I BEGAN MY foray into vegetarianism in the Ithaca College dining halls, a shining palace where dietary preferences were welcomed and celebrated. Silver chafing dishes warmed kosher entrées, and little laminated cards labeled vegetarian options; the salad bar always had marinated tofu along with tuna and chicken salads. What I didn’t know at the time was that the dining halls on my campus were operated by Sodexo, the food services industry giant notorious for its low minimum wage and private prison contracts with the U.S. military.1 All I saw was the vegan cooking station—its own booth with a separate cooking surface and a chef whose hands were not contaminated with the meat of other dishes.
The vegan station served veggie burgers made with brown rice and black beans. I imagined them soft in someone’s hands, rolled around and flattened, the way Nona’s raw meatballs felt in my palm before they were baked. A twentysomething Ithaca native with flowers tattooed on the backs of his plastic-gloved hands tossed burgers onto a slatted grill, then wrapped them in red-and-white checked paper and placed them in a cardboard container, next to a side of the coveted sweet potato fries. We loved the Sodexo sweet potato fries, the perfect layer of corn-syrup crispy on the outside, a delicate crust that broke open into the soft, tanning-salon orange flesh of the fry, always just this side of too hot, crumbling and sweet.
Looking back, I suppose I felt I had already done the difficult part: I had made the decision. By giving up meat, I had declared my membership in this new group of budding revolutionaries. We sat around the generic beige tables in our private-school dining hall, us white, upper-middle-class kids with our shaved heads, and discussed serious things, discussed free trade and facial piercings, our naïve fingers shoving handfuls of greasy sweet potato fries into our mouths. We were safe in our convictions. We were happy to let someone else do the cooking.
I HAVE A photograph of myself from around this time, unwashed hair in pigtails glinting red under a late-October sun. I am squinting into the camera, the Washington Monument in the background. Two fingers of my left hand form a V, and in my right hand I hold a poster mounted on a wooden stick, the grayed image of a young girl’s body, half-buried in stony rubble, stark white block letters reading, No Blood for Oil. And I am smiling.
This was the fall of 2002, my sophomore year, about a month after I stopped eating meat, and my friends and I had driven eight hours through the night from Ithaca to attend a protest in Washington, D.C. When I see the shiny-faced radical optimist in the photograph, I can’t help but smile along with her. I feel a surge of pride for the unabashed hope in her expression; I remember the churning in her stomach, the sense of purpose. But I can’t look at the beaming smile on her face without also remembering that six months later, despite our protests, President Bush authorized the invasion of Iraq, a war we are still fighting. I became a vegetarian in the swirl of this same controversy, born of the same belief in the power of protest. In the time before the war, decidedly, vocally, against.
But my face in the photograph is not angry, not defiant—it is joyful. I celebrated my boycotts, treasured them as a part of this new, radical identity I was crafting for myself, an identity that I hoped would take me away from the suburban convenience, the enclave of desensitization. The girl in the photograph, who smiled out for peace even as she held the image of a dead body in her hand, looked in only one direction. Outward, forward, away.
IN PREPARATION FOR Christmas dinner later that year, my father and I performed our usual non-cooking-related kitchen duties: inserting the double leaf into the cherrywood table, carefully draping the red-and-green plaid tablecloth over it, laying the real silver flatware alongside the goose-patterned china. We folded the napkins and lined a basket with paper towels for the rolls. Everyone clattered into the kitchen as the last of the food made its way from counter to table. My grandfather, right elbow hiked up over his shoulder, finished carving the roast beef and laid the slices delicately on a large crystal platter. Nana’s small knotted fingers gingerly plucked warm Pillsbury crescent rolls from baking sheet to basket. My mother surveyed the scene: she grabbed a spoon for the gravy boat, ladled green beans into the flowered vegetable dish, pointed at my sisters to pour water, wine. Then we sat, the seven of us, around the table in our traditional Christmas seating arrangement, held hands, and bowed our heads to give thanks. All of this, just the same as every year.
But as we began passing full serving platters around the table, or serving each other heaps of mashed potatoes or dripping roast beef, tossing rolls to our neighbors, licking drops of gravy from our fingertips, differences emerged. Dad preferred the ends of the roast, blackened to a crisp on the outside; gray, tough meat on the inside. Caitlin made a little divot in her mashed potatoes and then filled it, a small gravy volcano spilling over the edges. Nana took just two mouthfuls of everything, nothing more, and wouldn’t finish even that. Gampi loved the fat and gristle of the roast, keeping it in the corner of his mouth and gnawing long after the meal was done. And my plate that year held two crescent rolls, several forkfuls of green beans, and an extra-large serving of mashed potatoes. No meat, no gravy, not this time.
This was my first Christmas as a vegetarian, the first ceremonial family meal since I’d stopped eating meat, and I was not at all prepared for the alienation I felt sitting at that table, looking around at the others’ plates, passing meat along, smiling awkwardly at my own sisters as if apologetic. I finished eating before everyone else for the first time in my life and saw then how unlike the rest of my family I had become.
My whole life, my family had believed that the dinner table was a place you came together, that eating was a crucial, collective activity. But when I sat, pierced and protesting, at my family’s Christmas dinner table that year, I remembered the little girl building a fort of books to shield herself from the kitchen noise, the nights with pizza and my father. When I imagined myself through their eyes, a newborn radical fresh home from her hippie college, bearing strange new habits and restrictions, I didn’t think they understood anything I did anymore. And I took that as a challenge. Tension in my shoulders, I settled into the role of outsider. Perhaps, I thought, this was inevitable, that the redheaded eldest daughter would one day splinter apart from her Italian family heritage.
Food had been the bedrock of my family, the solid foundation onto which all of our connection was built, the means of expression, the reason. When I discovered the bloody, complex truth behind our family meals, the battery cages and the electric stunners. I saw cracks in what I thought had been a solid foundation. I decided to build my own.
Chapter Four
Cheez Whiz Is Vegetarian
I WAS SITTING AT the kitchen table with my new roommate, Erin, in Washington, D.C. She had a map of the city and a red Sharpie she was using to circle neighborhoods I should avoid. I was new to the city, a recent and hopeful college graduate, staying with some friends of a friend from high school for the duration of my summer internship with an environmental nonprofit. Erin had spent the last four years studying at George Washington University and wanted to make sure I could navigate the dense, complex city comfortably on my own. Here, she circled, was a great coffee shop on my way back from work. She marked Ben’s Chili Bowl and Kramerbooks and an independent record store where she knew I’d be able to find