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If you’ve ever been tempted to dismiss plant-based eating as a SoCal/woo-woo fad fit only for the Goops among us, you desperately need a copy of Alicia Kennedy’s new book, No Meat Required, which places vegetarian and vegan diets within their centuries-old cultural contexts while reframing their potential benefits in an increasingly consumer-driven and resource-scarce world. Vogue recently spoke to Kennedy about the two kinds of responses her work most frequently gets, the books that helped her envision her own, and the joy of cooking with easily accessible tropical fruits in Puerto Rico.
Vogue: How does it feel to finally have your book out in the world?
Alicia Kennedy: It’s interesting. It feels like a relief. It’s been a very long time coming. It’s been three years since I sold it, which is pretty normal, but in the process of writing it, I realized how long I’d really been working on the research for it; I think I’ve done about a decade of work on it. So yeah, it’s great to actually have it out.
What’s the most common thing you hear from people, preconception-wise, about plant-based eating and cooking?
People generally think that it’s difficult. If people are going to be nice, they say, “Oh, it must be so hard. It’s so hard to make vegetables or tofu or beans interesting. All these things are so much harder to cook than meat.” That’s the nice argument that I get, and then the more nasty one, of course, is that it’s an elitist way of eating. It’s for rich people, it’s for white people, it’s not realistic, that kind of thing. It goes to this extreme of, “It’s a terrible idea” or “It’s really difficult to cook that way,” and both of those things are very big misconceptions.
Did writing this book change anything about the way you cook or think about food?
The book really chronicles my cooking and food evolution over 10 years. When I first stopped eating meat, in 2011—I realize that this might be an odd way of doing it, but I started to really get into the cookbooks and the history and try to understand where this style of eating came from and who came before me in doing it. I made my way into veganism through having a bakery—a small commercial kitchen—and so I was digging into everything I could get my hands on that would bring me up to speed on the history of the culture and politics and the recipes and all of that.
The book also chronicles being a vegetarian and not a vegan, for ecological reasons and also because of my own desire to be a more accommodating person no matter where I am in the world. The thing that surprised me in writing the book is that I had been living in Puerto Rico when I was working on the proposal, for the most part, so the book ended up being bookended by tropical ingredients that I would never have been able to cook with when I was in New York. I mean, I could have found passionfruit or banana flowers, but these were things that were just gifted to me here. If I had been writing it while living in Brooklyn, it would have probably been framed a lot differently, but because I was writing it from here, I was able to ground it more realistically from the standpoint of someone who is living in a place that’s on the frontlines 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 get to experience it. For me, that experience has come through being able to find a farmer who will just give me their banana flowers or having friends who have passionfruit trees or lemon trees and can bring me their bounty. I think the grounded-ness of the book in the real potential of community, and how communities can grow and feed each other, is something I didn’t really anticipate.
Are there any books that you feel made the necessary space for your book to exist?
I don’t think my book could exist without Hippie Food by Jonathan Kauffman or Appetite for Change by Warren Belasco, which was published in the early ’90s and is about counterculture cuisine. Other than academic work, though, it’s really difficult to find people chronicling the specific influence of ecofeminism on actual food or interrogating the legacy of soy or what have you, and how those things live on today in vegan and vegetarian cooking. 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 Vietnam War–era protests. That’s super interesting, but I wanted to bring that into now and be like, Okay, so what’s happened since then that has influenced the ways in which plant-based food has taken shape? The cookbooks of the last 50 years were the real grounding force because I wanted this to be a food book but not a history book. Obviously, there are no recipes in it, but I wanted people to come away with 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 around it. I think when people hear about vegan or vegetarian or plant-based food, it’s all ideological, and for me, I also want it to be very real and tangible.
Is there any aspect of this book you’re really dying to talk about or that you haven’t talked about as much as you’d like to?
Going forward, I would like to talk less about plant-based food specifically and more about building regional, resilient food systems and what that really looks like. I definitely feel like I’ve gotten 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 has done.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
