All meat is processed.
Processed foods get a terrible rap, leading some to avoid plant-based meats altogether. But what if everything we’ve been told about processed foods, and meat, was bologna?
27th December, Lisbon, Portugal
The group next to me received three colossal plates of seafood. Based on the grandiosity of their feast, I'm guessing they were about to enjoy their last meal on Earth and were going out with a bang. The waiter then proceeded to open the heads of the giant shrimp lying in a bed of smaller, less impressive shrimp. As the hot air wiggled, he scrambled their brains and smeared the formerly sentient mush on the rest of their soon-to-be-consumed bodies.
The group suddenly looked nothing like the tired people they were just before the food arrived. Their pupils, now dilated, were as wide as your average Burning Man visitor's, and their faces were pleasantly dumbed down by about 30 IQ points, thanks to the child-like smiles involuntarily bursting off their faces. Witnessing these irrational acts of culinary barbarism, for some reason, I did not feel any disgust. Actually, I succumbed to sentimentality.
One of my core memories is of my mom toiling away in the kitchen all day whenever we had guests. The whole day was organized for them, and the chaos in the kitchen grew at a steady pace till the very moment of our friends' arrival. That’s when the apron went off, the sweat on the face was pat down, and it was showtime.
Seeing how guests’ faces went aglow with every dish she brought is reminiscent of the people gorging on half of the coral reef here. Though she never scrambled any brains, nothing was rational about her process or the food itself. What my mom made was always beautifully ostentatious, unreasonably elaborate, and above all else - fucking delicious. She managed to organize madness into beauty, and she did it all for others.
This was a staple of my childhood, so of course, I’ve contemplated having a restaurant. I also remember the restaurant experience that tipped me to the dark side. An experience so shitty that a bad review just didn’t cut it. To vent, I needed to open my own fucking place.
The restaurant that made open a restaurant
A new vegan place opened in my hometown. As a plant-based food enthusiast, I needed to try it. Now, the standard leafy logo with the name being a play on the word “veg” was a fair warning. But foolishly, I proceeded to enter anyway.
Thanks to the mold-ish tiling, the first vibe I got was that of a re-fitted gas station toilet with tables and a plywood counter, which featured many, many vegan-themed leaflets. Walls had no art but were instead adorned with laminated images of cows on fields, implying gratitude for not eating them with scripted fonts that said, “friends, not food” and “thank you.” On shelves lay books blessed with an aesthetic that can only be described as “Microsoft Word.” The titles of books condescendingly told me to “open my eyes” and showed me the “path to empathy” or promised me some version of bliss.
The walls were colored half orange, with sporadically placed illustrations of mandalas. A vague nod to Eastern cultures was indeed necessary because “that's where spirituality is from,” and not eating animals is a spiritual practice, many would say. I guess that also explains why books on yoga and meditation were peppered so generously. Then came the food.
The nutritionally dysfunctional, sensorically offensive, and unreasonably overpriced food they served was, quite simply, the worst food I ever had anywhere.
The nutritionally dysfunctional, sensorically offensive, and unreasonably overpriced food they served was, quite simply, the worst food I ever had anywhere. It was the purest manifestation of a complete disregard for enjoyment. There was no texture, nothing to chew. The food simply gave up as soon as it entered my mouth. Even I, a person striving to eat as plant-based as possible and no stranger to the bean-o-verse, could not stomach the beige fiesta they called food. Beige, both in the sense that it tasted bland and that everything on the plate was some hue of yellow.
The dishes on the menu even had tiny signage explaining how much emissions meals have compared to animal-based foods. This “hobby environmentalism,” paired with the eastern tapestry of the interior and the “dental green” hue of the branding, created a visual symphony that made… SAD. And the sheer volume of activistic messaging and printed leaflets was probably responsible for, I’m guessing, 1% of global emissions.
In essence, that place did not feel like a restaurant. Being there didn’t make me feel like food was the point, but converting each unsuspecting visitor. And yeah, that is not chill.
Thoughts, assumptions, what if's
I believe people must be inspired by food, not constrained, to consider eating more plant-based. I’ve seen friends convert in my own kitchen. And by “convert,” I don’t mean turning vegan. I mean simply losing the wildly unnecessary stigma that plant-based food is boring or that you have to be a strict vegan to eat more plants. I would never try to persuade somebody to be anything, really. I would, however, always impose food I liked onto people.
“You JUST gots to try this.”
I wanted to open a restaurant that celebrated food without all the identity baggage of veganism. My assumption was: “People are willing to eat more plant-based food if it’s tasty and if its purveyor doesn’t impose a new identity.” It was pretty simple—way simpler than opening a restaurant. But gee golly … the boys gon’ opened it.
