Care, Culture, and Tradition: Alicia Kennedy’s Love Affair with Food

Alicia Kennedy doesn’t care about meat. She says as much in the introduction to her forthcoming debut book, No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating, which hits shelves on August 15. And yet, the San Juan-based writer’s earliest food memory involves a request for lamb chops.

“I was asking my grandmother to make me lamb chops, then I remember my grandpa coming home from work and my grandma saying, ‘Go get lamb chops,’ and he immediately left to go get lamb chops,” Kennedy recalls with a laugh in a Zoom interview. “It’s a memory of meat. But it’s also a memory of food and my appetite being important enough that my grandpa would come in from work and leave again. And that my grandma would make me whatever it was I wanted.”

Kennedy’s grandmother, who grew up in Brooklyn and later moved to Long Island, never learned how to drive, and so the home — and the kitchen — became her domain. From her, Kennedy adopted a deep appreciation for and connection to food.

“She loved food,” says Kennedy. “She would sit down and just read cookbooks straight through.  So my earliest memories are of food being very important and what I liked being important,  which is an interesting foundation for eating.”

That foundation would go on to serve Kennedy well. Although Kennedy’s plant-based journey was at first heavily influenced by all of the “cool people” who didn’t eat meat, she later began questioning the ethics of eating animals. But she wasn’t sold on the idea at first.

“For me, I couldn’t stop [eating animal products] until I knew that I was going to have this central desire for my food to be pleasurable met,” she says. “When I was growing up in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, it was really hard for me to see a way to stop eating meat, to stop eating any animal products, and still enjoy food as a central part of my life as something that I held to a very high standard.”

But after stumbling upon the blog of vegan chef and chocolatier Lagusta Yearwood, Kennedy started to seriously consider becoming vegan.

“Lagusta wrote about eating locally and seasonally, just like all the fashionable chefs, but she was cooking vegan food with a rigorous ethical framework,” she says. “Once I realized it was possible to have both—to be farm to table without being nose to tail—I saw my future open up.”

In 2011, Kennedy became a strict vegan and, from 2012 until 2013, ran a small artisanal vegan bakery called La Pirata Kitchen. Her penchant for tasty treats, such as her popular linzer cookies, earned her the nickname “Non-Dairy Queen.” Several years later, however, Kennedy traded in veganism for vegetarianism after eating oysters to cope with the death of her brother. Food has always played a central role in Kennedy’s life and she makes no apologies about it.

“It's certainly an anomaly for women of my generation—elder millennial—to have grown up prioritizing my appetite over the demands of diet culture, and I've continued to do so,” she says. “I eat what many would consider, of course, a wildly healthful diet based on my personal nutritional needs, but it's also balanced in terms of enjoyment. My roasted cabbage is topped with toasted breadcrumbs, Calabrian chilies, and capers.”

It’s that philosophy—viewing food as both pleasurable and political—that Kennedy examines in No Meat Required. Throughout the book, she explores the history of plant-based eating in the United States, from the explosion of tempeh production in the 1970s to the decolonization of vegetarian cuisine by food writers in modern times. Along the way, Kennedy gives readers a closer look at how food narratives are formed, the stories they tell, and whom they leave out of the picture.

For example, “Why was it [advantageous] to portray vegetarianism or veganism as this white thing, especially in the ‘70s, when there’s this whole history in the ‘60s of these [eating styles] being tied to Civil Rights and thought leaders?” she asks. “It’s a part of that whole constant erasure of folks who have done a lot of work to build our food system, but it’s also a narrative that serves to make it seem separate, silly, and frivolous and a concern for people who don’t have other concerns.”

As a food writer and cook, Kennedy aims to make plant-based ideology accessible without being overwhelming. Her goal isn’t to get people to stop eating meat, but rather change how we think about meat.

“It’s always, for me, been so clear that you can’t divorce the politics of food and the ethics of food and the need for a justice-oriented approach to food without people also getting the pleasure that they need from food,” she explains. “Whether it’s lamb chops or grilled cheese, food satisfies a very deep need for us that is about care, culture, and tradition. It’s not just nutrition. There’s a way to eat that’s good for the planet, for ethics, for workers and…works for us on a deeper level of needing food to feel it’s taking care of us.”