A Bright Clean Mind. Camille DeAngelis
It isn’t a simple matter of “personal choice” even when fresh produce is available, as Starr Carrington writes in “Food Justice and Race in the US,”. “Before imposing shame upon the consumer, one needs to truly analyze the difference between accessibility and affordability.” (187) Check out Madrabbits.org for solid advice on eating well in a “food swamp” and/or on a fixed income.
Sticking point #6: “Too many of my ideas don’t seem worth executing. Maybe I have nothing new to offer.”
For two decades now, a group of ten Viennese musicians have visited the local produce market in search of new instruments. One chooses a pumpkin to serve for her drum, another a large head of celery for a guitar, another a calabash for a horn. Back at the workshop, a flutist drills a hole through the core of a carrot of improbable size, which begins to resemble a woodwind instrument the more he labors on it. The members of the orchestra spend hours fashioning these vegetables into leek violins and cucumber-o-phones, and then they go on stage to perform original compositions inspired by Kraftwerk, John Cage, and Frank Zappa. After the concert, the audience is invited to partake of a stew made from every last scrap of produce that wasn’t used in the performance.
When I hear someone lamenting their inability to come up with ideas that please them, it seems to me the artist in question needs to approach their work from a radically different angle. The underlying trouble isn’t a lack of fresh or viable ideas (or talent), it’s a deficiency of curiosity resulting from fatigue and/or discouragement, which can usually be remedied with a good night’s sleep, a wholesome breakfast, and a block of time set aside for deliberate, yet spontaneous, exploration. You don’t have to leave your house, or your kitchen. Food is the obvious place to begin reviving yourself. You are literally refilling your well, yes, but when you go out of your way to try something new, or when you prepare familiar foods in unfamiliar ways, you are forming new pathways in your brain that will eventually lead you out of your rut. After declaring that there is no such thing as originality, the adman John Hegarty writes in his book Hegarty on Creativity: There Are No Rules, “The value of an idea is in how it draws its inspiration from the world around us and then reinterprets it in a way we haven’t seen before.”
I’m not an entrepreneur, but I find vegan food research and development incredibly inspiring. Tell these geniuses it can’t be done—marinated soy protein you could mistake for real pork, or a cultured “cheese” that’s as rich and tangy as a dairy product—and they will make it happen, even if it takes years and years of trial and error. And if it hasn’t been done yet, I promise you they’re working on it.
What do innovative thinkers from Leonardo da Vinci to the Vegetable Orchestra have in common? A healthy disrespect for tradition. A tradition is self-justifying—we should do it this way because we always have—and while culture and tradition give us a vital sense of continuity and belonging, they also discourage innovative thinking. Over time any given culture must evolve into a wiser version of itself, and it’s up to individual members to make that evolution happen. “I assure you, even though I avoid hides and furs and choose a vegan diet, my Indianness is critical to who I am,” writes Linda Fisher, an artist with both Ojibway and Cherokee ancestry. Fisher 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