From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy Podcast

I didn’t expect to spend this installment asking James Hansen, of Eater London and the In Digestion newsletter, to be a representative of his nation, but as a recovered Anglophile—who, in high school, had a Union Jack cover on her first Nokia cell phone—I got a bit in the weeds asking for the scoop on why UK food writing, as perceived from the other side of the Atlantic, is so stratified and filled with social media beefs. There are the newspaper critics, who, as he explains, have a combined 125 years of tenure at their jobs between them, and there are the new wave, like James himself, Jonathan Nunn, Anna Sulan Masing, and Ruby Tandoh, who have sought to broaden the landscape of what is considered food writing and worthy of coverage in their country. How does it all play out in reality?The only thing I can hope is that this sort of thing is interesting to anyone but me. Please read on, or listen, and excuse the moment where I leap in to find out just how he got into this food thing at all.

Alicia: Thanks so much for coming on, James. How is it over there today?

James: Thanks for having me. It's okay. The UK government's response to all this has certainly been suboptimal, but I think that people are increasingly acknowledging that this is going to be with us for quite some time and reacting accordingly. Despite the many concocted horror stories about parks being flooded with people not socially distancing and such. Yeah. How is it in Puerto Rico? 

Alicia: Well, we have some tourists who are here not wearing face coverings. It's pretty cheap to get here right now and pretty cheap to stay, so people are taking that opportunity to visit for some reason, even though there's nowhere to go and nothing to do—just stand in the street. I guess sometimes it's fun to have a different setting for your isolation, but it would be nice if they wore their masks.

People are—I've been trying to figure out a way to say this and get an answer from a scientist—but the information that has been shared that it's okay to ride your bike or to run without a mask basically makes it so that no one wears one, because everyone acts as though they're out exercising and they're not, necessarily, and also if everyone is out exercising and not wearing a mask then it kind of defeats the whole purpose of trying to keep this under control.

But we've been in very, like, severe lockdown with a curfew for over two months now, without a lot of good information or tracing, which is the issue in the entirety of the United States, so… it's been a journey, as it has been for everyone. And luckily, you know, on the good side of it, I’m not sick; no one I know is sick. So for now, I'm, you know, one of the lucky ones in the situation. Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

James: Yeah. So I grew up in a small town in the UK called Cheltenham, which I'm certain no one listening to this podcast will have heard of before. It's famous for two main things, which are a horse-racing festival, which has been this year—not the Cheltenham one, but it was one of the main reasons that the UK has possibly suffered such a bad Coronavirus crisis, is that they didn't cancel a leading horse racing festival which had many tens of thousands of people attending just as things were starting to become clearly bad. Another thing is famous for is that it's a spa town, so in the sort of Edwardian Georgian 1800 times, people who were wealthy enough to do so would come to take the waters in the belief that it would cure them of all ailments and also make them virtuous and excellent, which is probably a very strange precursor to the wellness industry.

Neither of my parents are particularly invested in cooking. They both obviously cooked meals for me and my sister and I think did a very good job of that. But I wouldn't credit my like, interest in food to them, so to speak. I was always given the task of doing the “magic stir” at dinner, which was a single stir that would make whatever was being cooked perfect.

Alicia: How did you end up getting into food then?

James: I mean, I read a lot of cookbooks when I was quite young. And I think the first one I got given was a book by Nigel Slater who was a UK food writer who I admire a lot called Real Food, which was divided into chapters based on individual foodstuffs. So I think the main ones were garlic, cheese, chocolate, potatoes, sausages, and I think chicken—all of which are quite appealing categories to someone who's 10 and is interested in cooking. And then I think it mostly started when I finished university and I moved to London and was working in theater and needed to get a job to pay the bills because I was doing an unpaid thing assessing scripts for a new writing theatre. And that got me interested in coffee and coffee culture, and I think the food thing kind of spiraled from there.Alicia: And you mentioned Nigel Slater—he's one of the British food writers who have kind of crossed over into the American consciousness somewhat. But for the most part, there's not a lot of dialogue back and forth between the UK and the U.S. on matters of food, it seems that that's changing now with some folks such as yourself who are involved with Eater London, who are a bit more engaged with folks in the U.S. on social media and such. Why do you think that is? Why do you think that food writing that originates in the United Kingdom is so different from the food writing that comes out of the States?

James: That's a really good question. And one that I try to reconcile on a regular basis. I think that one of the key reasons is that Eater, despite being in the U.S. since 2005, only launched in London in 2017. I think that's a pretty good kind of precursor to understanding why the food media in the two countries is so different. In the UK, aside from publications, which are very much focused on London rather than being focused on—nominally, at least—an entire country, so in America places like Eater, Saveur, Gourmet when it was still around, publications that may have seen themselves in that vein, are focused entirely on London. And obviously Eater London is the same. 

Food writing has mostly been the preserve of national newspapers, and food writing in national newspapers is largely confined to two strands, both of which fall under lifestyle and those are restaurant criticism and recipe writing. So I think that's the key difference, is that I think if you asked someone in the street in the UK what they thought food writing was they probably default to it being either reviewing restaurants or cookbooks, both of which are interesting mediums in their own right, but certainly aren't representative of all the things that food writing can be. And that is very keenly demonstrated in the range of material you can find in the U.S. and that's not so true in the UK. It’s starting to be true, certainly opening out, which I think is very welcome. And I'm glad that Eater seems to be in some small way a part of that. But I mean, the five leading restaurant critics in the UK have a combined tenure of about 125 years.

The arena in which you're working—as in my personal case, I want to speak for myself as a newish food writer, but also for Eater London as a newish publication—is very entrenched in a certain way of thinking about restaurant writing and food writing and what those things are for and the forms they should take and who they should serve. And I think there's not the plurality of form that there at least appears to be in the U.S. I hope that changes in the next five to 10 years because it would be very disappointing, boring if it didn't.

Alicia: So how has Eater London and and the people in this kind of newer wave of food writing, what steps have you all taken to create that sort of plurality, and what has the reaction been to that?

James: The reaction has mostly been this perception that, I think because Eater London is a new site, and because I think barring the very early days, when we had a couple of current restaurant critics write guest pieces for the site, everyone who has written for us is not tied to a newspaper, which is like I said, the provenance of the food writing in the UK. So the reaction has been that it's a sort of, you know, new wave of generational upstarts coming in to steal away everything that we hold dear. And that's untrue for a number of reasons. And the main one is that there are people in the UK who have been doing that similar kind of writing and were doing that similar kind of writing long before Eater London existed and long before I was even out of school, let alone doing food writing.

But those publications either closed or changed their angle or the people doing it were never able to break into the very rarefied and closed-off kind of newspaper circle of writing. And so the reaction has been one of factionalism.

Like, for example, one of the steps we've taken would be Jonathan Nunn's best value restaurant project, which was twofold. It was designed to work against the sort of entrenched idea of the cheap eat, which I think is, you know, baked into both American and UK food writing culture and is something that needs redressing, and is almost always designed to counter the fact that restaurants reviewed in newspapers in the UK are almost all in London; they're largely at a certain quite expensive price point; and they're largely run by white male chefs. A lot of the response to it has been this sort of, like, why are you doing this? This isn't the way that food writing is in the UK. This isn't what food writing is supposed to be.

And I think it's been strange to experience that, because the perception seems to be that we're trying to kind of, like, stage a coup of some kind. And we're not, we just want to like exist as an alternative alongside what already exists. But that's not how we’ve been met in some quarters of the UK food writing circle, I suppose.

Alicia: UK food writing also kind of hit the States recently when there was that—I guess it's always when there's a bit of a kerfuffle, like when, when this one editor, you know, wrote back to a vegan pitch, saying something like vegans should die. And then he came out with a book that, by all accounts is not very good and was reviewed in Grub Street and kind of just destroyed.

His name is failing me right now. But it really it's very interesting to watch from the outside, because like that perspective is kind of, I mean—it's sort of like a jokey, outsider perspective of what a British person is from, from the U.S., like, so of course we like to make fun of him, and pay attention to him because for us it's a caricature. But it does do a disservice, it seems, to how people perceive food in the UK because if we're only going to talk about these very like upper-class type writers who never want to see any change, then we continue to kind of view food in the UK as a very stuffy affair, and from all accounts it is not necessarily that. How does that play out in terms of what you decide to cover at Eater London, do you take more risks because you want to push back against this very staid idea, or is someone like that kind of a joke even to you guys?James: I think there is that element of stuffiness still. I think it's probably even in the book by the critic you're talking about, William Sitwell. I think it's overstated in terms of its actual impact on the way that restaurants in the UK kind of operate and think about food. It does definitely still exist. Probably the most prominent food TV program in the UK is probably MasterChef, and that definitely still exists in this kind of like space where the pinnacle of food is like Eurocentric, white tablecloth, all the vegetables are in little cubes kind of dining. And I think that does have an impact on other restaurants in the country, but I think—and this is a hypothetical, but I think it's mostly true—I think that has more of an impact in restaurants outside London, particularly those recognized by the Michelin Guide, and particularly those recognized in places that aren't cities.

And in terms of London, I mean, the thing is, is that I think that we don't see the places that we cover as taking a risk. Like, I think one of the most dangerous things that food critics can do, and I think that it happens a lot in UK food writing in particular, is to write for this imaginary audience that you kind of patronize by assuming that they won't be into or won't understand the risk that you're taking, and therefore you just never take the risk.

I think that's been proven by the fact that lots of people read our site and lots of people want to read about the restaurants that we cover that we don't perceive as risky at all, but I think other critics in the UK certainly do. Or they want to handle it with kid gloves and talk about it in the sort of like, “Oh, isn't this a nice restaurant project run by, oh, someone who doesn't look like me,” and then we'll leave it alone and then go back to the same old thing, which is probably where the staid perception comes from. The second strand to it is that because the London restaurant scene, if you were to put restaurant scene in, like air quotes, is quite a newish invention. I think it's still—and I don't mean this in a derogatory way; I mean this in a developmental way—I think it's still relatively immature. And I think that it has this air of like, this is a group of people at a party, and they love all the food and they love all the drink, and they love all the guests, and they love the hosts. And then someone turns up, and they say, “Oh, the food's great, and the drink’s great, and you're quite nice people, but maybe the host is actually not such a good person.” And even though the thing being criticized is like the superstructure, the guests feel criticized for being there. And I think that's kind of part of the problem is that when we try to address larger issues, they're often taken as personal attacks, like raining on someone's parade or stopping people from having fun in restaurants. That's not the purpose of this. The purpose isn't to drag individuals or say that people are making bad individual choices, necessarily. It's just to ask, Sure, this is the way things are, but why are they the way they are? And who are they actually good for? And I think that's a pretty good summation of how we try and guide what we cover.

