When More Vegan Meals Are The Goal, What Is The Strategy?
Activist Tobias Leenaert counsels vegans and vegetarians to focus on vegan meals rather than vegan identities — and to talk encouragingly with meat reducers, says anthropologist Barbara J. King.
Join me for a memory exercise involving food and family: Think back to the main-course meals your grandparents served you. And, if you're middle-aged or older, like me, your parents, too.
How many vegetarian or vegan dishes were among those main courses?
Over the weekend, I encountered this question posed by Tobias Leenaert in his book How To Create. Immediately, my mind was filled with meat images. At my grandmother's, it was (pronounced "gawumpki") — a dish is made of cabbage leaves rolled around beef, popular in her native Poland — and ham. At my own home, baked chicken, meat loaf, tuna casserole, beef stew, hamburgers and hot dogs, spaghetti and meatballs and, for special occasions, London broil steak.
