Vegan Fermentation in Place An Interview with Carol J. Adams

Introduction

Over a career spanning half a century, Carol J. Adams has remained a vital and influential force in the fields of food studies, animal studies, and ecofeminist theory. Author of the landmark book The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory,¹ as well as the author or editor of twenty-six other books—and countless articles, essays, and op-eds in forums ranging from street zines, to the New York Times, to Critical Inquiry—Adams is one of the most prolific writers and scholars working today on issues concerning the intersecting oppressions of humans and animals. One of her most recent books, Burger, published in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series in 2018, focuses her acclaimed critical attention on the cultural history and environmental and gendered politics of hamburgers.² Also published in 2018, Protest Kitchen: Fight Injustice, Save the Planet, and Fuel Your Resistance One Meal at a Time, coauthored with Virginia Messina, takes on the regressive politics of food nostalgia with a series of short, critical essays on the politics of everyday eating, and also provides recipes for animal-free alternative dishes, like the "imPeach Crumble."³ Adams's versatility, her ability to pivot seamlessly from abstractions of literary criticism and analytical philosophy to concrete discussions about the cores and peels of vegan cuisine, is a hallmark of her approach to food studies and of her overall scholarly style. As Adams is a frequent guest lecturer at universities across the globe, many thousands of people have experienced her famous "slideshow," an evolving collection of images that formed the basis of her 2003 book, The Pornography of Meat.⁴ A revised edition of this book is scheduled for publication in 2020.

Less well known is the fact that Adams is a longtime resident of Dallas, Texas, where she has lived since 1987. As the center of a vibrant metropolitan area with more than seven million people, Dallas is home to a large community of vegan activists and businesses, and yet the city's vegan friendliness has often been hidden in plain sight, or at least overshadowed by supposed vegan utopias such as Portland, Oregon. In her current work Adams considers the phrase "vegan fermentation" as a starting point for tracing the historical and spatial patterns that structure the roles played by business, politics, diet, and community activism in determining regional identities. As part of Historical Geography's special issue on "Food Studies and the Spatial Turn," Adams agreed to share her early thoughts about vegan fermentation in place, as well as reflect on her career as an ecofeminist vegan scholar and activist living and working in Texas.

Michael D. Wise [MDW]:

Historical geographers, historical cartographers, and others with critical inclinations toward the visual representation of space are predisposed to think of maps as instruments of power. But what you suggest about mapping vegan spaces is its potential to illuminate rather than dictate—to reveal a foodscape of plant-based stores and restaurants that are often obscured by the dominant forces of consumption and industrial animal agriculture around which most of our economic spaces have been built over the last century and a half. As far as your work as a scholar and activist is concerned, how have you thought about the power of maps?

Carol J. Adams [CJA]:

I guess the basic question is, "When is a map useful?" I think an example is the best way to illustrate the answer. Every year, when the American Academy of Religion meets, a young vegan scholar circulates a map identifying where vegans can eat in whatever city the conference is hosted. For vegans, getting this kind of information about where you're going to find sustenance in an unfamiliar place is an essential element of our survival, particularly before the Internet.

I asked that scholar, Dr. Allison Covey, about how she came to do vegan mapping:

It's hard to say when I first started mapping vegan restaurants, but I'd guess it was around 2009. A friend and I have been regularly traveling together since before international data plans were easy to come by. I used to write down vegan restaurants on a piece of paper and, upon arriving at the hotel, ask for a tourist map at the front desk, then plot my list out on it. My friend (also a woman) and I were always nervous about pulling out a giant map in a strange city, thus identifying ourselves as tourists, so we'd duck into a recessed doorway and one of us would shield the other as we consulted the map.

So there's also another point to vegan mapping—how to safely find nourishment.

Allison Covey made her first Google map of vegan eats in 2011 and continued to make them for herself. After she started posting them to her personal Facebook page in 2012, she discovered that others were interested in her maps. The American Academy of Religion, which yearly rotates from large city to large city, provides a map of restaurants in the areas of the conference center and hotels where its conference is held. The restaurant list presumes their conference attendees eat dead animals, the nursing material of cows, and eggs taken from chickens. In 2014 the Animals and Religion section asked Allison to make "a map that they could share to their listserv and we've been doing that ever since." Allison described how "creating and circulating unofficially an alternative map highlighting plant-based food feels like a small act of pushback against the assumption that meat-eating is the default."

And she told me a funny story about the maps:

I was at AAR one year and two women came up to me at a reception, gushing that they were big fans of my work. I was surprised as I haven't published much yet but then they clarified that they meant my work mapping vegan restaurants. Flattering and disappointing at the same time! Haha.⁵

One of the other things such a project of vegan mapping does is that over time it will show the growth of vegan restaurants as the AAR rotates back to the same city and Allison maps anew the offerings.

If you were going to map historically the locations of vegan and vegetarian restaurants and stores from 1900 through today, for instance, and do something like an animated historical visualization, then we would find not only where vegans (and vegetarians) would have been able to eat but also where businesses thought they could actually flourish. In my thinking about vegan fermentation, I want to explore those relationships between businesses and community support. For instance, in 1976 where would I go to get some food if I weren't near a health foods store or a natural foods place? In Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a few other cities there were Erewhon stores, much more funky precursors of Whole Foods, but throughout the country you could find a Seventh-Day Adventist store. They might be in large cities, but they also served the Seventh-Day Adventist community in small cities. If I were in Jamestown, New York, for example, I could get some vegetarian franks in a sauce, or their "tuna"—which I thought was just awful—but nevertheless they offered vegetarians/vegans options, and knowing where they were located was invaluable.