Alicia: And you are doing so much reading for your new newsletter In Digestion. How does that happen? Like, how do you how do you put that together? What are you following and how are you making sure you know, to read outside the sort of, you know, well-trodden, well-tweeted, I should say, types of voices and publications that are, you know, used to attention. I mean, I know you've linked to Granta couple of times, which is more well known as a literary journal, so can you give us some of your methodology?

James: I started doing it as a project for another publication, The Gannett, which was the first food writing thing I did. It was a free, kind of passion project that mostly interviewed chefs, restaurateurs and food writers, but we wanted to kind of collate an interesting range of perspectives on what food writing was doing and what all the different ways in which food writing—and I think more broadly, food media, because I try and look at podcasts and videos and photographs and zines and all other formats, as I possibly can. In terms of In Digestion, I'm sort of relying on a very large network of publications and publications that I built while doing that, but I mean, a lot of it honestly is using Google; a lot of it is following up on links in stories that those kinds of stories you're talking about, that maybe do get shared a lot, because quite often in the branches have a story, they get informed by links to other publications that can unearth more interesting things that probably could have been given airtime or their own have been just in publications or places that maybe don't necessarily get as much airtime as a sort of what you might call the usual suspects.

And, I don't know, I think just looking around. I mean, it takes time, but you know, it can be done and I think it's hard to—I just read a lot and try to not look at mainstream publications as the starting point, I guess.

Alicia: And so are you looking, when you are creating your weekly anthology, for food writing that is making up for what you see as missing in the mainstream or for conversations that are lacking in the mainstream? And I mean—but even if that's not your aim, that is what you end up doing. And so what do you think is lacking in mainstream food conversations, not necessarily just in the UK, but in this kind of global conversation that we all are having all day?James: I think that the key thing that's lacking is a recognition of the fact that restaurants and food don't just appear. I think that it comes from this. The thing that spurred it for me in the UK was definitely that there wasn't enough writing that even considered why a food cost the amount it did or why ingredients came from certain places, or—when I was working in the coffee industry, like, why the term speciality coffee even came to be and what what does it mean and what can it be translated as? I think that’s the main thing. I think there's a lot of assumption baked in a lot of food writing about—yeah, I mean, we've thought about it. I think your line in your newsletter about “the coffee always comes from somewhere” is kind of the thing I think is missing, like an awareness that the single thing that you're writing about being a dish or a restaurant or a whole restaurant, or a chef who is at the head of a kitchen, or a restaurateur who is at the head of a large restaurant organization or even a small one, is part of a chain that doesn't start or stop with them. I think the most interesting, vital food writing addresses that and treats food as something which intersects with being essential to life and something that can be treated as a luxury or a pleasure. And I think often, particularly in the UK, those two things don't really meet.

And you just have this sort of very glossy, lovely impression of a restaurant world and like a restaurant culture, which is full of wonderful people and does wonderful things and has so many wonderful aspects to it, but also, you can't just stop at the surface; you can't just take all of that at face value and say, there's nothing behind this. There is, and you need to ask what that is and also whether it's actually good or not.

Alicia: It does make reporting much harder to ask this question. But it's so necessary. You reminded me by tweeting the other day about some sort of bug food, food made from bugs, worms, I think. This is a kind of, sort of utilitarian perspective on food that has been driving me nuts for a while, where, you know, the things that you're saying about sourcing and that the food always has a longer lifespan than one can imagine from when it appears on your plate. But there's been this strain of not caring about that for the sake of efficiency and for the sake of greenwashing items to make them seem as though they are saviors of the planet and saviors from climate change when, you know, there's a lot of questions that can be asked about their sourcing and that sort of thing. And I'm talking, yes, about heavily marketed products made from insects where people aren't considering how insects can also be monocrops and thus susceptible to disease, but also things like the Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat. And how are those things manifesting in the UK? Are people talking about these things? Are they writing about them? You know, what is the temperature on these things right now? I know that it's kind of taking a back burner, to the fact that we're living in a global pandemic, but these things still exist. And I'm still wondering how it's being perceived over there. As someone who, you know, in the U.S., we're always looking toward Europe and saying, “They do better things with food, they care a little bit more.” And so it's been, you know, troubling to see that these things could take hold there in a similar way. But, you know, basically what's the status on the situation regarding, you know, efficiency things like Soylent or tech food like Impossible Burgers and that sort of thing?James: Interestingly, one of the kind of prominent—I guess you'd call it a trend, even though I’m loath to do so, in UK restaurants that the majority of people who are covering London restaurant media will consider to be good—is this focus on meat and fish and vegetables which are produced using the mind-set of regenerative agriculture. There's a big debate in the UK environment media, which has had its entrails spilled into restaurants, whereby a lot of prominent environmentalists are arguing for extensive rewilding, so allowing the landscape to kind of just do its own thing, and the kind of strongest opposition to that in terms of mind-set would come from people who are supporting regenerative agriculture who would say that allowing cattle and pigs, particularly, to graze on kind of, I guess, quasi-rewilded landscapes, which aren't planted as monocultures. The theory is that it allows more carbon to be sequestered into the soil and is therefore better for the environment than standard livestock production. I have my doubts about whether that is a viable long-term solution, particularly at scale, but what it's led to is a series of prominent London restaurants focusing on using meat and fish from sources like that, particularly pork and beef. So you have this one strand, which is supporting small-scale farming and restaurant critics and restaurant writers love to write about that and love to give it praise and rightly so, because a lot of the product they produce extremely good. But at the same time, you have people eulogizing about the Impossible Burger—not the Impossible Burger because it's not even the UK yet because it hasn't been regulated as a foodstuff—but the Beyond Burger has and it has been, yeah, widely praised as an ethical, environmental, and tasty solution to me without even a moment's consideration to asking why the main people taking it up are fast food chains. There's a Formula One driver in the UK called Lewis Hamilton, who is known for having gone vegan a few years ago and he's backing a fast food chain called Neat Burger, which has designs on being a rollout, basically. So you have a guy who makes millions of pounds by driving a car around on a track for 70 laps also hawking a burger that purports to save the environment. And it's like, the cognitive dissonance or what there is staggering.

I've been thinking about this for a while, I think it's not so much that people don't want to have these kinds of conversations. It's more what I was talking about at the beginning. But food writing in the UK is so entrenched in, basically, if it's not a restaurant review or a recipe, I'm not really sure what it is. Outlets with the necessary kind of reach and impact to disseminate alternative ideas in a way that might even have a hope of penetrating the mainstream is just not really viable in the current media ecosystem. I think things like Vittles, that’s the key example in London, is providing like a plurality in UK food media, but it's also really sobering to think that it needed both a pandemic and an entirely new publication to present its ideas. Right, if that makes sense, like a shame that it’s perceived there is no room for the things that the largest publications in the country. There’s an essential parochialism there which I think is slowly kind of drifting by.

Alicia: And for you, is cooking a political act?

James: I think it always is. I don't like the BuzzFeed piece about Guy Fieri that said he was unproblematic because his food is apolitical like, I think it always is, I think, like, whatever choice you make about the food you buy, what you cook with, and all the other things that go into cooking, I think, are all political choices. And I think as well as that, being mindful of the things that control what those choices consist of is also important.

No individual person can make the same choices for the same kind of available roster of choices as anybody else, and I think that trying to think of cooking as not political is—yeah, it's not admissible to me personally.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much for coming on, James.

James: Thank you for having me.

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The wine world is a very complicated one, with its own language and its own rules. While that’s being challenged, invigorated, and misunderstood in equal measure with the big cultural emergence of natural wine, it can still feel far too difficult and far too vast to navigate as a newcomer. Writers and editors like Layla Schlack—associate managing editor for print at Wine Enthusiast—challenge that narrative. With her own soothing, clear-eyed voice and her ability to spot and nurture new writing talent in what’s understood as a fussy space, she’s been key to opening up this world with her work. “Racism, misogyny and ableism are alive in the wine world,” she told me when I brought up how snobbery manifests in the world as a possible topic for conversation. “These things aren't the same as snobbishness, to me, but they are adjacent, and they are a form of gatekeeping that turns a lot of people off from learning about wine. Change is happening, and ironically, I think the construct of snobbery, enacted by people like me, with power and privilege, toward those who look to exclude people who don't look like them, is probably one of the more useful tools.”Below (and above, in audio form) is our conversation on how she built her career, the media landscape, and the actual definition of natural wine—if there can be one.

Alicia: Hi, Layla—thank you so much for coming on with me today.

Layla: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be in your very famous newsletter. Alicia: Oh, God. So we’ve known each other—I guess for like a few years now. We've both edited and written for each other at different—well, you always at Wine Enthusiast, but we’ve worked together at Edible [Manhattan], too, and we have organized, along with Emily Stephenson, the Food Writers’ Workshop. And also, I made your wedding cake. So we know each other and I just think it’s important to have that disclosure upfront.I'm gonna ask you to give me a little bit more background on your food writing career and how you ended up at Wine Enthusiast, but for starters, can you give us like a little bit of a bio for you?

Layla: So I grew up in the Boston area, I got into journalism, largely because my dad worked in media. Both my parents are writers, you know; it was predetermined that I'd be a writer in some sense. My dad worked in b2b publishing my whole life. He retired a couple years ago, but he was in it for most of that time. And I believe plastics, before it was a thing. So I used to go to his office, and see how it worked. And I think it always really appealed to me that not only was there the writing side, but there was this design side and there was this kind of organizational, administrative managerial side that spoke deeply to my soul. So I went to journalism school at UCONN and it was a very newspaper-oriented, very kind of like, “you're all going to get jobs at your local newspapers and come town hall meetings” kind of program, which is really helpful background, and I did in fact get a job at a local newspaper right out of college copyediting.

From there, I moved to New York to work in magazines. I loved the format of magazines, and you know, I think I thought it was going to be very glamorous and very cool like a lot of people do, I'm sure. So I got a job at a publishing company that does all in-flight magazines, and I was there for about four years and I worked my way up. Around 2011, I started getting very into food personally and decided that I wanted to get into food writing—at a time when a lot of people were deciding they wanted to get into food writing. And so I quit that job. I went freelance. I was freelance for a little under a year; I very quickly realized that it was not for me, that I still like doing all of these other tasks of being an editor and that I am not great at nor do I particularly enjoy marketing myself.

I got a job at Fine Cooking, which was really kind of like a crash course and cooking technique as well and I was there again for about four years. They started having a lot of layoffs—not Fine Cooking specifically but the publisher. And with that came this extreme caution in what we were publishing that everything had to kind of appeal to our core readership and be fairly conservative. That's when I started looking for other jobs. And, you know, when Wine Enthusiast came along—I've always been interested in wine, but it really was sort of a fit in that I would get to keep learning about this kind of new to me thing. They wanted someone who knew how to make print magazines. And you know, it's a very lifestyle-oriented magazine, so the fact that I had this food and travel background really kind of worked for them. I've been there now about four years, and obviously, I've learned a lot about wine. Sorry, that's my dog. But that's how I ended up there.

