at the history and historical and economic contexts of what and how we eat. It’s a plea, yes, that we all think about how our eating habits impact more than just our stomachs, but it also focuses the culinary advances and importance of plant-based diets in our culture. Here is something everyone should take away from a book like Kennedy’s (or any cookbook): well prepared and cooked vegetables can and should star on your plate and then they will feature more heavily in your diet.
Kennedy’s arguments fascinated me because giving up meat has long been something I’ve thought about. It started when I first heard Propagandhi in high school. The Canadian punk/thrash/where I discovered John K. Sampson band specialized in songs about the horrors of our insatiable appetite to eat flesh and the capitalistic nature of this hunger.
Despite all of this, I still do it and I can’t explain why.
But what Kennedy successfully does is makes me think about what I purchase at the grocery store and why. She opens the lid on not only eating meat and the ethical dilemmas, but also all of the issues we face when we go shopping for the food we’ve come to crave and desire.
The highest compliment I can pay Kennedy and No Meat Required is that as soon as I got home I pulled down my cookbook and started looking for meatless meals for my family. And then something magical happened a week or so later: my wife returned home from scouring yard sales with a copy of Bryant Terry’s Vegetable Kingdom.
Alicia Kennedy is the author of the newsletter From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy. “No Meat Required” is out on paperback today. This interview has been condensed for clarity and length.
You write about starting to write this book during COVID, and I am wondering what kicked off the desire to start this project?
I had been writing about cooking, baking, researching vegan food, vegetarian food for a while. I started the proposal in probably 2018 for what was then called Meatless. It wasn't selling. I started it and I didn't finish it until 2019, when I was here in Puerto Rico. I had to rejigger it to sell it. But what I wanted to write is what I ultimately wrote, which was kind of a straightforward: here's an introduction to a bunch of subcultures and political approaches, and these are the reasons. There’s an introduction to all the reasons why in the United States post Diet For A Small Planet, post this kind of secular reasoning for giving up or decreasing meat consumption and here's how people have done it and why they've done it and what they've eaten in that time. That's what I wanted to write. That's ultimately not what's sold.
What sold was a proposal for a book that was like,: Veganism was once radical and now it's being co-opted by the corporations that are trying to make plant-based meats. Ultimately, I sold that book in June 2020, but I wrote the book I wanted to write because writing it during the pandemic gave some credence to what I wanted to write all along, which people kind of didn't understand, and it was that consumption is going to necessarily change. The way we consume food, the way we deal with livestock, the way we deal with land, it's either going to have to change or climate change will ultimately have these bad effects. I think a lot of people didn't understand the kind of immediacy of that until the pandemic happened and people didn't understand this need for large scale change or what it would even look like for there to be this kind of collective shift toward doing things in a way that kind of mitigates harm on a larger scale. I think that the pandemic sort of allowed people to understand that a little bit more and kind of set the stage for me being able to write a book that didn't kind of center what I have always thought of as nonsense, which was the Impossible Burgers and Beyond Burgers.
There were a lot of books that came out between 2016 and 2021 that did take those things seriously and I never took those things seriously because I've always had this kind of longer historical cookbook centered approach to looking at how vegetarian and vegan food. I knew that those products weren't going to ultimately work. Now, I wish that they had kind of fallen out of real favor while I was writing. It happened after I finished the book: they started to lose a lot of money. They started to lay off a lot of workers. They're less visible, less dominant in the conversation around plant-based foods now, but I think I was always leaned towards: these aren't going to be the thing. These are kind of a distraction.
But, I mean, a good time to write a book is when the book sells. I have no illusions about that it's nonfiction and it's a marketplace. It's when people are ready to hear it and to buy it that it works.
When I go to the grocery store I think about everything I'm buying, “What am I doing? Who am I harming?” And the thing that I took away from this book was it felt like a plea for the environment, but it also felt like a plea for just being awake to what you're buying. So I was wondering, as you were writing it, were you really hoping to convince me to not eat meat? Or are you arguing that I be an ethical consumer of food in general?
