Mastering the Art of Plant-Based Cooking

Introduction

Of all the eating trends over the last few decades, none has gotten more traction—or press—than the move toward plant-based cooking.

But the truth is, vegetarian and vegan diets date back millennia, to the Buddhism and Jainism of the Indian subcontinent and to ancient Greece. According to some (disputed) reports, Pythagoras abstained from animal foods. (Would that make veganism the true Pythagorean theorem?) In the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon catalogued a long history of vegetarian Spartans, Indians, a Jewish sect of Essenes, and various Christian ascetics “who had lived unusually long lives,” according to Tristram Stuart’s fascinating book, The Bloodless Revolution. And there’s evidence that much earlier than Pythagoras, despite the claims of a certain trendy diet, humans during the Paleolithic era subsisted mostly on plants.

Modern iterations of this way of eating have deep roots, some of them intertwining. In India, which has the world’s largest proportion of vegetarians, meat-free eating is most widely practiced among the upper caste. India’s religious traditions all teach compassion for animals, and ancient ideas connect spirituality to low-resource living, which includes rejecting animals as food. India has also had a strong influence on the rest of the world, with Mahatma Gandhi and other prominent Indians preaching the gospel of vegetarianism on trips to the West.

Given the two nations’ relationship, India’s ideas have had a particularly strong effect on Britain. There, in keeping with ideas of plant-based eating as a form of spiritual cleansing, a vegetarian community called the Concordium established itself in the mid-nineteenth century at mystic James Pierrepont Greaves’s utopian Alcott House. Originally, “vegetarian” connoted abstention from all animal products, but at Britain’s Vegetarian Society, the term was loose enough to allow for dairy and egg consumption until the Vegan Society spun off in the mid-twentieth century, coining the name “vegan” from the first and last letters of the word “vegetarian” because its founders believed veganism to be “the beginning and end” of vegetarianism: where it got its start and its natural conclusion.

In the United States, meanwhile, the Seventh-day Adventist Church encouraged vegetarianism starting in the mid-1800s, and that movement—along with Jamaican Rastafarianism and the Nation of Islam— helped lead to a growth in plant-based eating in the Black community. Sylvester Graham, father of the graham cracker, bridged the worlds of religion and public health around the same time, when, as the cholera epidemic headed toward America, he drew crowds interested in his ideas that a vegetarian diet was not only outlined by God but also the best way to prevent disease. Much later, the idea of avoiding animal products for environmental reasons got a big boost from Frances Moore Lappé’s 1971 blockbuster book Diet for a Small Planet, and in the decades that followed, the health arguments from such books as T. Colin Campbell’s The China Study in 2005 and the documentary Forks Over Knives in 2011 converted plenty of readers and viewers.

Now, it’s been five years since The Economist declared 2019 the “year of the vegan,” and endorsements by Ellen DeGeneres, Al Gore, Tom Brady, Natalie Portman, Mike Tyson, Beyoncé, and more have given the movement celebrity cred.

But what’s really grown over the last decade or two is not the number of people who label themselves vegan or vegetarian; that has stayed mostly static at between 2 and 6 percent of the population, depending on the survey. What keeps increasing is the number who are eating more plant-based meals. In the same ways that people say, “Let’s go get Italian tonight,” now it might be “Let’s go to that vegan place.”

One of the longest-running, most statistically sound surveys on the topic is from the Vegetarian Resource Group, whose studies have found that while the number of vegetarians has ticked up to 6 percent, with half of those vegan, the percentage who say they sometimes eat vegetarian or vegan meals jumped from 36 percent in 2015 to 63 percent in 2022. The trend is even more striking among younger generations: Forbes magazine reported a few years back that fully three-quarters of Gen-Z’ers said they were cutting down on meat consumption.

What difference does it make? Well, “vegan” is a lifestyle and a commitment, while “plant-based” is just dinner. Or a product like all those alt-milks that have taken over grocery dairy aisles. So-called tech meats like the Beyond and Impossible burgers aren’t even targeting vegans and vegetarians; they’re after the omnivores who, whether it’s for their own health or the planet’s, have vowed to nudge their diet away from meat, one burger at a time. In 2020, Bloomberg estimated that in the decade leading to 2030, the number of plant-based foods in supermarkets would increase fivefold.

Meanwhile, in my role as the food editor at a national newspaper, I see many separate but overlapping strains of modern plant-based cooking. I see hippie, post-punk, and cutting-edge. I see comfort, wellness, natural and whole foods, African diasporic, Middle Eastern. And of course I see the original vegetarians and vegans, including Indian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and other Asian cuisines influenced by Buddhist or other ancient religious traditions, along with precolonial Central and South American and Indigenous. In this book, I bring them together with the aim of helping codify plant-based cooking as not a lifestyle, not a philosophy, but . . . a cuisine.

I’m a longtime participant in this way of cooking and eating—but as more of an expat than a native. I’m a journalist by trade, a formal student of French and Italian cooking, a former certified competitive barbecue judge, and a West Texas native of Assyrian descent who has traveled (and traveled to eat) in Asia, Central and South America, Europe, Canada, and much of the United States. Unlike some plantbased cooks and eaters, I didn’t flip a switch and jump headlong into a vegan diet. I’ve been moving in fits and starts in that direction for decades, eating less and less meat until one day in 2012 when I realized I didn’t want it at all. I surprised even myself when I opened my freezer to start brainstorming for a dinner party and realized it was full of meat I had been buying from the farmers market—and not cooking.

The process sped up from there. When I first publicly announced that I was vegetarian, I called it my “second coming out” because I realized that the reactions, especially from chefs, colleagues, and other food-obsessed friends, were similar to the ones I had gotten the first time, when I came out as gay: How did this happen? Where did we go wrong? Is it just a phase? I joke, but a dozen years later, the last question has answered itself.

That doesn’t mean my diet stopped evolving. At first, I depended heavily on eggs and dairy products on the mistaken assumption that I needed them to create something satisfying. But over the years, they have taken up less and less space in my cooking—and are now virtually absent. If it weren’t for recipe and ingredient tastings that I want to be able to engage in for work, and if it weren’t for the rare instances when a restaurant menu (particularly when I’m traveling) offers no other palatable options, I’d be more of a purist about it.

In that sense, I’m surely like a lot of readers of this book: forever interested in the myriad ways to make plant-based meals delicious—vibrant in flavor, interesting in texture, wholesome and nourishing to eat—and perhaps less interested in claiming an identity, as helpful as that can be for those who want to.

As a longtime food editor and writer, I’ve dived into the complexities of regional cuisines in virtually every place I’ve been—and plenty I haven’t. So I know firsthand, professionally and personally, that a cuisine is defined by its history, its practitioners, often its geography. Since plant-based cooking is practiced all over the world, it has many underpinnings, making it particularly rich and complex. It borrows from cuisines everywhere, but in the same way that American cooking is made up of influences from all the immigrants who have come (or been brought) here, along with Native Americans, plant-based cooking is made up of traditionally vegetable-focused cuisines the world over along with interpretations that turn meat-focused cuisines more fully toward vegetables.