Alicia: Awesome. So can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Layla: Yes, I can. So I grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is, among other things, where Harvard University is, but more locally, it has a reputation as the People's Republic of Cambridge. It's a place that is increasingly very wealthy, but also very concerned with, you know, diversity and political correctness and these sorts of ideas. If I would, I would equate it to like Park Slope.

And what did I grow up eating? So I have a sister who's five years older than me and when I was maybe seven or eight and she was 12 or 13, she became vegetarian. So I decided I was vegetarian now too, so we ate a lot of Morningstar Farms products.

Neither of my parents was a great cook, but they were very dedicated to cooking our meals and, you know, and cooking whole foods and we shopped at a food coop and things like that. I wasn't allowed any cereal with marshmallows in it. So, you know, I think in terms of like, meals in my house, there were a lot of stir-fries, a lot of pasta which was, you know, mostly a decision by myself my sister. It was the ’90s, so as a lot of margarine and skim milk and low-fat and reduced calories stuff, which looking back runs totally counter to this like “we're going to eat vegetables and cook” kind of ethos that we generally had my house, but I guess, you know, I guess that's just what I did then. And so I really didn't learn a whole lot about cooking until I was an adult. My parents taught me to make stir-fry; my dad taught me to make an omelet and scrambled eggs. But it was really pretty bare-bones.Alicia: And how do you think that affected learning how to cook later? Like, did it feel different? Did it feel kind of like separate from the way you grew up? Did it feel like this big change?

Layla: Yeah, so I mean, I think before I learned how to cook, I just kind of lumped it in with all domestic labor which, to some extent was something I was always interested in, like, you know, I would organize the pantry on a Saturday afternoon as a child for fun and things like that. But I did have this kind of complicated relationship when I was learning to cook in my 20s as someone who's dating and cooking for boyfriends of like, “Is this what my role is going to be?” But in general, honestly, I think it was really kind of liberating. Like I didn't, I didn't have any rules for myself about what I could or couldn't cook. It was really just this kind of uncharted territory, and completely unstructured in a way that not a lot of things in my life have been. And at the time I was learning to cook and mostly teaching myself, I was extremely broke, so it also felt like

finally, I'm learning how to be self-sufficient. And finally, I'm, you know, learning this really valuable skill and I can feed myself and other people really affordably and it tastes okay.

So there weren't really many negatives to learning to cook for me.

Alicia: And so, what were the resources you used when you were trying to teach yourself how to cook?Layla: The internet was a big one. You know, again, growing up, we really didn't even have many cookbooks. We had The Settlement Cookbook, which I've written about. And we had the Joy of Cooking and we had Moosewood. So you know, but I was working in media already when I was learning to cook, so I got free cookbooks. I'd look at those. I was at the time, like, reading and reporting a lot about restaurants. So I'd get you know, chef recipes and be looking at what they were doing and kind of figure out how to dumb that down for myself. But honestly, a lot of it was pure instinct. And then right before I started working at Fine Cooking, I took a series of classic technique classes at at ICE, the Institute for Culinary Education, and then, you know, working at Fine Cooking, where we had a test kitchen, and it's a teaching magazine; I learned a lot, a lot, a lot on the job.

Alicia: And so when you started at Wine Enthusiast, what was your wine background like?

Layla: At Fine Cooking, we would often recommend wine pairings with the recipes and I worked on those. I worked with a writer who provided them, but we'd also get wine samples. And you know, we were pretty good about distributing them evenly and everyone would write tasting notes and so I kind of knew a little bit about how to taste wine.

And I think my, you know, for my 21st or my 22nd birthday, my dad had taken me out and bought me a case of wine and was very sort of like, well, “Pinot Grigio is a lighter white and you want it from Italy and Chardonnay is a heavier whiteand you want from California.” And so I had some of that in my head, but more than that, I was just a really adventurous drinker. You know, if I was in a restaurant and they had a wine I'd never heard of before, I'd say, can you tell me about this wine, I'd like to try it so and I traveled a fair amount for work—more so when I was doing travel stuff than at Fine Cooking. I'd been to Italy and I'd been to France and so I had tried wine in those places. So I have been to wineries and knew a little bit about how wine was made.

But I didn't know a whole lot, I had a good sense of, if I tasted wine, I could pair it well. And that's still probably my greatest strength in the wine world. 

Obviously, I've, you know, again, kind of picked up on the job because I've had to learn a lot of these distinctions about grapes and regions and blends and wine structure, which is something you don't hear a ton about until you're in the wine world, but it's kind of the most important thing.

Alicia: And so, yeah, what are the ways in which people learn about wine? Like I mean, in this, you're obviously at a magazine. So it's a little bit structured, but like when someone starts out wanting to learn about wine, what are the kinds of things you recommend they do? I don't know if there's necessarily really good books on it to start with. But yeah, what's your recommendation?

Layla: My recommendation is honestly just find a store in your area where the staff are friendly and where they have tastings a lot. Most wine shops have tastings pretty frequently, often because of their, from their distributors. They'll just set up a little table and pour wine, but they'll talk to you about where the grapes come from and how the wine is made. And it's free and you get a little free taste of wine. And you know, then you can go to the friendly professional who works in the store and say, I really liked this wine and ideally, you'll say, “I really like this wine because…” and they'll be able to kind of direct you toward other wines that you might like for the same reasons.

But I think the two most important things are to taste a lot and to figure out what it is you like and how to express that. And I only recommend doing store tastings for that because it's free and you know, wine can get pricey. But if you if you have access to a lot of wine some other way, whether it's, you're in a position where you can buy a lot of wine without knowing if you like it or if you work in a restaurant and they'll let you taste samples or anything like that, just taste as widely as you can and learn how to put into words what you like, and then find people more knowledgeable than you who are going to be nice about it and say, “I had this one and I really liked it because I liked these characteristics” and and you know, kind of impose on them to recommend things to you. I mean, obviously magazines are very helpful because we give you that context. Wine Enthusiast specifically will give you that context about, you know how a certain wine is going to pair with food or if the story’s very important, because it can help you

form an emotional connection to what you're drinking. And we certainly give you that. And it's just kind of a way to get comfortable with the language of it, which is also pretty huge because it's not like the language of food and it's not even like the language of beer or spirits or

Cocktails. So, you know, magazines are a good way to just kind of learn the lingo, but the most important thing is just to taste everything you can taste.

Alicia: Right. And so, the idea of snobbery maybe is so unfairly present with how people perceive wine and you how do you deal with that—or how do you like process that like, and you know, even specifically in an editorial role, how do you kind of chip away at the idea that caring about why is elitist, snobbish concept?

Layla: As someone who works in the wine industry, obviously I have people from outside the industry asked me all the time, like, is this wine good? And, you know, it's important to note that,

yes, there are technical characteristics that can make some wines better than others. But what we do at Wine Enthusiast, what I do personally in my day-to-day life is kind of say, well, it doesn't matter if it's good if you like it. I think in food and wine both we have this idea that if I like something, that means it's good. And if I don't like something, that means it's bad, and there are just a lot of ways to kind of measure good versus bad that have nothing to do with personal preference. So, you know, I think it's a huge way to kind of work around any perceived snobbery is to get over the idea of “good” pretty quickly. I haven't encountered a whole lot of snobbery from people actually in the industry, I think, because wine can be very expensive. Like that's true. There's no talking around that. A lot of wine is very expensive and a lot of wine is medium expensive. So to have it as a hobby and to have it as something that you drink widely and passionately and collect costs money. I haven't encountered a whole lot of people who, you know, say “Oh, what do you mean you've never tried Domain Romany Conti?” which is a very prestigious and expensive and rare wine. I have not had that experience. I've had a lot more experience with people who know a lot and want to make sure everyone knows that they know a lot. And so you know, if you say I tried this one and I like it, they'll say, Well, what vintage was it? And which, and you know, was it? Was it a single vineyard? Which single vineyard was it, because I had this one.

And so I think if you recognize that this is enthusiasm and maybe a little bit of kind of know-it-all-ness, rather than snobbishness, you just kind of have to, you just have to tell yourself that you just have to say this person is excited, and they want to show me how much they know, and it has nothing to do with where I'm at, which can be a tough pill to swallow. But it's also

easy enough to just say, I don't know, you know, just say, I'm not that deep into it. Tell me why you like the thing that you liked, because that's what those people are looking for, is an in to tell you all the things that they loved about a wine that’s rare. There are the people who are collectors for the sake of collecting and one of the rarest and the fanciest and the most expensive; I don't come across them much at all—they tend to travel in different circles than

people who are just really into wine. So I don't have any words of wisdom there and you know, and working at a wine magazine like they are also our readers and we speak to them and

like I guess I just kind of feel like, Well, that's cool if that's what you want to do. You know, I mean, there are certainly worse ways to spend your money and a lot of wines that are very rare and are very expensive, more so than with other consumer goods, like there's good reason for it. You know, it's because they're grown and produced in ways that lead to scarcity but also take a lot of skill. And you know, most expensive wine is also really simple, because they want to keep making expensive wine forever and it's you know, at heart, it's an agricultural product, so you can't do that if you destroy where it's grown. I think it's just kind of maintaining a perspective that if someone tries to tell you that they know more than you, it's more likely that they just are excited about what they want to talk about.

Alicia: Right, nothing to do with you. I think that's such a general misconception about food and beverage people, is that their enthusiasm is snobbery. Instead of just like, yeah, being excited when you've seen an entire process many times and enjoyed something widely, it's often that you're just—you just want to talk about it. You just want to share that piece. Things about food and drink are so personal with everybody that it often gets, you know, it feels confrontational sometimes to just be enthusiastic, which is interesting. That's been super-interesting to watch in the wine world, is how much people are talking about natural wine, especially in publications that have nothing to do with food or beverage. Like, there's been this generalist obsession with natural wine, which is a conversation that has been simplified and sort of universalized around like this perfect millennial caricature of an urban person with money to spend. So it goes like that. And so, like, what have you encountered around natural wine that is different from conventional wine, like how are these worlds different? How are they colliding? What are the mistakes people are making, in the way they talk about natural wine?

