From ‘Cheez Whiz’ Vegetarian to ‘Ethical Omnivore’

• The Vegetarian’s Guide to Eating Meat
• Marissa Landrigan
• Greystone Books (2017)

[Editor’s note: Marissa Landrigan is obsessed with food. In her new book, she chronicles her decision to shift from the diet of what she calls a “Cheez Whiz” vegetarian to an “ethical omnivore.” She writes about her struggles with adopting a vegetarian diet at a young age before she was prepared to fully take on all the responsibly of cooking a well-balanced meal. “I had the best intentions,” she writes, “but I was a child of the suburbs.” She recounts how her sojourn into vegetarianism didn’t exactly go well. “Here’s how it should have worked: I became a vegetarian. I began trying new vegetables: asparagus and leeks and bean sprouts…. I learned to bake my own bread, white knuckles kneading fresh dough daily, or how to make my own cheese, weaving long rubbery braids of mozzarella. Through my food, I communed with the landscape around me.... But that’s not how it worked.” In her conversation-provoking new book, Landrigan describes the journey that led her to her current understanding of what it means to eat ethically.]

When I was in college, when I became a vegetarian, food had become more politics than community, more activism than ritual. But now, with time and distance, I began to see that maybe my parents went to all this trouble to keep me close even while I tried to turn away, to maintain our food community in the face of my activism. Maybe they understood that the shared experience of eating together was more important than all of us eating the same thing. Maybe they had radical ideas of their own.

On the plane ride back to Iowa, as I finished The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I thought back to a conversation Scott and I had earlier that summer, on the back patio of a bar over a split pitcher of beer, surrounded by colored Christmas lights and smokers. I remembered us talking about our eating habits, our diets, the disappointment we both felt in my attempts at vegetarian cooking. I remember us trying to figure out why we both — educated, privileged, socially conscious — couldn’t seem to eat any better.

“I think it’s cultural. Look where I’m from,” he said, referring to the steaks that made his hometown famous. “If a meal doesn’t have meat, even if it fills me up, I still feel as though something is missing.”

For so long, I’d assumed the problems with my diet, with my life, were circumstantial: I’d eaten poorly in Montana because vegetarian options were marginalized. I’d eaten better in California because produce was readily available. I blamed my lack of interest in cooking on my desire to be a woman with a career, a woman who didn’t have the time to prioritize the kitchen. Somehow, it hadn’t occurred to me that being a bad eater might not be an indictment of my family, or the place I lived, or my politics. It hadn’t occurred to me that being a bad eater might just be a symptom of how I thought about food.

I was the problem.

For the first time, I realized this wasn’t an issue of me, as a woman, having a dysfunctional relationship with food or cooking. This wasn’t a latent feminist feeling resentment towards the kitchen, or an ethical activist being treated as an outsider among hunters. It wasn’t nearly so personal.

What I realized was that I was remarkably similar to the stereotypical American eater. I ordered pizzas and drank too much beer. I didn’t understand why a person would take the time to simmer white rice and add spices or fresh herbs when they could just buy a plastic bag, squeeze it, and microwave it for 90 seconds. I preferred fast food to handcrafted food, preferred something that came in a box and could be microwaved. For me, those products were made of soy and textured vegetable protein instead of minced white fish or pureed chicken carcass, but this no longer seemed like a meaningful difference. This wasn’t about being or not being a vegetarian, or a woman. This was a cultural disorder, plaguing almost all of modern America.

Somehow, in studiously avoiding the connection between food and family, I had neglected to feed myself. When I cooked better because I thought of it as taking care of a man I loved, I was reaching back into my past and resurrecting the notion of food I’d been born into, the sacred ritual of feeding the one you love. Maybe taking care of someone else could become a way to empower, rather than detract from, my own well being. Maybe, I thought, there were other complex conversations about food I’d been turning black and white. I thought about migrant workers poisoned by toxic chemicals and severely underpaid while they picked my fresh vegetables. I thought about Adjoa beating cassava root into a safe food for her family, and of all the people who couldn’t afford to choose vegetarianism. I thought of the corporate organic brands and saw all the ways in which being a vegetarian meant subscribing to the same agricultural system that produced the factory farms I’d watched in that PETA video. I thought, again, about what good I was really doing.

But rather than again feeling overwhelmed and giving up, I thought about Michael Pollan, and the hope his book had given me. For most of the book, Pollan visits industrial agriculture sites, and sees all the problems I’d been encountering in one way or another for most of my food journey. But later in the book, he visits Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farms, and finds a sustainable, biodiverse, inclusive farming operation. When I read Pollan’s description of this visit, I could hear his relief on the pages of the book, relief for having found a better way. I understood his frustration, the sense of futility that can come from looking too closely, from wanting to know too much.

I began to wonder whether I might be able to find something else to believe in, too.

Maybe I just hadn’t been looking in the right places.

Excerpted from The Vegetarian’s Guide to Eating Meat by Marissa Landrigan. Published by Greystone Books, April 2017. Adapted and reproduced with permission of the publisher.