I think that if you start tracking what I'm calling the vegan fermentation of institutions, then you have to start with these kinds of stores. As I recently wrote in my book Burger, the stores of Seventh-Day Adventists and others represented a hidden economy that was leftunseen in the meat-centric historical mythology of food in twentieth-century America. They had veggie burgers available for sale by the 1940s. And before that—long before our twenty-first-century health-food stores and products—vegetarians knew where to go. I think about the vegetarian restaurant operated by suffragists in Toronto in 1910; I wonder, where was it located? What was it near?

Now we can see, in terms of fermentation, a vegan-friendly city such as Portland, Oregon, is the home of the first mini-mall of vegan businesses/restaurants, including Food Fight grocery, Sweatpea bakery, Scapegoat Tattoo, and Herbivore Clothing.⁶ That's fermentation! And Austin, Texas, has the first all-vegan business trailer park (figure 1).

MDW:

"Vegetarians knew where to go." That is an important historical observation that encourages us, I think, to reconsider the common assumption that animal-free diets had no place in the past. It also leads me to another question about the place of animal-free diets in the present. You and I are both a fan of John Coetzee's essay "Meat Country," about his time in 1995 living in Austin while teaching at the University of Texas, a piece in which he remarks, "It is eccentric not to eat meat in the United States, doubly so in Texas."⁷ People are often surprised to discover that you live in Texas, and not in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or some other

Fig 1.

Possum Park designed by Jessica Freda and Cece Loessin, proprietors of Zucchini Kill. Used by permission.

seemingly more likely neighborhood for a vegan feminist theorist. Can you remark about the hidden economy and relatively invisibility of veganism in Texas? After all, you're not alone—quite a few vegans live in Texas, in "meat country."

CJA:

For the first twenty years or so (I moved here in 1987), people were absolutely shocked to find that I lived in Dallas. This was thanks to a variety of popular culture forces including the Dallas Cowboys, the TV show Dallas, the ongoing aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, and the right-wing culture that flourished in the city then.⁸ Once they got over the shock, they would ask: "What do you eat in Dallas?" And I would respond that it's a cosmopolitan city that has attracted people from all over the world, a city with a variety of restaurants. When we moved to Dallas, there was one vegetarian restaurant (Kalachandjis) and plenty of Italian, Indian, Mexican, Ethiopian, and Thai restaurants. All of them either had vegan items or items that might be veganized. In a 1988 letter to a friend I report, "Dallas has every cuisine imaginable though I have been gravitating to Indian restaurants lately."

There is an assumption that there's a monolithic identity for Texas and for Dallas. But as Coetzee suggests, "If it is ever going to be possible to address the subject of dietary customs seriously—that is to say, not as part of the flippant cultural anthropology of tourism—then that attempt should be made from someplace like here," that is, Texas.

The question about what I could possibly be eating in Dallas always seemed surprising, since vegetarians always knew—since the 1970s at least—that we could go to a Chinese restaurant, even the smallest one, and order a Buddha's Delight and eat a vegetarian path across the United States. I'm always struck by the lack of imagination when people's expectations of Texas as "meat country" break up against the realities of its phenomenal diversity.

Dallas, in particular, was a good place for vegans because of the presence of Texas Instruments and other employers who had been recruiting scientists, engineers, and programmers from all over the world since the 1960s. By the 1980s the part of North Dallas where I moved, Richardson, was basically a miniature Silicon Valley. In the dynamic tech economy, most people stayed (we were told at that time) for an average of two years before relocating elsewhere to take on other jobs. New migrants to Texas replaced them. So people were moving through—people from a wide and diverse variety of backgrounds. By the 1990s, for instance, three vegetarian Indian restaurants had opened within two miles of my home. Chinese investors in 1980 began a "Chinatown" community of businesses just down the street as well. I could identify possible Chinese restaurants' newspaper restaurant reviews and, at the least, order moo shu vegetables (leaving out the egg and the pork)—graduating up from Buddha's Delight.

Then to our delight, a Chinese vegan restaurant (Suma) opened in walking distance of our house; and when a disagreement fractured the staff, half of them leftand opened another Chinese vegan restaurant (Veggie Garden). Both had deliberately located themselves near the tech industry offices.

If we were mapping a vegan-friendly Dallas at the end of the 1980s, we would note the opening of the second Whole Foods Market (WF). (The first was in Austin.) WF bought a popular Dallas natural foods store on lower Greenville Avenue. I knew I could always find tofu, either there or in Chinatown. Then, on its road to empire, the third Whole Foods opened up near me, situating their North Texas presence, in effect,

Fig 2.

Dallas vegan fermentation map drawn by Carol J. Adams

on the border between Dallas and Richardson, near the Texas Instruments campus. So as far as what most people think about Dallas being the financial center of oilmen and affluent ranchers, I think it's interesting that they don't see how the tech industry brought a wealth and energy that certainly helped create an environment where people would want to eat things other than beef. In addition, many people come to Dallas to reinvent themselves, and they brought veganism with them or became vegan here. Finally, money can buy really good food; Dallas has always had several zip codes that are listed as the wealthiest in the country. (Though, in terms of mapping, these were carved out of the center of Dallas and made into separate incorporated entities—a white flight that didn't have to move. This area is referred to on my map [figure 2] as Dallas's own Vatican City.) I knew a couple of wealthy vegans who told me that they had no problem getting vegan food wherever they went to eat in Dallas. The rare times I ate at five-star restaurants, I found it was true—the chef created something special and delicious for me.