Layla: I want to state very clearly first upfront before I get into it that natural wine is a pretty broad term. Loosely speaking, it means kind of minimal human intervention in the winemaking process. It often also means from grapes that are organic and or biodynamically grown. There's a lot of controversy over whether or not sulfur is added as a preservative agent, so it's, you know, minimal to no sulfur. There's some back-and-forth over whether it should be filtered or fined, which means kind of just clearing out the sediment. And so oftentimes, you'll see natural wine that's cloudy, and usually it is wild fermented, so it's using ambient yeast in the air as opposed to commercially purchased yeast. That's, in a nutshell, what natural wine is when you hear people talking about that. It will still give you a hangover. It is often made, though, in lower alcohol styles. That's called the “glou-glou” style. It's a French word that just means “glug,” easy to drink. So it's lower alcohol, lighter in body. On the one hand, I think it's really exciting that natural wine is something that's speaking to so many people and people who might not otherwise care a whole lot about wine. Now they’re learning words like terroir, and they're learning about how wine is made and how it's grown and where and the people doing it. I think it has kind of, you know—I talked a little bit about structure and about these kinds of characteristics that wine should have to be classified as good. And, and to some extent, it is challenging that a little bit. I'm very interested in the palates of people who only ever drink natural wine, structured in line “acid tannins, alcohol body, complexity finish.” These are—these don't have a ton to do with what you think of when you think of wine tasting of, you know, notes of cherry and pine trees or whatever. They are their structural elements and, you know, in a good wine or in any wine, you're kind of looking at how those things interplay to figure out if the wine was well made. And so, in a natural wine, the rules are different, because the whole point is to let the grape express as it wants to. So if you know a grape is super tannic and doesn't have a whole lot else going on, but that's what this winemaker chose, and that's how it's expressing itsself, then that's considered a good wine in the natural wine world, not so much in the outside world, or in the outside wine world. I think that's where a lot of the conflict comes from: It's just these varying standards of what good is. But I think also, on both sides,  there's this idea of purity of, “I know the right way to drink wine and I

know the qualities that matter.”

That's where a lot of the conflict comes from. I'm someone who drinks both. I drink traditional wines and natural wines; I like both for different reasons, and I think there are probably more people like me then you really see or hear about. It's, I think, probably presented as more of a dichotomy than it really is. Because I think, again, most people who are in the wine world and love wine want to taste as many things as they can and generally enjoy drinking wine.

Alicia: For sure, I mean, I wish I could drink more natural wine here, but you know, it's not here.

In the same kind of way, the natural wine has opened up new people to the wine world—I'm going to try a segue you here that might not work—but how has food media, do you think, opened up to new voices? Like where are the new voices to be found? How are you trying to enable new voices as an editor? And, you know, how has the focus on big personalities and food media been kind of a hindrance to the conversation about food in the United States?

Layla: I think wine media is growing and changing, you know, seven to eight years behind food media, so we really have an opportunity to look at what worked, what didn't work in food media/ Obviously, the two are very related and there's a lot of overlap, including me. I also think it's important to remember that, like, there are a ton of people making food media who aren't the big personalities and, you know, and I get a little defensive about this because I'm one of them and have been my whole career. But like, you know, when you read a recipe that you find on online or in a magazine, chances are the person who developed it, the name on it is not one of these big personalities, if it's just like a, you know, weeknight dinner recipe. And it's fairly similar for wine. There are certainly kind of big names in the wine media world. A lot of them are people who have been around for a while so you know, they're slower to adopt or just kind of not as innately into the natural wine scene or that's been their whole career and they don't understand that they're not a fringe anymore but certainly less of the kind of big dominant personalities in wine media.

I think it's a lot easier for me at least to find people who write about wine and know about wine and oftentimes are coming from a wine sales or a wine retailer, wine marketing background and want to move over to the editorial side and say, Okay, well I work in, you know, one of the larger wine magazines, let's figure something out. And as an editor, it's really that simple to kind of bring new voices in as to, you know, be available to people who are interested and to

put yourself out there. There is someone who's available to people and, you know, to be active on smaller outlets and on social media and look for the people who have interesting things to say, and then reach out to them and say, I want to pay you to write about this, like, people like to hear people who are excited.It's probably easier to do because there's not this pressure to work with the biggest names in wine writing because they're, you know, because we want to bring in new voices anyway to keep expanding and growing.

In terms of what food media can do, I mean, I get it as an editor that it's really hard when you have found people who know how you work and do the thing that you need them to do. And, you know, and your bosses and the world at large is happy with the results. It's really hard to say, “Well, this was working, but I want to push myself and my readers, so I'm gonna find someone else.” But once you do it, you realize it's actually not that hard; it's just kind of getting over that hurdle of like, “All right, I'm gonna take a risk on this story and I'm gonna work with a writer who doesn't have as many clips and, you know, doesn't have as many social media followers, but is clearly smart as hell and has really interesting things to say.” I'm gonna do my job, essentially. And if their copy comes in rough because I haven't worked with them before, if it takes a little bit more upfront work, kind of giving them a more detailed assignment and explaining how I work, then that's what I'm gonna do. I will say that working in print makes that easier because we always have more time on everything. But I really think that's just kind of the key, is just an editor saying, I'm going to make the effort to do the work. You search and put in the time on the front end and the back end to work with a writer who's new to this and see what they have to say and then do that again and again and again.

Alicia: For you, are cooking—and drinking, in your case—political in any ways?

Layla: Anytime you're making choices about spending money and in food and in wine, it's such a long supply chain and it's such a big ripple effect of how you spend your money and, you know, who's hurt by it and who's helped by it that before you even, you know, pick up your tools to cook or pour your glass of wine, it's already a political decision. While you were eating or drinking, you have this further choice to reflect on it and to, you know, to tell people about it and, good or bad, and decide if you're going to do it differently next time or if you're happy and want to keep supporting these people you're supporting.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much for chatting with me today. Layla.

Layla: Thank you. This is fun. It's good to hear your voice.

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I don’t know how I made it this far without interviewing Stephen Satterfield, whom I’ve known and admired for a few years now. He launched Whetstone magazine, which has published five beautiful editions that look at food around the world—often from the point of view of those who actually live in and are connected to those places—and has been putting out the excellent “Points of Origin” podcast more recently, which shows food and beverage in their full context, with episodes talking to Palestinian restaurateur Reem Assil, exploring natural wine, discussing indigenous foodways, and much more. In this conversation, I wanted to specifically understand what led to his founding Whetstone and discuss the void that still exists in most food media, which fails to connect agriculture, justice, and joy to depict the food system in its fullness, without ignoring the cultural meanings of what we eat. Listen or read, then check out the podcast and follow him on social media, where his insights and poetry and cooking are always a bright spot.

Alicia: So, one, thank you so much for taking the time out to have a conversation with me for this newsletter.

Stephen: My pleasure.

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate.

Stephen: I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, and I ate regional food, fast food, and food from boxes. My father and my maternal grandmother are and were, respectively, really excellent regional cooks, so my whole repertoire of Southern dishes, southeastern dishes, I guess, is really strong; I grew up eating excellent versions of things like fried catfish, fried chicken, cornbread, macaroni and cheese, coleslaw, braised greens, cakes—stuff like that.

But also, you know, I was a baby with a very, very working-class mom and dad, and we ate at drive-throughs, we ate Pop-Tarts, and, in elementary school, we ate Lunchables. It was like a confluence of all those things.

Alicia: And how did you end up working in food, and specifically in food media?

It's the only industry I've ever worked—I guess media second, but prior to media, I had only worked in food. My first real job, I was 15 and I worked at an ice cream shop for my summer job, scooping ice cream, and then the summer after that, I worked at a pretzel shop. And then when I went to college, my freshman year, I was at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon, and I had to get a job. I was working at a little café there, a vegetarian café that also had a little wine retail situation.

I ended up dropping out of college, sticking with that job, going to culinary school, and kind of transitioning my whole life. But I always loved food. I would say, like, starting in high school. For instance, when I was a senior in high school, I would skip school, smoke weed with my friends, watch Julia Child, or read one of their books, and do wild s**t like make soufflés. I vividly remember our idea of a good time was cooking and, when we could afford it, eating out at nice restaurants in Atlanta. It was always, even as a teenager, part of the theater of my life and entertainment and truth. After college—I mean, honestly, I couldn't afford to stay in college, is what happened. And I was like, for one year of college I could go to culinary school, and I already know I love food and I can make a career out of it. So I dropped out of college my freshman year, went to culinary school in Portland, studied hospitality and restaurant management. Lived in a 400-square-foot, $500 a month apartment next to a methadone clinic, two blocks away from my culinary school, worked two jobs, and interned or staged at a kitchen in a country club. So I was just constantly working, constantly immersing myself in all things eating and drinking. When I was 20, as part of that curriculum, we took a wine appreciation class, like an introduction to wine class, and I really, really got deeply into wine as a young person. I became a sommelier at 21 and that really unlocked a big worldview in my life, in terms of provenance and agriculture and the relationship of agriculture and provenance to our culture, society, and just who we are fundamentally as humans.

Alicia: I feel like that's so clear in Whetstone, both in the magazine and in the “Points of Origin” podcast, this recognition of these relationships between what we consume and what it means and where it comes from. Why did you launch Whetstone the magazine? What kind of void did you see in food writing or in food media that led to its creation? Stephen: It's funny, I thought you were gonna ask me that. My original Kickstarter, from 2016, for Whetstone. It was a failed campaign; we raised $17,000 out of $50,000. Where it was then is actually where it is now and I'm actually quite proud of how on target we are with the original vision. I'm paraphrasing the language, but it basically says, you know, we're in the midst of a global food revolution, but the media is only talking about the chefs. There's no mention of origin, there's no mention of farmers or agriculture. This is a massive void. Someone needs to fill the void. This is our vision for Whetstone, and really talking about origin as an opening for much more profound belief systems around environment, around racial justice, around, you know, building empathy. So, I think we've always looked through origin as the prism, especially food origin, as the prism, as the most meaningful way to engage with other humans, and to just engage with food. Alicia: By 2016, people would say that the farm-to-table movement had taken off and that farmers’ markets were huge, you know, at least in various urban and suburban areas; that they were a big discussion point in the food world. But how was that conversation that was already happening, how was it lacking to you?

