‘No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating’
In her book No Meat Required, the author Alicia Kennedy has settled fully into her ideal of a world in which anyone with the option to do so eats in a way designed not to harm animals, the planet, or the laborers who get food to our plates. She’s not going to be shaken out of it. She’s convincing, in short, because she doesn’t need to convince you.
LILY MEYER: Alicia Kennedy’s first book, ‘No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating’… is a tour through meatless eating in the United States, starting with Frances Moore Lappé’s 1971 hit, Diet for the Small Planet, which made the case for vegetarianism as a solution to global hunger, and ending with contemporary debates over lab-grown meat and other food technologies as a major new culinary frontier. It’s also a work of climate activism. Industrial meat is a major source of the emissions causing global warming. Eating it regularly, Kennedy argues, is unsustainable. Yet for many in the United States, meat has long represented security and prosperity; in the 1920s, Republicans promised voters “a chicken for every pot.” When Kennedy quit eating animals, she immediately started searching for “new way[s] to create abundance” in the kitchen. Now, she writes, “this has become my life’s purpose: showing people life without meat is still a beautiful life, a filling life, a satisfying life”…
Building an American diet without meat, Kennedy argues, is just one part of fixing the American diet, which is in bad need of repair. But Kennedy is also convincing because she is confident. It’s apparent throughout No Meat Required that she is out to educate rather than convert or attack her readers. Like any good teacher, she has both facts and concepts she wants her audience to consider, then absorb; also like any good teacher, she understands that she will and should meet a wide array of reactions. Writing about the cookbooks Vegan With a Vengeance and How It All Vegan!, Kennedy praises their authors for not including a “manifesto to defend giving up meat, [or] mea culpa about ‘preaching’—there is just normalization and a lack of fear.” She could easily be writing about her own work. It is plain, reading No Meat Required, that Kennedy has settled fully into her ideal of a world in which anyone with the option to do so eats in a way designed not to harm animals, the planet, or the laborers who get food to our plates. She’s not going to be shaken out of it. She’s convincing, in short, because she doesn’t need to convince you…
To say that ‘no meat required’ contains no judgment wouldn’t be quite accurate. Kennedy never blames readers for their present choices, but she has harsh words for big systems: agribusiness, factory farming, the subsidies that hold beef prices down, and the Jones Act provisions that contribute to grocery stores in San Juan that are stocked with expensive imports instead of local products. And although she does not scold her readers, she does want them to see themselves as active participants in improving the way we all eat. In a recent Eater interview, she said that her goal “isn’t converting people to veganism or vegetarianism” but making them aware that addressing climate change—among many other things—“requires the end of industrial animal agriculture,” with its outsize carbon emissions. This awareness prompts another difficult recognition: Early in the book, Kennedy writes that although one person’s consumer choice may currently mean little given the power of the American meat and dairy industries, attending to our eating habits has real value. After all, she argues, if and when food corporations do get forced to emit less, our diets “will change, whether we like it or not. I believe there’s meaning in changing before it gets that bad”…
Kennedy’s opposition to that myth is key to her analysis of lab-grown meat, to which she devotes a chapter of No Meat Required. Here, she has no characters; she doesn’t interview scientists at Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods. Rather, she turns to a broader form of cultural analysis, one geared much less to home cooks and pleasure seekers than the rest of the book. Kennedy sees meat as a symbol of American masculinity; it’s canonically cowboy food, and the idea that it should be at the center of our plates is, to her, a variation on the idea that straight men must be at the head of our households. For this reason, she has little patience for products that mimic meat. Many of them rely on monoculture crops; in addition, Kennedy argues that they perpetuate the idea that there “can be no life without meat,” rather than helping consumers move toward seeing meat as either a luxury or something that they can do wholly without. SOURCE…
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