In the early years we flourished as vegans in Dallas, even if I had to get seitan sent to me from Ithaca. (And then I learned how to make it myself.) By the 1990s a wave of vegan cookbooks had appeared. One of the last things my elementary school–aged kids and I did before bedtime every night was look at the newest vegan cookbook and select some recipes to cook. I can't remember what I did for my fortieth birthday, which was in 1991. It would have been with two small kids. But for my fiftieth birthday, someone sent me a vegan cheesecake and we went to Veggie Garden, where the owner planned the entire menu and course after course came out of the kitchen to all our delight. And for my sixtieth birthday, we went to the Nana Grill (one of those rare fivestar visits), at the Hilton Anatole, which had a ten-course vegan tasting menu. So over three decades, the choices for how to celebrate kept widening, which suggests the extent to which vegan fermentation had taken place in Dallas. By 2011 enough of a market for vegan dining existed that vegan options flourished on the menu at even the most upscale restaurants, and vegan businesses appeared.

One of the ways that I resist—or play with—Texas is that I do vegan barbecues. I like vegan barbecues because they undercut Texas's investment in meat. "Let's have a barbecue. Let's have a vegan barbecue!" As you know, a couple years ago during the Moral Cultures of Food Conference at the University of North Texas, I invited some of the food scholars I knew and some local vegan activists, including Jamey Scott (more on him later) and Eddie Garza—who now has a new Mexican vegan cookbook, ¡Salud! Vegan Mexican Cookbook: 150 Mouthwatering Recipes from Tamales to Churros—for a vegan barbecue.

I had hosted vegan barbecues annually for the church on the Fourth of July, an event for the church's octogenarians and nonagenarians. They had had this picnic since we before we moved here, and we began hosting it after the death of the original hosts. The group provided the main course. The first year that was Kentucky Fried Chicken and I thought, "I can't do this." After that, I took over preparing the main course and used Miyoko Schinner's incredible recipe for vegan ribs (see sidebar). The next week at the church one of the nonagenarians—she was ninetysix years old—was asked, "How was the barbecue?" and she said, "It was the best barbecue ever." She emphasized to me when she reported the discussion, it wasn't the best vegan barbecue, it was the best barbecue. So—you know, part of being here in Texas is playing with your food.

Unribs and zippy barbecue sauce, from miyoko schinner, the vegan pantry

1/4 cup soy sauce

3 tablespoons nutritional yeast

2 tablespoons smooth peanut butter

2 tablespoons tomato paste

1 tablespoon white, chickpea, or red miso 4 or 5 cloves garlic

1 1/4 cups water

2 1/2 to 3 cups vital wheat gluten

Oil, for cooking (optional)

Sauce

3 1/2 to 4 cups Zippy Barbecue Sauce (recipe below) or your favorite store- bought variety

2 cups water

In a food processor or blender, combine the soy sauce, nutritional yeast, peanut butter, tomato paste, miso, garlic, and water and process until a smooth and creamy slurry is created. If you are using a food processor, just keep everything in there; if using a blender, pour it out into a large mixing bowl. Add 2 1/2 cups of the gluten to the slurry and mix well, either using the food processor or by hand in the bowl. If you're using a food processor, keep pulsing to knead the dough, adding a little more gluten flour as necessary to form a stiff dough (the more gluten you add, the chewier your ribs will be, so you can control how tender or chewy you want them). It may form one ball in the center or break up into little beads; if the latter happens, all you have to do is push it together with your hands. If you're mixing it by hand, knead it in the bowl for several minutes until it becomes smooth.

Roll the dough into a log about 6 inches long. Slice the log lengthwise into four "steaks" about 3/4 inch thick. Now here's one of the places where you get to decide whether or not to use oil, and how much. Heat a skillet over medium-low heat—if you're going for oilfree, make sure that it is nonstick. If you're using oil, add a couple of tablespoons to the skillet and let it get hot. Add the steaks and cook until browned on both sides. They will rise and puff a little.

Preheat the oven to 350°F. If your skillet is ovenproof, you can just leave the steaks in the pan. If not, transfer them to a baking dish. Mix 1 1/2 cups of the barbecue sauce with the water. Pour the diluted sauce over the steaks in the pan and cover with a lid or aluminum foil. Bake the ribs for 75 to 90 minutes, until the sauce has reduced and just barely coats them and the steaks are chewy and cooked through. They will be relatively tender while hot but will deflate slightly and become chewier as they cool, so fear not if they seem too softright out of the oven.

Let them cool until they can be handled without burning your fingers. Then slice each steak lengthwise into "ribs" about 1/3 to 1/2 inch thick. Heat the skillet over medium-low heat. You're going to sauté the individual ribs once more to brown or even blacken them on both sides. Once again, you can choose to use oil or not. If you like your ribs on the greasy side, you'll want to use a good 4 to 6 tablespoons of oil to sauté them. Or you can just use a dry nonstick skillet. Cook them all until nicely dark on both sides (I like them almost black). Then toss them with the remaining 2 to 2 1/2 cups barbecue sauce. Now you can dig in. Or wait until the next day, when they will have deepened in flavor and become even chewier. To reheat, just throw them in the oven or on the grill, or eat them cold with some potato salad—yum! Store in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 1 week or in the freezer for up to 6 months.

MAKES 8 TO 10 SERVINGS

Zippy Barbecue Sauce

This is a well-balanced barbecue sauce for UnRibs, tofu, tempeh, or anything else where you want to capture that Fourth of July flavor. It's got just the right amount of sweetness balanced by acidity, heat, and spice. If you prefer your sauce on the sweeter side, feel free to increase the sweetener.