Stephen: It was massively lacking and I feel and felt really qualified to speak on that movement that you're talking about, because I was working in the midst of it in San Francisco as a manager at Nopa restaurant, which is part of a lineage of the so-called farm-to-table movement as understood by the gospel of Alice Waters and disciples. I feel that the beginnings of that movement, sort of, back to the land, started off pretty purely and earnestly when you look at what was happening in the country socially at the time. The impulse to want to go back to the land and say f**k it all, let it burn was very understandable; I think we're in that moment again. But like all good things, it becomes co-opted and foremost, it becomes co-opted by power and privilege. It's usually a soft cooptation, at the beginning. And what I mean by that is a movement that is ideologically earnest about wanting to return to nature is pretty wholesome, but it does ignore those folks who have the ability and the privilege to return to nature, who is welcome in nature, and also who is able to afford to build a life to acquire a home to develop a home in nature. The same structural inequality that we talk about today of course existed three decades ago, four decades ago. So, the kinds of communities and the kinds of ideologies that are reverberated by these communities end up being just as harmful and just as damaging as the more overt forms of racism and exclusion, because it only ends up serving a small population of people who are connected through their own social identity—who are connected through their race, who are connected through their privilege, their access to power. And so while these people are in areas like Sonoma County and Napa, Alice Waters who herself had come from money had the privilege of traveling around Europe—these are possibilities for you to talk about an idealized world of returning to nature, eating locally, and, in that message, you know, food justice, food access is completely obliterated, and the opportunity for her to bring her disciples, from that same power and same joy that she experienced, the exhilaration of living on the land, eating on the land, being on the land totally ignores and undermines the fact that that privilege is not available to most. And so, to exalt that lifestyle without being honest about that joy and exhilaration and access not being equally available is disingenuous. And of course that is reflected in the media, and the composition of the news organizations who are covering these chefs, who are perpetuating their message, that are leading this crucial point. Basically what it looked like from me being both a part of the disciples, as a manager at a farm-to-table restaurant that was a descendant of Chez Panisse, and I covered it exhaustively: I mean, really the precursor to Whetstone was a project called Nopalize, that I to help our diners more deeply connect to the people who were growing their food, because there was a major disconnect. The ideology of what we were talking about at lineup and tasting—this is the farmer, it comes from this. I'd be like, Can anyone point out Yolo County on a map. They’re like, no. They're memorizing all the names and farms, all the names and the different entities and I'm like dude, you have no—there's still no relationship, really, to the land, there's no relationship to the politics of the land, there's no relationship to the people who are committed and the sacrifices of growing on the land. So, you know, I started kind of an in-house media company that was really committed to bringing people on trips, but also, you know, in content being made to try to close that gap. So I've always, you know, I guess in my own way been a product of trying to bridge social justice and food justice with my almost innate education around fine dining and hospitality standards.

Alicia: I've been thinking about this a lot, how—I mean, I'm always thinking about this a lot—but people view, you know, this disconnect between farmers and the land and not recognizing those connections... They don't view that as a justice issue, they don't view these things as connected to justice or to politics. They view these things as snobbery. How do you have the conversation? And I think you're very good at this, and I think Whetstone is good at this, and the podcast is good at this, at presenting these things, not as a point of elitism, but as a point of culture. How do you bridge those gaps and how do you think more writers or more people creating media can, you know, talk about where things come from and why that's important, without alienating people, and also why does it alienate people to talk about where food comes from? I think that was three questions.

Stephen: I think that it is alienating because it's frightening. The truth is very confrontational, and in the truth, people are implicated, and who wants to be implicated?

When you start talking about power and privilege, it completely sullies what you think is a pristine, liberal worldview of having a garden and living on the land, like excuse you talking to me about access issues and urban communities, you know, like no one wants to go there. But the problem is, the analysis completely falls apart from a justice perspective, the analysis falls apart if you ask the question, do you believe everyone has equal access to food? And if they say yes, it immediately undermines everything that they're purporting because what they should be purporting is actually equitable access to the same quality of food that they eat but that's not what they're purporting, that’s not the culture that the media—that's not the message that gets through. And so we end up talking about like, whatever, the f*****g egg spoon and whatever clips come from people like Alice Waters, and lost in all of that is like a—I mean, this isn’t a critique, I don't mean to critique her, I actually love Chez Panisse; I think of it as more of an institution. And honestly this woman is in her mid-70s and I don't feel comfortable really going that hard, you know. It’s not about her but because in a way her name and her legacy have become synonymous, because it is a really kind of clarifying example of the disassociation between the ideals of the farm-to-table movement and actually what's lacking in practice.And then around the question of origin, you know, we have been saying from day one that there's so much power in origin. We've been trying to shift our readership and other people in the media to think more critically about origin, because we feel like that is where our power lies and that gives us so much range to talk about food from a perspective of gastronomy and dining and pleasure and enjoyment, because we are connected to that history, just in the same way we're connected to the history that understands the politics of land, and in understanding land and agriculture that means that we understand that there has always been a disenfranchised class and always a ruling class associated with that land. Prior to that there were many different indigenous tribes, even precolonial, there's still, you know, intertribal politics, around land, you know, there's no dissociation. So for us, because, again, we kind of have this origin filter allows us to give the same berth, the same energy, the same scope when we're, you know, speaking in more I guess overtly political tones, or on subjects like natural wine or fine dining restaurants that might otherwise go out of context, without editors, people like Layla [Schlack], who helps us with a kind of editorial vision, making sure that we're consistent in our analysis and sharing the full spectrum of experience. And we think our connection to history and our appreciation for history allows us to do that better, and we think that if more people in the media did that food media on the whole would be a lot better. You’re really good at it. That's why people are paying attention to your work, because it holds the same analysis, which is that, yes, you can talk about how to properly make a drink, you can talk about proper bar etiquette and culture from the service side, from the consumer side, and obviously your entire platform being centered around veganism is intensely powerful for people, because it doesn't let you or anyone else off the hook in the analysis; they can't just show up for the, you know, Negroni commentary without understanding the connection to the food system as well. And that's the same system that we should all operate in.

Alicia: I would hope the current moment is forcing people to make better considerations. I hope. I hold little hope. But one of the things that I think Whetstone is so good at versus other magazines is being global. And so I wanted to ask how you achieve that and why that was a goal, as well. You know, to really have people from different places around the world writing about their own land, their own cultures, their own foods. Because you know, so many magazines act as if that is an impossibility to do, and you prove that it's not. But how did you go about achieving that?

Stephen: Well, we really wanted to do that, that’s something else that was in that original language and vision as well. Because the same kind of accountability that we're speaking on—I mean, we have a long way to go. I'm not saying that we have, by any means, arrived. Believe me, I'm poking more holes than anyone else on the work that we're making. But it didn't feel consistent for us to talk about food as part of a larger global human history and then have it be like focused on New York, the Bay Area, and a couple of cities in between. So we had to commit to a global platform and a global message to begin with, because we were already kind of on that, again, just in our connection to the kinds of stories that we were wanting to tell. So, more like, you know, I guess, behind the scenes what happened is we, you know, the first edition that we made, we reached out to people in different parts of the world that either we already had a relationship with or in some cases had just traveled there, and we created kind of stylistic standard and aesthetic for Whetstone, what we were trying to make in form but also in content.

And I think that once people saw the first edition of Whetstone, it became really evident what was missing and it kind of proved what our promise of being different would look like in real life. And I think more than like the public per se, the biggest, the most like enthusiastic response that we got was from other creative people who really appreciated the work that we put into sourcing and placing the photographs, who appreciated the original artwork that we commissioned, and really just like holding art at a really high standard alongside our messaging and alongside the content. So, once we created that first edition, slowly but surely we have been the beneficiary of mostly inbound pitches from people in other parts of the world, usually accompanied with a message that says, I'm so glad you exist. Like, I've been wanting to place this article, but I haven't found a magazine that would make it make sense. It's just like, people are expressing what we were feeling from the very beginning, you know, when we publish people in Iran or in Palestine in a way that doesn't make them feel tokenized but like part of a larger global fabric, that's what we were trying to do from the beginning. And I think people who recognize that, especially people who are holding stories that are dear to them, have offered us that that trust as we continue to grow and publish more people.

Alicia: I'm gonna ask you my final question. For you, is cooking a political act, and if so, in what ways?

Stephen: I mean, duh. Deeply. Of course. It's been a huge shift for me because the first couple of years of getting Whetstone off the ground, I had to spend so much time on the road meeting with contributors, speaking, selling the magazine, on and on. And so this is the most that I really have slowed down and been idle in, you know, years, and it's been so highly activating for me like, politically, because immediately, as I'm in Atlanta, I'm like connected to this amazing network of Black farmers who are growing food on rooftops, are growing food on the west side of Atlanta. I'm like, man, we have produce that tastes like it was grown in California out here being grown by beautiful Black women whose skin is, like, glistening, growing the best kale I’ve ever seen in my life. I'm like, this is f*****g glorious, you know, like this is the politics of food; this is almost the vision of food system that I hope for, where restaurants are thinking about how to serve frontline workers in medicine, you know, they're thinking about—I mean, not all of them, but like the beacons that we're talking about. They're looking at how they can serve as food hubs in a completely different way than just, you know, serving multi-course tasting menus that no one can afford and that have gentrified neighborhoods. You know, so like, everyone who's cooking at home right now who’s making supply chains more cumbersome. Everyone who listened to “The Daily” and heard a gross story about you know what's happening at the meat facilities, like, and they don't want to buy meat, like that is very political whether or not they are aware of the politics of that decision to not purchase based on the media that they consumed. Whether or not people are conscious of their eating or cooking being a political act, it's always that; it's always a vote for a more corporate food system, a more industrialized food system, a more harmful system, or it’s the opposite. And I don't mean to assign any moral judgment around that, because so much has been done to make a completely morally pure purchase impossible, but I'm just saying more matter of factly that, you know, every time we buy food, it's either one of those things or the other things. So, cooking for me has really centered the part of it that is political and a lot more deeply connected to Black folks growing food in Atlanta, and like, that's a community that really matters to me, that I'm happy to be back in touch with, and that would have never happened—or not never happened but I’m kind of in Atlanta unexpectedly cooking when I would have been God knows where. So I do feel really, like, politically connected in a way that I haven’t in a long time.

Alicia: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for chatting with me.

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Abra Berens, chef at Granor Farm in Three Oaks, Michigan, wrote a definitive vegetable cookbook, Ruffage: A Practical Guide to Vegetables, that came out last year. We sat down to have a chat in New York upon its release, and while I took some quotes from it to use in my coverage for Nylon, I never put it out, as I’d intended, as an episode of my podcast, “Meatless.” We covered a lot of ground in that conversation, from her upbringing that mixed food and medicine, what farming taught her about the labor that goes into even the most ubiquitous vegetables, and the importance of broad access to fresh ingredients.In these Friday paid-subscriber posts, “Meatless” is back, and I’ll be featuring my favorite people in food and beyond in chats about their lives and the food issues of the day. Below, a few questions I asked Berens in order to get an update on her life since the book came out and we had our talk. Then, a rough transcript of the audio in case you’d prefer to read rather than listen. Either way, I hope you enjoy.How has life changed for you, if at all, since the book came out last year?Setting aside the current global pandemic for a second—now that the whirlwind of touring on the book has slowed, day-to-day life isn’t that much different, which I’m grateful for. I was privileged to get to travel for the few months around the release of the book.There were big life events (meeting food and writing mentors, talking to larger groups of people than ever before, being on TV for the first time etc) almost every day, and so it was a real practice to absorb it all the way I would if there was one of those events a year.  

Now I hold those experiences and then get up and walk the dog etc. Plus, the dinners at Granor Farm didn’t change, which is wonderful. I went from being in a new city every few days to being anchored in my work kitchen, cooking from the farm, for the 24 person at a time meals we host. That juxtaposition is really wonderful. Plus, it still feels like an honor when someone who isn’t related to me buys Ruffage and cooks from it!