I think I don't aim to convert anyone to anything. I aim to change how people think.
I think there's a lot of messaging that doesn't ask people to think about where their food comes from. There's a lot of messaging around food that tries to kind of obfuscate the harm that is done necessarily in a capitalist, globalized food system.
I've always found vegetarian and vegan food fascinating. I've always found it fascinating to make this choice that makes you different from other people because it's a real choice that you make to oftentimes alienate yourself from the way that everyone around you is eating. So it's interesting to me in that it's a very small percentage of people who are able to, for myriad reasons, make this non-normative choice that takes them away from how their friends and family and community are eating. That’s one thing I wanted to document and give a spotlight to because to me that's fascinating. I think that a lot of the times omnivores especially don't really understand all the reasons or all the difficulties or all the things that go into making this decision. I don't think that omnivores really give it a thought. Food writers will prove this over and over will be like, “Oh, well, you could just give a vegan anything as long as it's vegan and they'll eat it and they'll be happy, and that's fine.” So I definitely wanted to do a book that made the food important, even if it has no meat.
Then, also, I did want to kind of say that vegans, vegetarians and conscientious omnivores all have a lot more in common than what tends to be the conversation.It tends to be like vegans hate vegetarians because we eat dairy and eggs and omnivores don't understand vegans. Vegetarians tend to get kind of caught in the middle of it all. So I wanted to just make the case that we all have a lot more in common and we all are kind of butting up against the same corporate food system that is destroying the planet and doesn't care about the wellbeing of animals or workers. I'm trying to make a strong case for decentering the omnivorous perspective, or a case for making it a little bit more comprehensible as to why anyone would give up meat. Because I do think that people sometimes misunderstand that.
Essentially, everyone wants to eat good food that's good for them, that's good for the environment, that the workers haven't been suffering repetitive motion industry injury for, that isn't putting toxic wastewater chemicals into the rivers and land. We all want to eat that way. And we all have a common interest in breaking up this kind of corporate oligopoly that controls the food system. So I wanted to be like, here's the way that all these people have done this.
In terms of the future, I wanted to rejigger the way people talk about the future of food, which is really tech oriented and really lab meat oriented, to make it be like, no, the future of food can just be all of us eating good stuff. We don't have to accept this kind of idea that we just have to give into another set of corporate ag-overlords to continue eating. We can change the way we do things. Obviously that's very utopian, but I also just wanted to make the case that I have as much in common as a vegetarian with a vegan who is focused on whole foods as with someone who is getting a chicken from their local butcher and using every piece of it to feed themselves.
One of my favorite parts of the book is how you go through the cookbooks of the past of vegetarian and vegan cookbook, because one of the things I think that gets lost in the history of it is how many techniques and things they've created out of this way of eating. It also came up in the research I did once about hardcore kids who became chefs in Boston and many of them were vegan or vegetarian. I am wondering where you pulled that information and how you decided to use it?
The book is a compendium of the research I'd done for 10 years. I had noticed like, oh, there's this intersection between people who are vegan and music in all kinds of music. Obviously hardcore, there's a big, big thing, but there's this overlap between this and noticing all of those things over the course of, I guess 20 years.
I started to be really interested in veganism when I was 13, 14, so the late nineties. And so I have been paying attention for the last however many years. I had always been aware of that overlap and then once I was reading cookbooks in a real way over the last 10 years, you start to notice it even more. Obviously there's Brooks Headley from Superiority Burger, who's the number one kind of icon of this overlap.