2 (6-ounce) cans tomato paste

1/2 cup maple syrup or organic sugar, or 3/4 cup coconut sugar, or more as desired

1/3 cup soy sauce

1/4 cup apple cider vinegar

2 tablespoons molasses

1/2 to 1 teaspoon liquid smoke

6 cloves garlic, minced

2 chipotle peppers in adobo sauce (canned), minced 2 tablespoons chili powder

1 tablespoon smoked paprika

2 teaspoons ground cumin

1 cup water

Combine all of the ingredients in a bowl and whisk together well or mix in a blender or food processor. Store this in a jar in the refrigerator for 2 to 3 months.

MAKES ABOUT 3 1/2 CUPS

Reprinted with permission from The Homemade Vegan Pantry: The Art of Making Your Own Staples by Miyoko Schinner. Copyright © 2015.

I believe that nonvegans are perfectly happy eating vegan food as long as they don't know that that's what they're doing. It is their mind that is interfering with their enjoyment of the food. For many years, I would make a vegan chocolate cream pie with tofu as its main ingredient—one of those early recipes from the 1970s. Every year I took two of them to a church picnic and everyone loved them, said they were terrific, and only then would I tell them that they were made out of tofu. I started using these pies for our boys' birthday cakes, especially for our older son since he loved them so much. On his thirteenth birthday, all these adolescent boys came over to build things. Bruce, my partner, and my sons had already done what he called an "appliance autopsy," taking apart broken appliances, like vacuum cleaners and old computers. We assembled all these disparate parts on tables with glue guns. The kids had so much fun tinkering and building. Then for dessert I served the chocolate cream pie. When they finished, my son ran around the room yelling: "You just ate tofu! You just ate tofu!" (This was during the tofuphobic mid-1990s.)

MDW:

We talked about Coetzee's essay having its roots in Austin, Texas. How does "meat country" relate to your idea for vegan mapping?

CJA:

In a sense, it is what his readers have missed about "meat country." I love Coetzee's essay for several reasons: for his description of his bike ride, for one, but also his summary of the conversation that occurred when he was invited to a dinner at a fellow faculty member's home. This is how he tells it: "We are invited to dinner by a colleague at the University. Dorothy calls his wife to warn her of our eccentric dietary habits. 'Oh dear!' says our hostess. 'We're having ribs first and then chicken. You don't eat chicken? There won't be anything else.'" There's that "doubly so" Coetzee refers to about Texas: if one dead animal is good to eat, two are even better.

Presumptions about Texas have perhaps kept people from recognizing something unspoken in "meat country": Coetzee wasn't just in Texas; he was in Austin, the most liberal city in Texas, and it had many vegetarian options. Austin had an alternate narrative to "there won't be anything else," and one could see it, map it; it was the vegan-friendly places where vegans and vegetarians could eat. The term vegan- friendly is almost a mapping term. There was the venerable vegetarian Mother's Café (founded in 1980), the West Lynn Café, Veggie Heaven, the Wheatsville Coop, the vegan-friendly Mr. Natural's, Magnolia Café, the Whole Foods mother store. Many Austin restaurants carried a black bean burger at that time, calling it a "Hippie Burger."⁹

Vegan-friendly is also a term that captures some of the implication of the vegan fermentation idea—that there are catalysts, inspiration, lactobacilli, in a sense—that are percolating around. In 1995 there was an Austin Vegetarian Association, a very large Texas Conference for the Animals with a gourmet vegan meal served by one of the premier hotels in Austin, or Dallas, or Houston—wherever the conference was held that year. And a Lone Star Vegetarian Chili Cook-Off had been around since 1989. (The Vegan Trailer Park in figure 1 is an example of the fulfillment of these earlier efforts.)

A vegan cookbook I was working on with the vegan chef who helped hotels veganize their menus was going to be called "It's Vegan, Y'all." Or, in answer to the assumptions of our status as "meat country," It's Vegan, Y'all—get over it.

Coetzee was in Austin for a few months in 1995 and biked everywhere, but his host must have lived in a meat country bubble to remain unexposed to the flourishing of the vegan culture there. There won't be anything else. When, in fact, there was … just around the corner.

I do think that Texas can have a lot of boring people when it comes to meat—there's no doubt about it. But a lot has changed, and I wish Coetzee, for instance, could come back to "meat country" now and have many great vegan meals.

I cannot tell you how many people are still shocked I lived in Texas and am a vegan (and a feminist). Everyone has an opinion about Texas. Here's the thing. You can leverage a mythology—a stereotype—and make it work for you. Where meat eating is doubled, as Coetzee observes it is in Texas, then the vegan, in a sense, enacts a doubled challenge against the meat culture. Beneath monolithic identities percolate alternatives; it's part of the fermentation process.

In retrospect, if I wanted to find a place where the dissonance of veganism could be a lever for education, what better place than Dallas, Texas? And, yes, as a theorist, it is good to have what you are studying close at hand! The double eccentricity that Coetzee describes, of being a vegan in "meat country," has in fact doubled my power. Not only am I a vegan who is surviving, but I'm a vegan who is surviving in Texas!

MDW:

In your book, Living among Meat Eaters, you reflect on many of the same frustrations that Coetzee describes about life in "meat country." To what extent was this book shaped by your experiences in Texas?

CJA:

For the years that I've been here in Texas, in my private life I was also "a minister's wife." And the church, like most churches, has a huge commitment to standard American fare. They actually have meals every Sunday, and they have picnics, and they have barbecues. The part of me that is an advocate wants to say (and I have actually written): "You know, the best mission trip that US churches could make is to stop eating meat. Instead of going to Africa to help the 'needy,' you could just stop eating meat and dairy and you would be doing more to help people around the world."¹⁰ At these church barbecues even the coleslaw was tainted with mayonnaise, and the beans were laced with pork or cooked in lard. I'd go and there was truly nothing you could eat that is vegan (there won't be anything else), and so I stopped going.

