points out that “[m]ost tribal people survived comfortably eating meat sparingly, while thriving on the cornucopia of the land… European influence introduced Native people to commercial trade, and fire power, and buffalo began to be killed in great numbers. Only recently has meat become an important staple.” Fisher proves that Native Americans can actively participate in their culture while opting out of those practices they find morally objectionable.
Many chefs are making it their life’s work to create a more compassionate cuisine within their culture. Vegan soul food chef and author Jenné Claiborne emphasizes the surprising compatibility of the two traditions:
Soul food cooking is all about optimizing flavor and texture. What we love and crave are the spices, the sauces, and the preparation style. Soul food is about seasonings (smoked paprika, Old Bay, celery, hot sauce) and preparations (smoking, frying, grilling, baking). You don’t need meat and cheese for amazing soul food, and you don’t even need mock meat and fake cheese—you can get outstanding results by applying classic soul food seasonings and cooking methods to vegan ingredients like fruits, vegetables, grains, beans, and mushrooms.
Chef, author, and food-justice activist Bryant Terry is doing the same: focusing on classic soul food produce like yams, plantains, okra, and mustard and collard greens, and using traditional spice mixes and marinades with tofu, tempeh, and jackfruit instead of pork and other animal flesh. Kiki Vagianos is working comparable magic with traditional Greek cuisine; Chloe Coscarelli and Pietro Gallo with Italian; Jean-Christian Jury, Alexis Gauthier, and Willy Berton with French, and so on. I have a vegan friend from Brazil, Vini, who still actively participates in those aspects of his native culture that do not conflict with his ethical beliefs. He’s currently working at a vegan restaurant in Curitiba, so yes, Brazilian vegan food is very much a thing! The more you learn about the possibilities for gourmet vegan cuisine, the more you’ve got to wonder about the chefs who scorn it. What do they have to lose by trying something different?
When J.P. Guilford was evaluating a subject’s creative capability, he’d ask, “Does the examinee tend to stay in a rut, or does he branch out readily into new channels of thought?” By making your food choices outside the dominant paradigm, you’re exercising flexible thinking without even trying. It’s only by imposing so-called “restrictions” that we allow for the most ingenious workarounds.
Someone could write a whole book about vegan food research and development in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The most surprising discovery of the past few years has got to be aquafaba (from the Latin for “water” and “beans”), the liquid from a tin of chickpeas (or other beans) that can be whipped into a downright miraculous egg substitute, ideal for meringues and other desserts vegans once thought they’d never be able to eat again. Aquafaba was “invented” in 2015 by Goose Wohlt, a vegan software engineer who’s been conducting and taking detailed notes on his culinary experiments for many years now. Appreciating the efficiency of crowdsourcing, Wohlt started a Facebook group called “Aquafaba (Vegan Meringue—Hits and Misses!),” which is eighty-three thousand members strong at the time of writing. The more we share our results, the more delicious our lives will be.
Other vegan innovators are bringing their discoveries to market. There’s Miyoko Schinner’s exquisite farmhouse cashew cheeses, Violife’s “parmesan” and “gorgonzola,” and plenty more vegan cheese brands I enjoy almost as much; the Field Roast hazelnut cranberry roast en croute that makes for a very satisfying “Thanksliving”; various brands of soy or almond nog, which are light and delicious and won’t make you feel queasy for drinking raw eggs; classic ice cream flavors from Nada Moo, or fancier nut- and coconut-based ice creams from Coconut Bliss (cherry amaretto, ginger cookie caramel). Stanley Chase, founder of the Louisville Vegan Jerky Company, stumbled upon the perfect recipe when he accidentally over-baked the tofu he’d marinated in a spicy sauce from a traditional Hawaiian pork dish. Having the delightful suspicion he was onto something, Chase brought the jerky down to his neighborhood bar. “They devoured the fortuitous first batch and asked for more,” he writes on the company website. “Where could they buy it? What was it called? And the best part…none of them even knew it was vegan.” Louisville Vegan Jerky is a pricey snack—a three-ounce bag retails for upwards of six dollars—but gosh, is it ever delicious, and best of all, no pigs were harmed in the making of it.
The growing market for compassionate foods is driving the slow-but-steady evolution in American culture. The Wall Street Journal and other papers reported in 2013 that many Southern farmers who’ve grown tobacco for generations are now shifting to chickpeas to meet the insatiable demand for hummus. Queens-based Elmhurst Dairy, founded in the 1920s, moved to plant milk production exclusively in early 2017; I tried a “flight” of their new “milked nuts” at the Boston Veg Fest, and their hazelnut milk is pretty darn sublime. And along with surprisingly quick advances in “clean meat” (i.e., grown in a Petri dish using biopsied muscle cells), Big Ag is investing in plant-based substitutes because it’s what people are buying (and many of these consumers aren’t vegetarian, they’re just moving in that direction). Beyond Meat makes burgers, sausages, and chicken strips that taste disconcertingly like the real thing, and their biggest competition is another California startup calling itself—with amusing irony—“Impossible Foods.”
Impossible is a foolish word indeed, so you may as well quit using it in relation to veganism. Here’s my theory: begin to experiment in the kitchen—as methodically or meanderingly as you please—and you will notice new tendrils of possibility unfurling in your primary creative practice. A year or two after going vegan, I found myself combing Google Books for vintage British cookbooks to see what kinds of dishes people were eating in Scotland in the late eighteenth century. When I discovered Susanna MacIver’s Cookery & Pastry—first published in 1773 after years of teaching cooking classes to young housewives in her Edinburgh flat—it occurred to me that, blood pudding and potted cow’s head aside, I could veganize many of these recipes: potato fritters and almond custard, “green meagre” soup, and mock venison pasties filled with minced seitan marinated in red wine. And when I finally get back to the book that I needed this research for in the first place—the “gothic satire” I mentioned earlier—this culinary experimentation will hopefully render my Pythagorean characters all the more vivid.
Jerry Drave, How Vegans are Born, digital comic, 2018.
Of course, there’s no need to fall (however happily) down a research rabbit hole. “For a while I’ve followed the tenet that if I don’t recognize a fruit or vegetable, I buy it and Google it when I get home to find some recipes,” vegan web designer and podcaster Paul Jarvis writes in Eat Awesome. “This approach keeps things fresh and interesting in the kitchen.” Better yet, Google while you’re still at the store so you can pick up anything else you might need for that recipe. Do you want to be the kind of person who bypasses the kohlrabi because it looks weird, or would you rather charm your friends with kohlrabi schnitzel? (That is a real recipe, by the way. You’ll find it on the blog Elephantastic Vegan.) Look for liquid smoke, too, which is just the condensation from a hickory-wood fire. When I made a pot of split pea soup and added half a teaspoon, one of my meat-loving relatives went on and on about how delicious it was. It had never occurred to her that split pea soup could be just as satisfying without ham.
© Philip McCulloch-Downs,
Nurture/Nature, acrylic, 2019.
Leonardo da Vinci—a vegetarian, and surely one of
