Serving Meat

After owning and operating vegetarian businesses for more than 23 years, I recently started cooking and serving meat. I expected the sky to fall. I expected the vegetarian police to issue a warrant for my arrest. Instead, the transition was largely smooth and uneventful.

I learned to cook in vegetarian restaurants and natural foods stores. The store where I cooked in Virginia didn't even sell eggs, although they did have an impressive cheese counter. Local farmers used to bring eggs to sell to the staff. We'd meet them out in the parking lot, like high school drug dealers.

When I moved out to the West Coast I was delighted to find a wider selection of organic and natural meat products. But I started a vegetarian business largely because it was the food I knew, and also because there were fewer food safety issues to worry about. Over time I began embracing the decision for other reasons, including the health benefits and the atrocities associated with industrial meat.

I published two vegan cookbooks. I'd sent out proposals for all kinds of books, but these were the ones that editors wanted. The Accidental Vegan made no secret of my omnivorous tendencies and some vegans found that, well, controversial.

When I began vending at farmers' markets, and later when I opened my shop in Ballard, I had more direct contact with potential customers than I'd had with my earlier wholesale company and meal delivery service. Over and over again I saw people evaluate the menu and move on because it was all vegetarian. I'd naively assumed that if you offered vegetarian food that was appealing enough, folks wouldn't care that it didn't have meat in it.

Watching these powerful negative reactions, I grew interested in the question of why we are so emotionally attached to meat (aside from the fact that it's tasty) and why vegetarianism is so likely to push people's buttons. I learned that our relationship with meat is old, deep, and complicated. It involves venerable traditions, persistent class issues, and even our identity as a species: toolmaking was at the heart of what first made us human, and we first began making stone tools for the purpose of butchering meat.

My decision to start cooking and serving meat was less a matter of caving in to popular demand as it was a realization that doing so would actually put me in a better position to spread the message that we should eat less meat and better meat.

I now offer a couple of meat-based items on the menu at the cafe, and we served chili (with Jubilee beef!) at our gig at the Jubilee pumpkin patch. I'm hesitant to add it to my market menu because everything is so smooth and streamlined, but I may experiment with it a bit this winter, when things are slow. We use only locally raised, sustainable meat and we always buy it directly from the producers.

We're still selling a lot more vegetarian and vegan food than meat based items, probably because the vegetarian and vegan food we sell is so appealing. But nobody walks away indignantly anymore because the menu is entirely vegetarian.