When the church finally had a book party for me, after being in the congregation for twenty-three years, I talked about writing Living among Meat Eaters. "Yes, I know for many years many of you never realized I was a writer, and it really helped me in writing this book. You gave me great material." A number of people laughed because they knew I had caught them out. People had often been very argumentative with me about veganism. Or in my face. They would boast about their meateating, or protest their need for meat, or try to identify supposed lapses on my part. They would ask me if I licked postage stamps, or did I wear leather?

When I moved to Dallas, I bought a pair of nonleather cowboy boots to wear. (The company's tagline was "Now that you stopped eating her, why are you wearing her?") People would see them and ask with an air of superiority, "You are a vegan—why are you wearing leather?" They could not imagine that cowboy boots might not be made of leather. I would let them really get caught up in me being a hypocrite. Finally, I would tell them that the boots were actually vegan. Why were they so concerned with my supposed hypocrisy and not their own? Those vegan cowboy boots allowed me to have some fun.

Living among Meat Eaters was also inspired by a dinner that I wrote about in The Sexual Politics of Meat, a dinner that defined so much for me. This happened in the early 1980s when I lived in western New York. I was invited to a dinner at a friend's house; he was an English professor, and several of his department colleagues were there as well. I brought an out-of-town friend with me. The minute we sat down to eat the whole dinner became an interrogation of my vegetarianism. They asked me question after question. "Well, what about civilization? We wouldn't have civilization without meat." "What about our canine teeth?" "Where do you get your protein?" etc. They repeated all the myths of a meat country, and I earnestly answered all of their questions because I thoroughly believed that if I answered every question, I could prevail.

As we left—before we had even gotten to the car—my friend said: "Do you go through that at every meal with others?" I thought about it and said, "Yes." And I realized that I was doing it all wrong. So Living among Meat Eaters is the consequence of that insight. I thought that all you had to do was tell people the facts, that if I could answer their objections, they'd give up their meat fetish. I took their arguments literally, misunderstanding these very repetitious interactions. But I should have known better; engaging with the substance of the arguments had not worked when I advocated as an activist for racially integrated housing. We generated maps and reports detailing how public housing didn't cause declines in property values. But that did nothing to derail their racist assumptions, so why did I not realize that prejudices don't want facts? It's immaterial that there's a fact.

This is how I evoked that dinnertime conversation in The Sexual Politics of Meat:

As though a text of meat must be recapitulated on the level of discourse—the flesh made word—you become the rabbit, the other person the hunter who must vindicate the sport. You will be teased, you will be baited. You are the quarry, not your beliefs. The other attacks, backs off. … In this situation, the issue of vegetarianism is a form of meat to meat eaters: it is something to be trapped and dismembered, it is a "dead issue." Vegetarian words are treated like animal flesh. And while the vegetarian is faulted for a failure to maintain objectivity, none at the dinner table is actually objective.¹¹

So Living among Meat Eaters is, in a sense, saying: "Look, don't get sucked into the drama." The drama that goes on at these tableside debates is not the vegan's dilemma but a problem for the meat, dairy, and egg eater to solve. Why, when their conscience tells them otherwise, do they still not only wear her but eat her? It's like the maps for the AAR (or probably any academic conference): Why is anyone, in 2019, reaching for the normative map? Why not follow the vegan map?

When it came time to negotiate the inevitable dinner invitations to Texas barbecues—that is, ribs and chicken—I would say, "May I bring something?" If not, we'd identify items that I could eat, that were untouched

Fig 3.

"Meat Country" drawn by Carol J. Adams

by bacon or lard. I didn't want people to see an empty plate; that was not going to send any affirmative message about veganism.

What is most interesting to me about Coetzee's "Meat Country"—to return again to one of the ur-documents for Texas vegans—is his bike ride to Bastrop from Austin. He locates himself outside of Austin. He writes,

I make the mistake of stranding myself on a bicycle on a country road near Bastrop, thirty miles east of Austin, with the latemorning sun already beginning to sear. It will take two hours and more to get home. I am carrying water, but the water is already at blood heat, warm enough to make one gag. My fantasies are anyhow not of water but of food: of a great dish of rice and peppers—poblano, ancho, manzano, chimayo, serrano.

He was burning up, and not just from the searing sun … There won't be anything else. What's a polite person to do?

It makes me wonder about how his fertile imagination is fed on bike rides. I see his thoughts spinning like the wheels of his bike. What if there were someone who didn't eat ribs and chicken and spoke their

Fig 4.

Donald of Dallas, "Peppers." 13 ½ inches by 11 inches. Acrylic painting. Created at the Stewpot Art Program, Dallas, Texas.

mind? Did his fictional animal rights character (often referred to as his alter ego), Elizabeth Costello, make her appearance to him perhaps on the ride back to Austin? (A ride, that, when I tell Austin biking friends about it, gives them chills—now that route, even on a country road, is seen as very unsafe.) The rest of us meet Costello in Coetzee's The Lives of Animals, his Princeton lecture that became a book a couple of years after his Austin experience. Perhaps that Texas befuddlement, "Oh dear? You don't eat chicken? There won't be anything else," paved the way for Elizabeth Costello to sweep into the lecture room and into our minds to rebut that perspective.

In this sense, "Meat Country," the essay, and meat country, the place, demonstrate that it is a good place for the imagination of a vegetarian or vegan.

MDW:

You suggest how Coetzee's writings are a source of inspiration. What does it take for vegan fermentation to take place?

CJA:

Hmmm. Another example is in order. In the East Village for forty years, Angelica's Kitchen not only produced some of the finest vegan food around, but the founder, Leslie McEachern, trained many vegan chefs who went on to run their own restaurants or write incredible vegan cookbooks.¹² Angelica's Kitchen's signature dish, "Dragon Bowl," is now mainstream. That's vegan fermentation. When I talk about fermentation, I am referring to a culture that literally brings about change. I think about fermentation and some of its possible synonyms, like incubation and transformation, and see them as metaphors for social justice activism.