And then you notice it reading Isa Chandra Moskowitz's cookbooks where she's like, I learned I had to feed all these people sleeping in my living, my mom's living room, so I learned how to cook. And there really is this big overlap between an understanding of what hospitality is by having to feed people with a different way of eating than you and cooking for a large group and the fact that you learn techniques of cooking when you have to cook vegetables. I think it’s kind of lost on people a lot of the time. Maybe they don't love vegetables enough because they haven't been taught or haven't been forced to learn how to cook them in a way that develops their flavors in a bigger way. I think that's why there is such a big overlap between people who've had to cook vegan for large groups of people and people who are really good at cooking, whether it's in the cookbook sphere or in restaurants, because they've just had to learn how to make something taste good, vegetables taste good. That's something that really does take a lot of skill and it's not something that's necessarily prioritized.
How do you get a book like this out to people in the world and get them to start to read it and experience it?
Well, I don't know how to get other people to read it. I do think that people have this very visceral response to the idea of No Meat Required: plant-based eating. They're like, that's not for me. Fuck that. But a lot of people don't feel that way. Also I am not good at publicity and marketing and that sort of thing, so, for me, just doing the work has been a good way to get the work to people. I think a lot of folks bought the book because they read my newsletter and they know that I'm not going to be this preachy person at them. They know that I take it very seriously from a cultural perspective and from a culinary perspective and so that made it easier.
I think the cover being very vegetable centric helps people be like, oh, okay, this isn't going to be about how people are making lab meat and that's the future of the future, whatever it is, a book that centered around vegetables. One of the best things was when I interviewed the cover designer for my newsletter and she hadn't seen any of the materials I sent over as inspiration, which I sent this a painting by a painter whose name escapes me at the moment. Then, when I saw the cover, I was immediately like, oh, this is the cover. This is gorgeous. This is exactly what I wanted. And she had not looked at any of the things [I sent]. She had just read the book and made the cover. I was dying of anxiety for weeks and months before the book came out, but when I heard that from her, I was like, “Oh, okay, the book makes sense.” The fact that she created that cover out of reading it made me feel okay.
Yeah, but do I care about making omnivore like A Clockwork Orange: Read my fucking book? No, I don't. If you want to read it, I think it'll do something.
I had a small advance. The advance is already paid out. I have more impetus now to get people to read it than I did before that, because now I actually get royalties on it, but, at the same time, if people aren't interested in the idea then the book isn't going to be for them anyway. If you're not a slightly interested in what it would mean to stop eating meat or to decrease your meat consumption, then the book isn't for you and it wouldn't convince you of anything. And that's fine.
I just wanted it to be kind of this starting point, I guess, because it's not a starting point because there's a lot of writing about the counterculture food movement, but I feel like it never got into enough of the meatless food. So I want this book to just be like, Warren Belasco’s Appetite for Change, like Jonathan Kauffman's Hippie Food, like Francis Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet, something that simply documents a time and the characters and the books and the thought processes and gives other people a jumping off point from to think more about these things.
I think I had to sell this book and write this book so that even better books can be written about vegetarian and vegan stuff. Now that this exists I want people to be like, Hey, there, there's real thinking behind this, there's real culinary significance to this way of doing things. And I wanted to write a book that establishes that.
In the writing how did you decide to start breaking this down into these sections? How were you able to tie everything together and figure that out the way this book needed to be broken up?
It was really just by the gut.
I'm writing a new book now and I had all these ideas for a table of contents — you have to write a table of contents for the proposal — but while you're writing, it makes more sense to move things around. Chronologically speaking, I wanted to get the meat chapter out of the way in the beginning. Obviously, it's important because a lot of people are going to come into it eating meat and so my big argument, I guess, is about reframing what meat means, whether it's this really natural, intrinsic desire to eat meat every day, or if that's been economically and culturally established as a good thing. That's really what I wanted to establish for people in that chapter.
My whole thing was to start from 1971. Obviously, there's times where you have to go before then, but I wanted to start from the 1971 secular moment of Diet for a Small Planet, The Farm, et cetera. And then, because before that there's vegans and vegetarians, and some of it is ideologically connected, politically, ideologically connected, but most of it is religious, and that's not really part of my project here.
