1st place: Best New Restaurant
2nd place: Best service; options for special diets (gluten free, lactose free, etc.), Top Chef: Jason Sellers
3rd place: Favorite Restaurant; Best vegetarian
In a town that boasts 358 restaurants on Trip Advisor (of which Plant is, ahem, numero uno), them's not shabby stats for a place that hadn't even been open a year when voting started.
Jason Sellers
Here's what the Xpress had to say about he Plant:
"The crowd at Plant is difficult to describe. On a given day, you might see a group of college students, a table of ladies who lunch or even Congressman Dennis Kucinich and family. As Xpress readers know, the clientele varies because Plant offers something for everyone, even though they serve only vegan foods. Chef Jason Sellers plays up the plant-based components of traditional flavor combinations to create dishes that are at once familiar and exciting. Plant doesn’t overwhelm diners with the merits of a vegan diet; the restaurant simply serves great food from its chic open kitchen."
With Moby, who ate there twice in one day while he was here for Moogfest
With Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat, who came to visit us
The first part of Carol J. Adams’s
foundational The Sexual Politics of Meat is titled “The Patriarchal
Texts of Meat,” and focuses on the various historical narratives that shape our
belief that meat is the substrate of male strength and power. She carefully deconstructs a vast array
of texts that includes fairy tales, unwritten food taboos, and cookbooks, as
well as historical narratives of colonial domination that champion white
superiority in order to expose as fictitious the notions that meat is male food
and that men need meat in order to obtain and maintain patriarchal power. She notes early in the section that despite
the fact that people with power have always eaten meat, the narratives that
support that reality work to undermine and disempower various other
groups. She notes that “dietary
habits proclaim class distinctions, but they proclaim patriarchal distinctions
as well,” equating second-class foods – vegetables, grains, fruits – with
women. Therefore, “the sexism in
meat eating recapitulates the class distinction with an added twist: a
mythology permeates all classes that meat is a masculine food and meat eating
is a male activity” (26).
In addition to looking at the ways that
meat is constructed as essentially male, Adams also examines how the mythology
that codes meat in this way is also both an “index of racism” (29) and a
mechanism that enables and justifies the colonization and subjugation of
non-Western cultures by the West.
She cites nineteenth-century medical doctor James Beard’s assertion in
support of a meat-based diet to enable intellectual and physical progress among
the English: “the rice-eating Hindoo and Chinese and the potato-eating Irish
peasant are kept in subjection by the well-fed English,” who constitute a
“nation of beef-eaters” (qtd. in Adams 31). Since its publication in 1991, Adams’s work has remained the
standard bearer in the increasingly relevant fields of ecocritism and animal
studies, even as subsequent scholars have built upon her premise.
Despite the fact that, by and large, men
have been able to “enjoy eating as a value free behavior” (Buerkle 253), an
increasing scholarly and scientific focus on the gendered nature of diet
combined with women’s increased access to traditional male spheres of influence
situates men’s dietary choices – like women’s – as political. In “Meat, Morals, and Masculinity,”
Ruby and Heine characterize male meat eating as “archetypal” (448), and they
examine the paradoxical nature of meat, noting that “meat, long considered both
nutritionally dense . . . and high in pathogen risk, is . . . the most
cherished and most often tabooed category of food . . . and it is strongly
linked with cultural conceptions of masculinity and power” (447). The belief in meat – particularly
red meat – as essential to both manhood and power is so deeply entrenched and codified,
particularly in the United States, that the proven health risks associated with
its consumption have done little to deter its mythological power.
Richard Rogers, whose study “Beasts,
Burgers, and Hummers: Meat and the Crisis of Masculinity in Contemporary
Television Advertisements” situates nature as the absent referent in several
pro-beef television commercials (in that these commercials constitute a
backlash both against feminism and environmentalism), attributes the power of
the mythology of meat to the pervasive discourse that surrounds its
contemporary articulation: “from literature to everyday speech, from art to
advertisements, the articulation of hegemonic masculinity with the consumption
of meat is pervasive” (281). To
undermine or challenge such a culturally pervasive archetype is an attempt to
open a space in which to discuss alternative masculinities – Rogers, for
example, examines the category of “metrosexuality” – but it is also, given the
“precarious state” of masculinity, “easily lost and requiring constant
validation” (Ruby and Heine 450), to invite resistance and to engender a
profound backlash.
Despite the fact
that a large body of work about men, meat, and gender exists, according to
Jemál Nath, “the experience of vegetarian men who reject the social and
cultural norm of eating animals is harder to discern” (261) and that for men,
“choosing to eat a plant-based diet is . . . transgressing dominant cultural
and gastronomic norms of Western society and all of the meat-eating values
invested in those norms” (263). In
the U.S. and Britain, where research has shown a strong perceptional link
between the consumption of muscle meat (like steak) and masculinity,[i]
and men to choose not to eat red meat are viewed as weak.
Into this
discourse about meat and masculinity that consistently asserts that while
vegetarians are viewed more virtuous than their omnivorous counterparts, they
are also perceived as less masculine,[ii] men who
choose to be vegan face immense social pressure either to acquiesce and eat meat
or experience ridicule, judgment, and ostracism from their fellow men. While Nath discovered that some
non-meat eating men find it empowering to subvert the dominant dietary norm
(274) – and one could argue, after all, that to be male and refuse to eat meat
is one of the bravest things a man can do, given the societal pressure to do
otherwise – the pressure to render veganism as appropriately masculine has
generated a counter-discourse of “heganism,” or male veganism.
And there’s a lot more to this
discussion, but for now, here’s Jason again:
With a scythe. And apologies for the objectification.
Like I said, at least from where I'm sitting, being male and refusing to eat meat: pretty studly.
[i] See Rozin et al. for more information
about this study.
[ii] See Ruby and Heine, p. 448.
Works Cited
Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of
Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum, 1990. Print.
Buerkle, C. Wesley. “Metrosexuality Can Stuff It:
Beef Consumption as Hetero-Masculine Fortification.” Taking Food Public: Redefining
Foodways in a Changing World. Eds. Psyche Williams Forson and
Carole Counihan. Routledge, 2011. 251-64.
Print.
Nath, Jemál. “Gendered Fare: A Qualitative Investigation of Alternative
Food and Masculinities.” Journal
of Sociology 47.3 (2010): 261-278.
Print.
Rogers, Richard A. “Beasts, Burgers, and Hummers: Meat and
the Crisis of Masculinity in Contemporary Television Advertisements.” Environmental Communication 2.3
(2008): 281-301. Print.
Rozin, Paul et al. “Is Meat Male? “A Quantitative
Multimethod Framework to Establish Metaphoric Relationships.” Journal of
Consumer Research 39.3 (2012).
Web. 8 October 2012.
Ruby, Matthew B., and Steven J.
Heine. “Meat, Morals, and
Masculinity.” Appetite 56.2
(2011): 447-450. Print.