Fermentation also grounds us in culinary skills and arts … We all need to eat, and what or who we eat is an ethical issue. Fermented food, also known as probiotic food, is good for your digestive tract, creating an environment conducive to the growth of healthy bacteria. Some of the most delicious fermented foods, like tempeh, miso, kimchi, and sauerkraut, are vegan. As an ecofeminist, I like the ideas of creating environments conducive to growth; that certainly challenges the current oppressive cultures we live within.

So fermentation is about "culture"—think sourdough culture, for instance. Fermentation often can use what you already have to leverage something different into existence, like the way water and flour become that sourdough culture. Sandor Katz in The Art of Fermentation says that learning how to ferment is a way of relating to the world that is uniquely yours. So too with activism. Change, like fermentation, often requires an agent.

About fermentation, Katz offers these guidelines:¹³

• • Do not be afraid of mold (just remove it and eat the sauerkraut underneath). I say, don't be afraid to push back when the dominant world airs its views, disagreement, dissension, Mold happens.

• • Change takes time. Preserving projects for fermentation may take 3 months … or 3 years. Katz writes, "The empowerment when you succeed is matchless." I have no illusions that we have "succeeded" with veganism, but certainly we are able to map many more vegan and vegan-friendly places than ten or twenty or thirty years ago.

• • Katz says: "Forgive Yourself." "There are times when you do not succeed as well as you had hoped. It could mean you did not watch the thing as closely as you should have. You were busy or out of town. Learn from your mistakes. Fix them. Every activist needs to remind themselves of this."

• • "Do not be afraid to try again." And again. And again.

• • Be persistent fermenting, Katz says. Fermenting takes awhile … It takes imagination and courage.¹⁴

MDW:

You've spoken at so many universities around the world over the course of your career, delivering your famous "slideshow" and other lectures and keynotes, that you must have a lot of different reference points on the relationship between place and vegan fermentation around the world. So—what's your sense of how veganism varies across space and place and have you come to any kind of observations about that relationship?

CJA:

It's true that being the author of The Sexual Politics of Meat has given me entry to vegan spaces around the world. Inevitably, wherever I have gone, we have talked about vegan food. I have learned so many vegan cooking techniques from others.

I was recently in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for an event. We were staying at a friend's house. That weekend a vegan pop-up bake sale was happening. Your readers should watch for vegan pop-up sales in which several businesses, or individuals who love to bake, create an event. A kind of spontaneous fermentation project. Even if a community hasn't yet sustained vegan businesses, these pop-ups are ways to participate in vegan culture. Because of a flight schedule, the organizers let me in early to see all their wonderful goods. The cheddar spinach scones I got there were so delicious I asked for permission to put the recipe on my website.¹⁵

On campuses, I met such inventive students. I'd write down their recipes, their innovations, their favorite cookbooks and return home and try those recipes; then on my next trip to a campus, I'd share what I was learning and jot down more recipes, cookbooks, innovations. I was invited to so many places; I would not just get recipes, but I would also learn about new food items to prepare—like jackfruit, which, for Texas barbecues, can take the place of pulled pork. I would get these "fermentative vegan cultures" from around the world and take them back home with me.

I think social media has helped accelerate veganism; what occurred for me with the students over dinner in dining halls happens all the time online. You share recipes, and survival methods, and places to go. In the 1990s that kind of vegan fermentation would have taken place over a meal. This new geography of veganism, shared online, has also helped reconfigure the historical and geographical narratives about food and place.

I've been able to enjoy a variety of cuisines among diverse communities. I'm hesitant to make a declarative, overarching conclusion about this diversity. But I want to emphasize that one of the exciting developments is the decentering of whiteness by vegans of color, chefs and activists and writers who are recognizing and sharing an alternative narrative.¹⁶ There's a reclamation of Meso-American plant-based traditions and an articulation of vegan recipes of the African diaspora.¹⁷

MDW:

It has always seemed to me that one of your core contributions, both to discussions about vegan diets and to larger conversations in ecofeminist philosophy, has been your pragmatic and sympathetic approach as a critic. Your work offers readers more than just a mournful critical chore. In Burger, for instance, not only do you critique the burger as a symbol of intersecting oppressions, but you also take the less predictable path of considering burgers without these associations—permitting us to imagine reconstituted burgers with alternative histories and geographies. Rather than orienting around theses of alienation, for instance, your scholarship tends to illuminate readings and possibilities that have been hidden in plain sight.

CJA:

Thank you. Yes. I love doing that. Take the hamburger, for example. A number of authors have claimed that the hamburger originated at the end of the nineteenth century at a county fair. And yet the hamburger is really an urban food. So there has always been an interesting juxtaposition when the historical-fictional content of hamburgers hits up against the historical realities of burgers. Dallas Cowboys founder Clint Murchison, Jr., claimed Texas as the original home of hamburgers. He supposedly said, "If we let the Yankees get away claiming the invention of hamburgers, they'll be going after chili next." As if Texans invented chili … (And note, the association with cowboys was a stretch to begin with. Dallas businessmen in the early 1960s challenged the name of the football team; they wanted to present a more cultured image that differentiated Dallas from the cow town sensibilities of Fort Worth. And the bovine extraction from Texas that is memorialized in the name only occurred for a few years after the Civil War.)

