The book also details me being a vegetarian, not a vegan, for environmental reasons, as well as my own desire to be a more accommodating person wherever I am in the world. What surprised me writing the book is that I lived in Puerto Rico for the most part when I worked on the proposal, so the book ended up being filled with tropical ingredients that I never had the chance to cook. with when I was in New York. I mean, I could have found passion fruit or banana flowers, but these were things I just got as a gift here. If I had written it while living in Brooklyn it probably would have been worded very differently, but writing it from here allowed me to substantiate it more realistically from the point of view of someone who lives in a place that is on the front lines of climate change. It’s a place where agroecology as a means of food sovereignty is a very real and active idea and community, and you can experience it. For me, that experience came from being able to find a farmer who would just give me their banana flowers, or having friends who have passion fruit trees or lemon trees and can bring me their bounty. I think the anchoring of the book in the true potential of a community, and how communities can grow and feed each other, is something I hadn’t really counted on.
Are there any books that you feel have created the necessary space for your book to exist?
I don’t think my book could exist without it Hippie food by Jonathan Kauffman or Hunger for change by Warren Belasco, published in the early 1990s, is about counterculture cuisine. Aside from academic work, though, it’s very hard to find people who capture the specific influence of ecofeminism on actual food, or question the legacy of soy or whatever, and how those things live on today in the vegan and vegetarian world. kitchen. That writing has very direct antecedents in terms of counterculture cuisine, because people are so obsessed with the communes and the hippies and the food that came out of the Vietnam War protests. That’s super interesting, but I wanted to bring that in now and say: Okay, what has happened since then and has had a certain influence on the way plant foods have taken shape? The cookbooks of the last 50 years were the real founder, because I wanted this to be a food book, not a history book. Obviously there are no recipes in it, but I wanted people to get a deep sense of what vegan and vegetarian food has been like, in order to give more life and more material logic to the cultural and political ideology that surrounds it. I think when people hear about vegan, vegetarian, or plant-based eating, it’s all ideological, and for me, I want it to be very real and tangible as well.
Is there an aspect of this book that you really want to talk about, or that you haven’t talked about as much as you’d like?
I think in the future I’d like to talk less specifically about plant foods and more about building regional, resilient food systems and what that really looks like. I definitely feel like I got this out of my system; It’s a short book, but I feel like I really said what I had to say about what this kind of food can do, and what it is. has finished.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