Two years in three paragraphs
Just one year after opening, we were named ”top 5 popular places” in Ljubljana by Gault & Millau and ranked as the 25th best vegan bistro in Europe by some (allegedly credible) food blog. We were doing great and had expanded our menu from the initial 4 dishes to a vast offering, able to quench any craving, whether healthy or naughty. All the food we made followed the same rigorous principles and had to be exquisite, both nutritionally and sensorically. We knew that each bite we served had to penetrate layers of prejudice people held against plant-based food, so every dish had to be a spectacle. We made our own products. We sourced ingredients from local farms or made them ourselves. We sold food products from local creators. We fermented everything that lent itself to a life in a jar. Shit was fucking wholesome. We hosted concerts, poetry readings, natural wine festivals, and, of course, all-out hedonistic dinner parties with endless food. It was hard, but hot-diggity damn, there was something magical and deeply transformative about hosting people, day in, day out.
The only thing I loved more than hosting itself was that we hosted predominantly non-vegans. Not that I don't enjoy hosting all people equally, but nothing beats a compliment like “I am a religious meat eater, and I must say, this is one of my favorite places to eat.” We received this sentiment daily. It proved our assumption true - it doesn’t matter whether it is vegan or not. As long as it’s good food, people will come. Veganism is an ethical stance, but plant-based food is just food. Some like it, some don’t. It proved to me that there is a part of food culture where we can all come together and celebrate the fact that we even get to eat in the first place.
Another common sentiment we got from our clientele was, “Thank you for not shoveling veganism down my throat. I do like plant-based foods. I just don’t want to go to most vegan places because I don't want to be perceived as “one of them.” Yeah. Food is THAT painfully tied to identity. That’s why there were no happy cows on our walls, though conceptually, happy cows are dope. There were also no mentions of emissions on our menu.
Learning to respect food culture
We closed 2,5 years after opening thanks to a little virus that visited us in 2020. Mea culpa.
Despite all my clothes becoming permanently stained with grease, I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. I learned that food culture must be respected, cherished, and preserved as we attempt to shift to a more “responsible” food system. And in the center of it all lay something I saw in the “shrimpocalypse,” as well as in my mom’s cooking—irrationality—an essential component of human nature of which importance we seem to underestimate.
We now track sleep, count calories, measure body fat, check emissions, reach KPIs, crush goals, optimize micro-nutrients, … it’s all too fucking rational, and it’s driving us insane. But we need ways to let go of our socially constructed decency from time to time. We need a happy place where irrationality can exist and flourish. A safe place where we can dip our tongues into the umami of deviousness and let our humanity come out of the shadows and play. Else we risk it becoming something quite sinister.
But we need ways to let go of our socially constructed decency from time to time. We need a happy place where irrationality can exist and flourish, a safe place where we can dip our tongues into the umami of deviousness and let our humanity come out of the shadows and play. Else we risk it becoming something quite sinister.
So I wonder, is there a better method of escaping it all than gorging on a completely absurd meal surrounded by people we love?
Food, and more precisely, food culture, may be one of our last meaningful ways of escaping. It certainly beats drugs. Food allows us to forget who we are, but somewhat strangely, it also reminds us of who we really are. Especially in a group setting.
My culinary “activistic tendencies” have also softened and gotten more nuanced thanks to meeting more people in 2 years than I have met in the previous 30. People on all parts of the “veg spectrum.” It taught me, quite viscerally, that the internet is not a good indicator of what people are actually like. Reading online commentary, one could easily assume that all vegans are militant extremists and all who eat meat are raging Neanderthals. But that is not the case, I can say with a sigh of relief.
Reading online commentary, one could easily assume that all vegans are militant extremists and all who eat meat are raging Neanderthals. But that is not the case, I can say with a sigh of relief.
Eating out or at home is one of the last normal things we have left in this divided, ever-more-techno-dystopian world. Do I still believe we should all strive to have more plant-based diets? Sure. If not for animals, we should do it for people. The animal-centric agriculture we have doesn’t successfully feed all the people now, and it sure won’t be able to feed 10 billion in 2050. This fact is often overlooked due to our public discourse being overly focused on emissions.
I don’t like dividing people into vegans and non-vegans, generally, but I was happy to see us all share the table with no animosity. Being an unapologetic slut for unity, seeing people together really felt good. As blues and jazz played in the background, for a brief moment in history, we all worshiped the same god - good eatin’.
There is hope to be found, even in the darkest of times. And even when people are hurdling “emissions statistics” at each other or comparing themselves to goddamn lions. These are equally hopeless behaviors. Also, obscenely unproductive. What a waste of time and human potential. Instead of arguing with strangers online, I think a much better form of activism is learning how to cook really well and possibly doing it for others as much as humanely possible. Hosting people is also a great antidote for the epidemic of loneliness and disconnection we are witnessing. Heck, maybe the revolution just won’t happen online but rather in the kitchen. We’ll see.