In my book Burger I argue that it doesn't really matter where the hamburger began, and that, in fact, burgers had a variety of beginnings. The hamburger had to be claimed to be uniquely "American," so what better place to locate its origins than in this celebration of Americana, the county fairs? There is a geographical capitalism going on in claiming the burger. As I write in Burger,

Whether or not it really was invented at a county fair, it had to begin there. Before hamburgers became a symbol for the United States, the county fair was. … The fairgrounds guarantee the hamburger its 'American' birthright. Ironically, the county fair, celebrator of all things agrarian, popularized a food related to industrialization.¹⁸

I not only wanted to show the problem with claiming the "Americanness" of the hamburger, but I also wanted to divest the hamburger of its uniqueness, because in essence it is simply what I call a "single portion protein patty." Once you've redefined it that way, you can ask, "Well, what are other examples of single portion protein patties?" And you can find the answer in a variety of plant-based foods, like falafel. Once you liberate the dish from its limits as a hamburger, then all of a sudden you can consider how it's not that we vegans are "imitating" the hamburger with plant-based versions, but the hamburger was an imitation of plantbased patties. So why not be provocative and take a carnivore's symbol, empty it of its associations with jingoism, animals' death, white settler colonialism, and as well make the case that it's in fact replicating plantbased alternatives with much older traceable traditions?

MDW:

Another major element of your work is your ecofeminist approach to rethinking historical relationships between land and culture—in terms of how our language reflects cultures of domination, the domination of animals, the domination of women, and colonial processes. You describe the irony of the metaphors "groundbreaking" and "pioneering" for your classic book, The Sexual Politics of Meat. How have your ideas on these subjects evolved over the course of your career?

CJA:

I always think it is ironic to hear the terms "pioneering," "groundbreaking," and "seminal" used to describe my work. I know "seminal" might also derive from plant biology, but when I hear the word, I think, really? Couldn't my work be "ovular" instead?

In The Sexual Politics of Meat I wrote about colonial presumptions about meat eating and showed how colonial nations like Great Britain articulated an idea that they prevailed over other countries because they were beef eaters and the colonized were rice eaters. I was also very interested in the creation of United States as "meat country" and how this meat country had its origins in settler colonialism. Part of the allure of "America" for many European immigrants was the democratization of meat consumption. Immigrants wrote home telling their families that they ate meat three times a day, that one could eat as much meat as one wanted. After the American Civil War, meat consumption expanded further with the centralization of industrialized slaughterhouses and refrigerated railroad cars (which could deliver trimmed carcasses instead of transporting the entire living animal).

I had always been offended by the bumper sticker that's all around the Midwest that reads: "Eat Beef. The West Wasn't Won on Salad." Eight words that encapsulate the sexual politics of meat (beef over salad); Euro-American settler colonialism; the cowboy's domination of animals; the decimation of bison; and the subordination of Indigenous land and labor. Could any other words so cogently sum up the devastation of it all in one jingoistic, self-assured phrase?

But not only the stolen land, the dispossession and slaughtering of original residents, the eager depletion of resources, settler colonialism operated by imposing white European dietary practices on the land and those who lived there. One of the demarcations of the evolutionary status of a culture has been whether it was dependent on animal protein. Thus, a hierarchy descends from Western white meat eaters to pretechnological hunters. Then a white masculine primitivism, keyed to subordination, dominance, violence, and control, appropriates supposedly Native practices to reify meat eating and hunting.

But that's just one side of the story. There's been a lot of wonderful and sophisticated work that has come out since The Sexual Politics of Meat in Native American history and in the history and critical theory of settler colonialism. I certainly want the concepts from The Sexual Politics of Meat to keep up with, and always remain in dialogue with, new critical work appearing in Indigenous studies, critical race studies, queer studies, and other fields. In retrospect, I think one of the most important insights of the book was that it helped expose and explain deepseated understandings of the "American" self as a meat eater. This is really what Coetzee was up against when he visited "meat country"—not just the burden of Texas, but the burdens of the concept of the American self—the American sensibility that "I have the right to eat meat; a democratic right." It's so hard to untangle meat eating from American conceptions of selfh ood because any attempt to do so can make Americans extremely uncomfortable, as their very self feels under attack. (Why are you challenging my right to eat meat?) In very base ways, meat eating and dairy and egg consumption are how Americans, especially white Americans, define themselves—especially when their businesses and livelihoods are also wrapped up in animal agriculture.

Of course, these American notions of the meat-eating self are also entangled so deeply with gender and sexuality. One of the things I am really interested in is how the sexual politics of meat continue to hold such deep resonance despite America's wavering commitment to the gender binary in other cultural spaces. The sexual politics of meat has remained a central sphere in which Americans have reinforced the gender binary—a retrograde presumption about how humans live, an idea that there are just two sexes: beef and tofu. I think, unfortunately, that ideas about the sexuality of meat remain a very strong limiting factor for many peoples' ways of thinking about gender, and for limiting cultural transformation.

MDW:

As you point out, you've never had an academic appointment the same way as many of your colleagues in feminist theory, in animal studies, food studies, and in other fields. And yet you are something of a faculty member of the metaphorical global university writ large. I was struck to learn how, as you work on a new edition of The Pornography of Meat, you had gathered so many new images, unsolicited, from readers of your work from around the world.

CJA:

The sad thing is that the examples I get—which as you note are from around the world, sent by what I call "grassroots sociologists"—indicate how pervasive (and perverse) the figuring of the sexual politics of meat has become: from South Africa to Croatia, from Brazil to the Netherlands, from New Zealand to France. (An interesting project would be to map the places where examples of the sexual politics of meat are found.)