"Who cares about this book—the world is on fire!" is something you said at this time last year, and we're in quite a different condition now. What do you see as the role of cooking right now?Sheesh, if we had only known when we were talking last spring! In a weird way, Ruffage feels less frivolous to me now. Maybe frivolous isn’t the right word, but last spring it felt a bit like I was just another writer hocking a recipe. I always knew that Ruffage was more than just a collection of recipes, that it is a resource on how to select, store, and use ingredients. I wanted it to be something that would give readers permission to change out the type of cheese or whatever in a recipe to make it their own. Maybe I wasn’t sure that that actually mattered or if anyone would care. 

Now it feels like it really does. I’ve had a number of readers email me and say that they liked Ruffage before but now they really are using it. That has been heart-warming and makes me feel like it was worth the effort and worth their money that they spent on it. This cookbook still doesn’t solve the massive inequities in our society, but I still believe that every story/problem has a food angle and so caring about food means that we might shift the needle on some of the larger issues in our world. Might. Hope. We’ll see. 

How have you, personally, been cooking and shopping for groceries while in isolation?Instead of resolutions, I always do the year of something. Something to focus on or a habit to try to build. 2020 is the Year of the Pantry—to use up the things that have been on my shelves for over a year. I never expected a global catastrophe to aid me in my personal goals! All of this is to say that we haven’t gone to the store much except for fresh produce because I have a lot of dried staples as well as odds and ends into the freezer. It has been weirdly fun to have added purpose around finding a home for the random ball of dough or the pint of cooked lentils in the freezer. Let alone the things in the pantry. I’ve had a jar of teff flour on the shelf for over 3 years. I finally made a successful batch of injera and that felt very satisfying! 

Are there changes to the food system that could be made that you think this universal experience might be showing to a broader population than just those who are already concerned with food?I think people are seeing four things: what scarcity feels like, the issues of scale of our agricultural system, seeing the hidden, now essential, workers who get food from the field to their homes, and how being food insecure is not one’s fault and that being hungry doesn’t help you get a job. 

I also think that the rise in interest in CSAs and local food supplies shows that this might be a crystalizing moment for people who thought (not always inaccurately) that the desire for farm-to-table was elitist or only fancy. In a lot of ways, a resilient, local food system that keeps money in a regional economy, is as practical as it gets. I hope that the interest in that doesn’t go away. That we are more and more willing to cut out the noise of spending on stuff and instead spend on food. Does that make sense? 

What are you looking forward to about a world post-isolation?Ironically, after championing home cooking for so long, I’m looking forward to a bit of luxury of eating out. I was talking with a friend the other day about the day that we will get to eat together at our favorite restaurant, he said “doesn’t that sound luxurious?” And it does. The simple act of getting together and eating something I didn’t make and not washing the dishes sounds pretty great. 

Also weirdly, as I’m not much of a hugger, I’m really looking forward to hugging someone who doesn’t live in the same house as me. 

I’m also looking forward to trying to make large structural changes to our world. I hope no one can look at a grocery worker and say “nah, you don’t deserve $15 an hour” etc. The Great Depression led to the New Deal. I hope that we can make big changes to de-stratify our society. So first, dinner out and hugs, and then the real work! 

Alicia: Thank you so much for having a conversation with me. Abra: Thanks for asking. 

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up in what you ate?

Abra: Yeah, so I grew up in Hamilton, Michigan. Well, a little town called Bentheim, which is about—it's on the west side of Michigan, about halfway up the state or, you know, a third of the way up the state. And I grew up pretty rurally. My dad came from a family of pickle farmers, but both my parents were anesthesiologists, so we had this funny mix of farming and medicine in our house.My mom was a really tremendous cook, and so we ate most of our meals at home and it was a mixture of things—everything from a lot of pizza rolls and mini quiches from Sam's Club to, you know, these really amazing home-cooked meals of venison. My dad was a hunter, so we had a lot of game, and my mom went through this period where she got really fed up with having so much game meat in freezers and not eating it because we didn't really like it and so she put a moratorium on domesticated meat. It was kind of that funny mix of some very wild things and some very traditional, like Hamburger Helper, and then some things are straight-up candy.Alicia: So what does being a pickle farmer mean?

Abra: Where we live, it's very sandy soil, and so cucumbers grow really well because there's good drainage. We would grow pickling cucumbers, and pickling cucumbers are smaller—the size of the ones you'd see in the jar. They have a slightly thinner skin and a slightly drier interior, so it makes them easier to preserve. So when we had a good year, we would do like three crops. So we'd go in, you know, late May, this time of year, and then come to pick and harvest with a big combine and then redo that ideally three times through, and then in the fall you plant to a cover crop of like rye or wheat.

Alicia: And so when did you decide that food would be your career?

Abra: I don't know that I—I don't know that I guess I made the conscious decision when I decided to go to cooking school instead of joining the Peace Corps. So I had been cooking in restaurants since I was 16. Mostly because every farm kid wants to get a city job, so they don't have to keep doing that—or that’s my experience, and so, yeah, so I had always worked in restaurants and then through college, worked at Zingerman's Deli and had stayed on and cooked with them. And that's where I went from front of house to the back of the house. And I had always assumed I would go into the Peace Corps and then like I had lofty dreams of working for the UN or working with like, you know, all of those things still related to food and food security and health and things like that. And then I was like either Peace Corps or cooking school, and my chef at the time, Roger, said, you should check out Balleymaloe, which is in the south of Ireland. He had done his externship there. And he's like, “you don't need two and a half years of cooking school, but you need some fundamentals that we can't give you.” And so he sent me there.

Alicia: And that was from Zingerman's. Abra: Yeah. Alicia: How is it working at Zingerman's? I'm like a big fan. I have the anarchist business books.

Abra: I mean, I fully drank the Zingerman's Kool-Aid like well into working there. Working there is a dream and it still feels like home. And in fact, one of the benchmarks for success for Ruffage was like I want it to be good enough that Zingerman's would want to sell it, and not just out of personal relationship. And yeah, I mean, Paul Saginaw is maybe one of the most influential people in my life and he's less public-facing than Ari is, but his title’s like the chief spiritual officer, and just all of these ethos of servant leadership, community-based businesses, and I always tell people Zimmerman's was important for me, for a lot of reasons, but one of them was it showed me the why and the how, what I wanted to do, and that was also that transition between thinking like Peace Corps and maybe making a small difference for a lot of people. And what I saw at Zingerman's was making a large difference for a smaller number of people, you know, between paying a thriving wage as opposed to just a livable wage and treating everyone with respect and treating food with respect because it's someone's work, right? All that stuff.

Alicia: And so when did you start farming? Abra: I started farming in 2009. I had gone to cooking school and then moved. Eric [my husband] was living in Chicago; so we were in Ann Arbor at the same time, I went to cooking school, and he moved home to Chicago. And then I moved back and started working at restaurants in Chicago, but my cooking school was on a 100-acre farm, and so it was there that I started to toy with these ideas of making food that was of a place. And so I had kind of been kicking this idea around and then our mutual friends Jess had started farming for Zingerman's. And so he said, I think I want to have a farm, but I want there to be some sort of food component with it, so we started farming in 2009 to give it a go.

Alicia: And how did you find that?

Abra: Great. I mean, it changed my life. And also, I know that I don't want to be a farmer and I have so much respect for people who do because it's, it's a very thin margin work that's very hard and physical and very uncertain. But it fully changed the way that I cook and in a way that I'm endlessly grateful for. Alicia: How did it change your cooking?

Abra: Before farming, I was interested in vegetables but I was still in the, like, big rib-eyes and big things of pork, you know, and then I started realizing the sheer diversity of textures and flavors within the vegetable category. And I was just around it more, you know, so it's like the same thing that when you're in something every day, you get to know it in this other way. And so it gave me a lot of respect for how that food is produced. The onion seeds are some of the first seeds that go in. When you're starting sets to go outside, and they started in February, they go into the ground, you know, in May, or late April. They are in the ground until after the solstice, and then they cure, and so then they're ready to eat, like at the earliest, at least for us, like kind of July-ish, and then they'll last, ideally, until the next round of onions. Like that's an entire year for this vegetable that is like so ubiquitous that it's often like a throwaway thing. And then that's true for carrots and celery, like mirepoix is this thing that was like the baseline and those things take so long to grow. So it was that level of appreciation for it.

Alicia: And so much of your kind of style seems to be vegetable focused—was that a conscious choice or…?

Abra: No, I think it was a form following function and the way that because we were around vegetables and we wanted to tell the story of our farm, obviously, the vegetables were the primary thing on the plate. And then I just fell in love with them. And then also—and I have a story in the book where the first year farming was maybe the poorest I'd ever been because we had put, I put my savings into starting this farm, and I had taken a job at a winery just pouring in the tasting room for extra cash and they needed me to stay on for a couple of weeks before I went back to Chicago when my pie shop job started, because I always help bake pies over Thanksgiving. And so I was, like, eating—we had carrots and kale and some eggs left from our chickens. And so I was eating those three ingredients every night and each meal was different and like really, really comforting and homey but I was also dreaming of, like, all the things I thought that I loved in food like salamis and cheeses and you know, again, and coffee. And then I got home and started eating those things. I just felt like garbage. And then I realized like, Oh, this is how I'm different. Yeah, like, at least I'm appreciating. I don't want to say it because like, I don't ever want to be like, eating vegetables is better for you. Yeah. And like cinnamon rolls, like that's a trope that nobody really needs. Yes. But at the same time, I know that I personally always wake up craving a cinnamon roll. And if I eat one, I don't feel good. But if I have like, a big breakfast salad with some sort of protein in it, like, you know, then I feel good the rest of the day, so I don't know.

Alicia: I feel like I have this conversation on the podcast a lot where like, people are like, they don't want to say that this is better, like make a blanket statement, right? Because why? It's silly to make a blanket statement and we all, you know, eat the cinnamon roll or eat the pancakes and stuff but like that, like the idea that like it matters how you feel.

Abra: This whole, like, wellness movement or whatever. I feel like there's not a questioning of what people are trying to sell you when they're trying to tell you like this hot yellow thing is gonna make you feel better. But at the same time, it also requires people to be deliberate in their choices and to be honest with themselves. And I don't know, it seems very complicated and also like super classist and super like, you know, gender-tailored and all of those things. So, yeah, the shoulds of eating feels really laborious.

