Diet, Identity, Lierre Keith, Chili Pepper Pie

As someone who cooks for many different types of dietary needs, I have to keep open minded. I have personally been Macrobiotic, Vegan, Vegetarian, all organic, and now am an omnivore.  Especially in my Macro and Vegan days in my early 20′s, I had been a bit self righteous. To my eyes, newly seeing the connection to food  politics and the environment, it seemed so obvious not to eat a mainstream meat-based diet. I was clear that I had the answer. And I made sure others around me knew it. I would mostly hang out with others who shared my views, and talk about food alot.  And the funny thing is that I felt relaxed and open minded compared to some others around me who were really uptight.  I was and at times can still be rigid with my thinking about food.

Don’t get me wrong, I love food…alot. I do go to bed reading cookbooks, its true. And I have set up my life to eat as high quality healthy food as possible. It’s very important to me.  I have my standards. But what I am interested in is for food to bring us together,not isolate and alienate each other.  My question is can we do what we want and need to do around our food choices and be part of the world?  Too often on my cooking jobs, I have people with special food needs who are really stressed out about food.  I work with them, recognize myself in them, however notice what it does to me and to them.

I am reminded of a story I heard once about Michio Kushi, one of the founders of Macrobiotics. He went to a student’s mothers house with a bunch of his students. She made for them a big plate of chocolate chip cookies, which is everything a Macro diet is not. Round and round those cookies went around the group,with each of the students refusing the cookies. Except when it got to Michio Kushi, who ended up eating all the cookies.  When they left the house,Michio Kushi scolded his students for being rude, that you don’t insult your mother that way, and that the good qualities of her love in the food outweigh anything. I think about this story alot, and about how to be gracious and what is really healing.

I have been thinking about what happened to Lierre Keith here in San Francisco recently. Lierre Keith, who had once been a vegan, but now is not due to her health degenerating, has written a book called The Vegetarian Myth . She says that vegan-ism and vegetarianism is not the solution the worlds problems, but that the advent of agriculture has actually harmed the planet.  Ok, She has some opinions I may or may not agree with. I don’t know her work well enough to comment on this. However, what I do know is that while she was speaking on this, 3 people in black hoodies attacked her with chili pepper pie that got in her eyes. It was planned, as 40-50 people in the audience stood up and started handing out flyers.  The flyers were about vegan-ism.  I have been appalled by this story. Has it really come to this where vegan-ism is some kind of untouchable ideology that cannot be critiqued? Really? That someone who does so must be shut up and not allowed to speak with a chili pepper pie? And given the history of pieing in recent years where CEOs of awful companies were getting pied, does this woman deserve that?   Pieing is an interesting form. Its an attack couched in a “cute” clown package of a pie.  Its not cute, nor is it funny.

Now I know that this was just a small group of people, not all vegans who did this. Still, the questions arises about what happens when we over identify with our diet or anything.

Lierre Keith\’s Chili Pepper Pie comments