For the new edition, I've had to add new material about the use of meat metaphors in the #MeToo movement, the right-wing use of meat eating and dairy in efforts to promote white supremacy, fat-shaming, the association of animality and race, the way the gender binary is reinforced through the sexual politics of meat, and the language of President Trump, the sexual-exploiter-in-chief. Meat ads had already encouraged their own form of grabbing 'em by the p—y. From a Nando's ad in India in early 2016—"Try something you can grab with both hands"—to the language of barbecues—"Booty Rub," "How do you like Butt Rubbed?" "Rubb some butt," and "Slap Ya Momma's"—fixation on touching bodies that are clearly marked as female can be found. In recent years there's been a phenomenon of transport trucks in Europe featuring a sexualized pig on their backs, as living pigs are being taken to slaughter. And, as you observed, "there is something inherently aggressive about putting an image on wheels in the first place. An image fixed in one place has to be sought out or discovered—people circulate around it. But an image that circulates around people carries powerful geographical effects."¹⁹

An entire arc of the pornography of meat hit its stride between the first publication and the new edition: advertisements for the patriarchal burger. Misogynistic hamburger advertisements tend toward four themes: naming hamburgers to evoke associations with sexual exploitation and sexual violence (the "Weinstein" burger, the "Casting Couch" burger, the "Fake Taxi" burger, the "Marie Da Penha" burger in Brazil, referring to a battered woman for whom domestic violence legislation is named); depicting women as hamburgers desiring consumption; women consuming huge burgers that function as the phallus; and the promise that consuming hamburgers will fulfill the expectations of a sexual politics of meat culture that requires maleness to constantly renew itself through meat and dairy consumption. Consider Matthew Ramsey's "Lolita Burger" (a part of his "Pornburger" project) and the contents he suggested should make it up. The Washington Post referred to his burgers as brazenly "heteromasculine."²⁰ The contents of the Lolita Burger are peanut butter and jelly (childhood tastes), foie gras (sophisticated adult tastes), in a "choux," most often used for sweets

Fig 5.

Carol J. Adams holds up Miyoko Schinner's "UnRibs" that she made for her Fourth of July barbecue. Photo by Benjamin Buchanan. Used by permission.

(Lolita loved sweets). Foie gras is in the twenty-first century like Lolita in the late twentieth: something naughty, illicit, charged through with a sense of violation.

MDW:

Were you surprised when VegNews named you the "Vegan Queen of Dallas"?²¹ How does that work into your notions about vegan fermentation?

CJA:

Oh gosh, that was fun and funny and a surprise! It happened because VegNews picked Dallas as one their top ten vegan cities in 2017, which showed the pace and progress of vegan fermentation here. Today, I don't have to map out the one Whole Foods Market in town (nor do I have to go to Whole Foods at all). If I want to eat at a restaurant, I don't even have to negotiate the menu. I can go to an all-vegan place like Spiral Diner, or a vegan Mexican restaurant, El Palote Panadería. I can go to a countless number of vegan-friendly and veg-friendly places. Many vegan businesses are flourishing here; D Magazine recently did a piece titled "Meet the Black-Owned Restaurants Fueling Dallas' Vegan Scene."²²

Jamey Scott, the author of the VegNews piece, is one of the many reasons for this growth. Jamey organized vegans in Dallas to leverage their combined force as consumers to help reshape local restaurant menus. He created Dallas Vegan Drinks, a social group that made arrangements to go to restaurants that weren't vegan but promised to develop some vegan dishes and keep them on the menu in return for hosting his group. One of these places even created an entirely new vegan restaurant as a result. So that's an example of the fermentation process in a place like Dallas. Jamey is also the force behind the Texas Veggie State Fair, which has grown from 750 people attending the first one in 2010 to 15,000 in 2018.²³ As I walked around the 2019 Veggie State Fair at the Dallas Farmer's Market—along with thousands of others—I had to pinch myself that I was indeed in Dallas. So many vegans in Dallas all in one place! And of course, there was a map to guide us to the more than sixty vendors of vegan food and beverages! Jamey says he began the Texas Veggie State Fair because he wanted a vegan corny dog and couldn't get one at the Texas State Fair (which takes over a part of Dallas for almost a month in the fall).²⁴ I say it's the best thing that has come from a corny dog.

I think, language aside, the question about "who was the vegan king or queen of Dallas" was asking, "Who is someone who lives in Dallas we should know about?" And I loved the reasons Jamey Scott offered for "crowning" me. Besides noting my books, he referred to my local activism as well, saying, "she stays active in the local community through her volunteer work at The Stewpot, a center for helping homeless and at-risk persons. In addition to her general volunteer work, she authors a vegan-centric column in STREETZine, a street paper published by The Stewpot." Each month, I used to pick up four hundred servings of vegan kung pao "chicken" donated by Veggie Garden and transport it to the Stewpot. At the Stewpot, there are several vegetarian homeless individuals. When one of them promotes a new edition of STREETZine, she always says, "You've got to try Carol Adams's new vegan recipe" or something like that. So that's another way veganism hits the streets of Dallas!

Many people get uptight when they find out you are a vegan. They think that since you care about animals you must not care about people. In calling attention to my work with the Stewpot, Jamey was subtly challenging that either-or assumption about social justice. It's only nonvegans who think caring about animals keeps us from caring about other social justice issues.

When Jamey suggested that I was the "Vegan Queen of Dallas" it was sweet, as though saying, "Here's someone in Dallas who is disproving the stereotype of being a vegan and disproving the stereotype of being a person in meat country." With so many people reading my work over the years, many never really knew where I lived or what I did outside the covers of my books (or as you pointed out in the beginning, assumed I lived somewhere like Cambridge, Massachusetts). As an author and theorist, I was a person without a place. So now that I'm the "Vegan Queen of Dallas," I feel like an author and theorist with a place. Though I sense abdication is in the future.