Alicia: I have been talking to people about CBD a lot and it plays into all these things that are bad in the way we talk about what we consume. And so there are people who just—there's no real scientific basis for its efficacy in certain things, like maybe in treating childhood epilepsy, maybe it'll help your muscles, but then people are just like, no, it's amazing. It's like an adaptogen. And then like, what is an adaptogen? I don't know, like, I haven't heard about this word yet, but everyone talks about it. It's like, well, it's like putting mushrooms—like people are drinking mushrooms and all these kinds of things. Like, I don't know, just all this stuff people just like, accept.Abra: There's part of me that's like, if it makes you feel better then do it, but that doesn't mean that it's gonna make someone else feel better. And it doesn't mean that it erases the hurdles that other people have to feeling good. Yeah, it's funny. I was just reading something about the placebo effect. And it's still the like, you know, the number one most effective pain reducer is a placebo. And so like, I don't know, there's something there that I haven't like fully thought through. Alicia: People are always looking for a solution to something that's not just eating vegetables. Like, I work at a wine bar and I see people eat, like they'll order these two arepas, and there's like a little arugula, like dressed arugula in the middle, and no one eats the arugula. But these might be the same people who are looking for something somewhere else, but then not eating that. I don't know. I mean, it's complicated to say that vegetables are better, but they are, you know.

Abra: And I do feel like there's, there's gotta be a middle line with that or a middle ground with that, too, where it's like, do what makes you feel good. But also, part of it is to me is like, Is it all just marketing? Alicia: Vegetables don’t have PR.Abra: They don't have a lobbying group. Like, you know, and part of that I think that gets into some of those issues with the larger food system, is that we spend significantly less of our disposable income on food than we ever have in the history of the planet. That’s part of why vegetable farming and dairy, why farming all over is having a harder time: Those raw ingredients, they don't have those marketing lobbies. I mean, there probably is a carrot-growing association, but it doesn't have the weight of a corn or soy. And so I don't know, all of that stuff is really hard. And so part of me says like, yes, buy vegetables because they are better and those farmers need your your dollars. Yeah, I don't know. It's,

there's a lot it's a lot. Alicia: I try and like walk that line of like not being classist about it, because it's difficult, but it's also like, you know, I'm not rich. So it's not like it's not like I'm like coming from some sort of high horse.

Abra: It’s funny how not being rich does put you in the minority in this world. You know, like one of the things I'm thinking about with all of the like, conversations about inclusion is we don't is that we don’t often talk about economic inclusion. And it felt very true to my experience but also notable to me that the entire like first bit of the book is about being like freaking poor. When people are like, “oh, Whole Foods, whole paycheck,” it's like, yeah not if you buy the produce. Though it might be a slightly more than, for us, we have a Dominic's as the grocery store and Mariano's. And it's maybe slightly more than that. But it's also almost all organic. And there's a price associated with that, or, I don't know all those things. And so part of me is like, well, is it actually more expensive? Or is just that the crackers are more expensive, or the toilet paper is more expensive? I don't know.

Alicia: The conversations about class and food are always so complicated, and recently I got into—well, now I'm not tweeting anymore. But someone was like, someone was talking about natural peanut butter, not liking it, and I was like, oh, but if you just turn it upside down like that, then the oil incorporates and they blocked me. And then someone else was like you were food shaming, because I said something about like palm oil being bad, like, I don't know. And it's like, but you know, palm oil, like, is terrible for the environment and for ecosystems and if you're, I think this person was vegan, it's like if you're vegan, like you have to think about these things, right? And like, it's, I'm frankly, like, Smuckers makes natural peanut butter. And it's like, you know, it's not much more expensive, it's totally good and it's more available.Abra: That was a big thing about the book too is like, what are the things that are available across all of these spectrums? Because yes, I love Koeze peanut butter, which is made in Grand Rapids, and it's like, my family always sent Koeze nuts at Christmas, you know, whatever. But it's not available everywhere, and so that excludes people. How for you, I'm curious about your sort of track with veganism and where does it come from for you Why are you passionate about it?

Alicia: I hardly identify strongly as vegan, okay? I vacillate so wildly on this and like, there, there's probably an interview with me six months ago where I was like, vegan vegan vegan. But I feel more strongly identified with vegetarianism right now just in terms of like, the relationship to the farm, like to farms, the relationship and the relationship to an ecosystem and like what needs to happen in order to feed ourselves and like, what's a more honest relationship with that? And I, you know, I do see like, animal-human or animal-farmer relationships as significant and like not always inherently exploitative, right. So it's difficult for me but my, the reason I'm into this is because I just I feel like it's the one way to, I don't know, to always talk about justice in the world, in the food system, and I think I mean spiritually I just can't eat meat; that's just where I am. I don't know what my track is with veganism; it's more of a way to talk about politics and food. It's a way to talk about economics and food. It's a way to talk about labor and the environment and that's what I found in it. And also, just culturally, I've always found it fascinating like even from when I was a teenager. I like many people found out

about veganism through like Moby's liner notes. But at the same time, I was like always, it always seemed like a subculture that was like fascinating and it always has political

ties and so I'm really obsessed with how veganism has evolved from being this hippie thing to be a punk thing to being like more of a wellness thing to be like that. So where veganism intersects with all sorts of different politics and different identities, that's, that's like my, I love that I'm, like, super fascinated by that. But like, in terms of—it's become extremely hard for me to say I'm vegan.

Abra: I am fascinated by that those challenges too, because as someone who's not vegan, you know, like, I, in some ways, you know, I used to, like do a couple days a week at a butcher shop where like, veganism was just made fun of like, so intensely. Yeah, I was like, I don't know. I mean, it seems like if you care about the environment or care about animals, taking that stance feels really brave. Yeah, because it's so—it seems very intense to me. And whereas, like, if people are like, Oh, I don't eat meat because like animals are so cute. And it's like, right, well, you drink milk, right, like they like take the calf from the mother. And then raise it for meat. Like, it's just the nature of it. And so I don't know, it feels like it feels like a very deliberate line in the sand. Yeah, that I really respect.  And then for me, I think that there's a part of being having spent so much time on a vegetable farm is realizing we had hogs and chickens and recognizing their role on our farm for soil tillage and fertility and also, and then also feeling like the exchange felt reasonable. Yeah, like they were safe, they're protected. They were well fed. They were photographed. And so that felt like a reasonable way—that was the exchange. But it's also why it's really hard for me to like—we don't bring feedlot meat into the house. But then like, I still go to mom and pop restaurants because I want to support business or because it's like protecting some of that sort of culture and I know that they're getting Tyson chicken, you know, so,

no, it's super complicated.

Alicia: But yeah, I mean, I just I see veganism as a, you know, a really strong political choice and like—I mean, it's a protest, you know, of exploitative systems. This is how I see veganism. But at the same time veganism has been used in awful ways by right-wing people. There are literally like Nazi wings of veganism.

There's really there's like conservatives who are like, maybe pro death penalty but then vegan and like, like anti abortion but vegan. Veganism can be used in so many insane ways, right? That it's complicated to say, vegan and so, but like I think in my work, what I'm trying to do is figure out the real thing, but I don't know if that even exists. So, but you know, it's like more of a philosophical question. Like, if you're making these choices, they have a logical conclusion

In other ways that you're living your life. And I don't think that that logical conclusion is the death penalty or like, I don't know, like, it makes it exciting but yeah, for me like right now, it's hard to say, especially because I travel a lot now. And so it's hard for me to go into somewhere else and like, make these demands on them, so I just don't anymore. I mean, my only demand when I'm abroad is I don't eat meat anymore, or fish. So yeah, but it’s complicated. 

Wait, so to actually talk about your book? It’s called Ruffage. And I love that word. But like—it's a word that I have always only heard my mom say when you, you were like constipated. I love it. But like, it's always like, for me, it's like you need roughage. Yeah, you're having stomach problems. You need to eat some roughage.

Abra: It's funny because one of the riffs that we had on that when I, our mutual friend, Tim and I were joking about the title or like, kind of going down that rabbit hole is he was like, what about the suffragette movement? He's like, wait, that sounds like a bowel movement.

That's funny that you have that association. Alicia: But so how did you come to that title?

Abra: So it is sort of multifaceted and one, it's just playful, and I feel like a lot of food stuff takes itself very, very seriously. And so it was meant to be sort of light-hearted. And then also it comes from the very first round of dinners that we did at Bare Knuckle farm. It was a friends and family dinner and I was like, my dad is sort of my favorite person to assess food because he's, you know, he's eaten at the French Laundry, he's eaten all these places. He loves food and like food is such a part of our lives. But he also is just like, not part of the food world. So it's a very, like, I like his perspective a lot. So I asked him, I was like, Dad, I'm really looking for critical feedback to make these dinners as good as they can be. And he's like, Well, you know, Abra, it was very good meal. It's a lot of vegetables. And I was like, well, we're a vegetable farm, dad. And he was like, yeah, it's just, it's a lot of roughage. Maybe you could serve some bread. Okay, duly noted. I'll take that into consideration. He's like, everything else is fine. So it's sort of a nod to this idea that vegetables are drudgery and or that it's like purely utilitarian so that you get the fiber or whatever. And so yeah, that was kind of where it came from. and wanting to play against that. I find vegetables very exciting and like fun and all of those things.Then for the spelling of it: Sometimes I feel like I'm like a little bit dim in the world because I always whenever I read that ROUGHAGE I read it as RU-HAGE, even though like I know how to spell rough and like I don't pronounce that weird. But in my mind it never like sounded right so then I looked up with FF and it was like, Oh, this is also an accepted spelling of this word. So I thought it was like, you know how you can spell gray like with an a or an e? I thought it was just like that. And then I didn't realize that it was like, not exactly an equal acceptance.

And so yeah, in my head, this is the spelling.

That's okay. I'm glad to hear that because so many people were like, Can we talk about the spelling of this and like, all of these things. I was just like, I don't know why. And then but also spellcheck kept underlining it like the entire book, and I was like, well spellcheck is wrong

side of the spell check.

The real dirty secret of the title is that we got a dog and my dog like was obsessively eating grass one day at the park and I made a joke. I like oh, the dog is just like me, he needs to eat a lot of grass, ruff-age And he was like, cool. We're going home. And so then it just stuck

in my mind possible that all of this came from like a very bad dog pun. 

Alicia: So how did you decide to do a book?

Abra: So I started writing a food column for the local paper in Traverse City, Michigan, about five years ago, and that was because we were going to the farmers market on Wednesday, which is also when the food section came out. So it seems it was I had always been interested in writing as an English major and enjoy writing and enjoy, like having a different creative part of the food world and not just something you do with your hand. So I pitched it to them and started doing it. And that's part of why the format for the book is what it is. And that that column really allowed me to work through some of these ideas. So it was every week, I would take a vegetable or an ingredient, it didn't have to be a vegetable ingredient, and then talk about like either different preparation techniques, but the same flavor profiles to show like, how is poached asparagus different from roasted asparagus? And what are you trying to achieve out of those two things, or take the same ingredient and the same preparation technique and then change the flavor profiles. So the best example I think it's like the beet salads that are in the book. You know, I always steam roast beets. And so I take those and then whatever you put with them can be as different as you know, something that's very Northern Michigan, Eastern European of smoke, whitefish and beets, and caraway and sour cream, or something that's like apples and walnuts and dairy, fall-ish, or something that's like a, you know, like a curry spice yogurt and chickpeas or something like that, like all of those things that can kind of travel that spectrum. And so that's how it started.