Starting there and then going with what made sense in terms of like, “Okay, we talked about Diet for a Small Planet, we talked about the civil rights relevance of this, now we're talking about what does meat even mean? Why were people so attached to it?” It was kind of chronological in my head, but not actively chronological because it kind of circles in on each other the whole time, I think, which is just how I write. I really am an essayist, 100 percent, so it's really hard for me to just write straightforwardly without dipping in and out of times and places and et cetera, et cetera. It's what felt right. I needed to talk about the feminist before I talked about the punks. I needed to talk about the hippies before I talked about the feminist. I needed to talk about the wellness aspect of it. I needed to talk about the racial capitalist aspect of it. I needed to talk about non-dairy dairy, which I had already written this huge feature for Eater, so I just kind of built that out more in the book and then kind of trying to tie it up.
But it was what I felt made sense. And when I sent the book into my editor, she didn't ask me to rejigger it at all, so I didn't.
I want to talk about the non-dairy dairy section actually, because it's the something I had hard time working my way through as somebody looking for the answers you search out. because almond milk is fine, but almond trees are really bad for the environment.
It's a mess. It's a mess.
Even soybean production in the United States is a really confusing mess. And why we do it and how we do it is, and then I go into oat and I'm like, oat, it's the same way. And then I go back to dairy because it’s what I know and something I spent a long time writing about for Vice when I worked on a feature about dairy farming in Vermont, but that’s also a disaster. But something I really enjoyed was how you looked the consumerism, the capitalistic aspect of looking at why we buy these things and how we're buying it and who owns it. So how were you able to wrap your head around that larger question of all of these things coming into one place?
I mean, for me, it was, again, I'm coming to it as someone who's interested in both why people are attached to certain foods, and also how we've used culinary ingenuity to get around that desire. You could write a whole book about plant-based milks and that whole thing. But for me, it was really about cheese. It is this one thing that the vegan world has never been able to deal with. It's getting better— the aging and everything like that — and it's becoming a cool thing. But most of it is cashew based or coconut based. It's terrible for the environment. It's terrible for human rights when we're talking about cashews. So I think it's kind of an interesting question because of the fact that people have made this transition to plant-based milks, which has been really weird, and really against the tide of every other decision people make around food or when presented with the option, but cheese is the most difficult thing to change for folks.
I can't get away from the fact that I find it really, really interesting as a nerd about these things, when did people start using cashews to replace dairy? When did people learn that cashews were the thing to use? How did people learn about techniques for aging nut-based milk the same way? So it's kind of like a twofold thing of why are people able to make this transition when it comes to milk, but nothing else, and why is it so difficult to overcome? Why is it so difficult to make cheese when you don't have cow milk or goat milk or whoever's milk? I'm also really, really nerdy about the history of soy in culinary use.
You don’t day? Large sections about soy in this book. I was like, wow, I didn't know all about this.
It's so interesting to me. And I really had to hold myself back.
What is most interesting to me is the way, and I'm trying to work more of it into my new book without it being weird, soy is historically a food of deprivation. It was just a way of trying to make sense and sort of demystify what a vegan cheese is necessarily. It's not always disgusting. There are more interesting ways of doing it. And also to put non-dairy cheese in conversation with the normalization of plant-based milk.
Is there anything else I should know about this book and it coming out in soft cover that you want to include here that isn't already out there in the Alicia Kennedy newsletter world?
I think that whatever's interesting to other people is what's interesting to me. People mostly really enjoyed the punk chapter, which was interesting to me. I think it's because I have the most fun writing it.
That's the most personal feeling chapter. It has the most of you moving around in the world more than in your kitchen. You're out in the world. And I think that might be why.
People like it. I mean, I wanted the whole book to be that way, but because of the pandemic…I was like, I'm going to go to Tennessee. I'm going to go blah, blah, blah. I'm going to go put myself in different places that are in the book. But I had to just do it based on the past, unfortunately. But I'm glad that chapter is a hit with folks.
To close, here is one more Propagandhi song. An older one. One you probably know. It’s, of course, different because this is Propagandhi after all.