Alicia: And the book is, like, divided by vegetable, which is really cool. How did you kind of decide which vegetables would make it into—like the book is, it's like a tome. It's huge. And like, which is great, and it's like, so beautiful. But um, yeah, how did you decide what vegetables?

Abra: I mostly used the ones that we grew. And so it wasn't, I knew that it was gonna be a Midwestern-based book, so there were things that we don't grow like, at that point. We weren't growing sweet potatoes. Granor Farm where I work now does grow sweet potatoes and so I'm sort of like ruling the fact that there isn’t a sweet potato chapter, but also then it's 465 pages. So Chronicle was like, you cannot. Like there's a whole Brussel sprout chapter that I like, didn't really finish and kind of forgot about it. And I didn't put it into the manuscript. So then I was like, maybe I can just like, sneak that chapter. And they were like, absolutely not. So there's more to come. But yeah, all stuff that we were growing and wanting to really showcase even the most—like things that are usually just a component in something else like garlic, onions, ramps, celery, stuff like that. And so that's how the selection came.

Alicia: And you also have kind of a big pantry section in the book. So what is the significance of the pantry? Like, especially when you're focusing on vegetables?

Abra: Yeah, so I think for me, the pantry serves a couple of different functions. One, it's the ease of preparation. So if you have these, it's sort of like solving an algebraic equation like if you have one variable, which is the vegetable, but everything else stays consistent, it's really easy to get to solve for that. And so having certain things on hand meant that like whatever vegetables you have in the fridge, you can turn it into something pretty quickly. And then also thinking about—I felt really important to me for this book to be inclusive for anybody across class lines, regional lines, and just like access lines, and so I wanted the pantry to be something that you could always get in a small-town grocery store or at like a corner store. ideally, I mean, some things are like wild ric;, I don't know if like your corner store has wild rice or not. But it's a part of all small-town grocery stores where I am. And so wanting to be sure that that list was sort of circumscribed so that it didn't feel like you had to go out and buy a bunch of stuff that you might not use again, or that you didn't have access to. I saw somebody flipping through a book. And they're like, Oh, this looks really good, Calabrian Chilies like no thanks, you know, Calabrian chilies are delicious and beautiful things. And you can also use like crushed pepper from a pizza place, you know. And so wanting to really hone that part of it down and it felt like that needed some explanation.

Alicia: So in your mind what is the biggest misconception that people have when it comes to vegetables? Like you talked about your dad's joke about the roughage, but when people are like cooking vegetables.

Abra: I feel like people still think that they're the work that you have to go through to get to the prize, right? And I wonder sometimes if that's because maybe they're harder to season because there's more nooks and crannies or something like that. Or like they change more with the salt? I don't know exactly, but it seems like often people, I feel like they're not doing it quite right. And so there's like a little bit of a weird resentment there, or just sort of a trepidation about it. So I would say that people feeling confident cooking them, or being excited by them. Alicia: And so how, I mean, you've touched on this, I think before but like, working as a farmer and like, still like being very involved in a farm. How has that kind of influenced your thinking on people who choose not to eat animal products?

Abra: I think it makes me want to be a resource for them. And because I think that there's a natural alignment between people who are growing, you know, plant-based food and people who have consumed that like, so it’s a pretty normal thing but, it is also interesting because I think, and someone asked me recently about like, what do you think being a farmer teaches people about food, and I think part of it is those little acts of celebration and I really believe in that for food, that it's a true privilege to be able to eat three meals a day. And so that like excitement of pulling radishes out of the ground for me directly translates to being excited about having them at dinner. And oftentimes I think another misconception about vegetables is a lot of people will say meat is the star of the plate and I felt that way before I was growing vegetables. And I realized like it's a decentralization play which I really love. And so it's like being excited about the radishes with some sort of like thing to dip it in like you know, butter’s the classic or like something rich like that. And then something like a carrot that's really long roasted and has this like sweetness right out of it and it's a totally different texture than like a tomato and cucumber salad and all of those things can live together and you get to like eat all of them at one time feels so exciting and joyful. And so that also I think tempers like I think you're right about veganism and plant based eating—it has a element of a political act. And there's a joyfulness. Like part of me is like, who cares about this f*****g book; the world;s on fire? Yeah, you know, and I, but then there is this thing where it's like—food is such a balm for so many problems. And it causes a lot of problems too, but it's a way for people to connect and I don't know, that feels really powerful to me. And that's why at  Granor, when we do our dinners, they're all family style. I mean a couple of the courses are plated, but most are family style, and we live in a very purple area and I have heard a handful of times like very heated political conversations, like one end is like talking about Bernie Sanders and the other side is talking about Trump and they still have to pass the platter and that feels like something that we need right now. Absolutely. I don't know that anything was resolved that, like at least treat each other with dignity and that feels valuable. 

Alicia: It does feel valuable. And so what do you think that people who don't consume animal products might be missing from what the reality of a farmer is?

Abra: I mean, I think that there's—I don't know that there is a missing piece. I think that my argument for eating animal products or having animals involved in the agricultural system is that I think that they serve a very necessary purpose. You know, there is a natural fertilization when we had hogs; they did a ton of our tilling and land clearing, chickens, the same thing, pest management, all of that sort of stuff. So I think there is an element of going back to some of those integrated systems. But I also think that we are such a meat-focused and animal-product focused society that I don't, I think that you can be pro animals in agriculture and still not choose to not eat meat without missing out on that. And I do think there's some validity to that argument of if you want to save it, eat it, you know, and like some of these heritage breeds, especially of hogs and cattle, but you can support their production without eating it. I don't know. I think that there's less to be missed out on by avoiding meat products than there is to be very meat-centric.Alicia: I think that's a great distinction. I always have this complicated feeling because I recently interviewed someone who makes whiskey upstate and like, they have their own farm and they're raising like a heritage breed of hog. These pigs that you're raising, you're keeping that kind of breed alive. And also, they're part of the cultivation of the rye that you're using to make the whiskey and it's like this beautiful circle. And it's all about New York State terroir and blah, blah, and like, it's really great. But then I'm like, Oh, wait, but then they're eating the pigs. But yeah, no, but to find that compelling while still not wanting people to eat it. I don't know. It's complicated.

Abra: I think that too, it gets back to you know, making—it's a complicated line, like making choices for yourself and then advocating choices. Alicia: Advocating is the difficult part. Abra: But I don't think that there's I think that also too, one of the sort of on heralded benefits of veganism and also just being plant emphasizing more like, hippie dippie way to say it, but is that there's a care and deliberateness that goes into it, that thought is going to flow along the food chain, right. And I feel that way about farmers too, that like if you have a farmer that has separated their asparagus stocks by thickness, that's a level of attention to detail that is going to carry through to other systems on their farm, and probably means that they're gonna be growing beautiful things. And so if there is a level of care that you make in your food choices, and people see that even if they don't agree with it, it might make them think, Maybe I should be thinking about that. And if everyone ate less meat and better meat, and that was somehow an outcropping of a vegan mind-set, I think that's a great thing. Yeah. And I don't think all of that stuff can happen simultaneously.

Alicia: So for you is cooking a political act?

Abra: Yeah, I mean, I think that everything is. For me, that is mostly manifest around— I've been thinking about this a lot lately, about how do we reclaim the phrase pro-life, right? Because it's such a, like, black and white term. But for me the way that cooking is a political act is that I feel like I am truly pro-life in the sense that I think even the like, most losery lazy person who doesn't work, you know, a person that is like, has no moral compass, still deserves to eat and still deserves to be treated like a human being. And I think that wanting to make food and protect people along that. There's very few of those people quite honestly, I and, you know, the idea of cutting SNAP benefits and making people like prove that they are looking for a job like they're so poor, you know, like, and being hungry doesn't help you get a job and having to like spend, you know, three hours a week trying to upload proof that you're looking—it doesn't help you get a job and doesn't help you get food. And I don't know that stuff makes me like really, really—I'm not a very hot-headed person, and it makes me really angry. And I think about that a lot with rural life, too, because a larger, the larger percentage of the population of rural dwellers are on SNAP than in urban centers. And so the dollar amounts are true, but the percentages, and this idea that we would make it harder for anyone to get food. It is immoral to me. So I think that's how it manifests. And also just waiting to tell the stories of the people who are growing that food and respecting their labor. You know, like 100 years ago, 30% of our population were farmers. And now it's 3%. We have to replace 40,000 farm jobs every year just to maintain the level of farmers in this country. And some of that's because of automation and I get that and there's lots of good technology, technology that can be used. But if people don't understand what that lifestyle is, it feels harder to understand their products, right? I don't know. So those are sort of the ways that that that comes together for me.

Alicia: Thank you so much.

Abra: Thank you for having me. It's a true honor and and yeah, thanks for being interested.

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In the second part of Alicia’s visit to Chicago, she speaks with pastry chef Valeria Taylor, and food writers Tim Mazurek and Natalie Slater. They discuss their frustrations with the way Chicago’s food scene is repeatedly defined by critics based in LA and NYC, their favorite animal-free recipes, and what they think makes for a good vegan city.

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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In the first of of Alicia's two dispatches from Chicago, she talks to bartender Alicia Arredondo and chef Pat Sheerin about the city's reputation as a bad place to go meat-free. They discuss some of their plant-focused dishes, how the cultural and social context of Chicago influenced them professionally, and the broader ways in which food and politics intersect.

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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Alicia talks with John Currence, a chef based in Oxford, Mississippi who co-hosted a series called the “Big Gay Mississippi Welcome Table Dinners” to protest at the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which sanctioned religiously-motivated discrimination, particularly against queer and trans people. They discuss the political uses of food—both as a tool of protest and in bringing people together — and what makes for a “stunning” vegan breakfast.

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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Alicia talks to Luz Cruz and Ollie Montes de Oca, members of the Cuir Kitchen Brigade that formed in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Organizing as a collective solidarity group, they flew to Puerto Rico to distribute pickled seasonal produce and run workshops on jarring and preserving foods. They discuss developing connections between activist groups in New York City and San Juan, their work with Tijuana’s chapter of Food Not Bombs, and the broader importance of food to social justice movements

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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Alicia talks with and Danielle Ricciardi and Daniel Strong, a couple who founded the vegan comfort food business Chickpea and Olive. They discuss the process of getting products into Whole Foods, how delivery apps can financially undercut restaurants, and the concept of “making a burger out of all the things that cows eat.”

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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Alicia talks to Olivia Hu, the co-founder and owner of Old Timers, a bar in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The first-generation child of Chinese parents who fled during the Cultural Revolution, Hu talks about the experience of trying reconcile her family's heritage and cuisine with her pescetarianism. She also discusses what she loves (experimenting with cocktails) and hates (racism and sexism) about being a bartender.

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

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