Plant Restaurant, Asheville, NC and the Masculine Politics of Meat

So let's just put our hands together and give a big round of applause for Plant for placing in the following categories in the Mountain Xpress's Best of 2012 edition:

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

I've been writing for the past two weeks or so a chapter that I've titled "Men, Meat, and Hegan Identity: Veganism and the Discourse of Masculinity."  It's all about the way that masculine identity, at least in the United States, is a very fragile construct, dependent in no small part on men's consumption of meat, particularly red meat, and about the social penalties enacted against men who choose not to do this most manly of things.  

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.

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[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.

The Vegetarian/Vegan Anorexia Connection

Before I go getting all academic, last week was celebrity vegan week at Plant.  On Tuesday, Carol Adams dropped by for a three hour dinner, and, a week later, I'm still walking around going, "I got to eat dinner with Carol Adams."  She blogged about it here.

 

Carol and me.  I. Am. Happy.

Then on Wednesday, on their way to the DNC, Elizabeth and Dennis Kucinich dropped by for lunch.

I look like crap in this photo, but I attribute that to the fact that I am standing near Elizabeth Kucinich, who is a goddess.  Also pictured: Leslie, Alan, and Jason.

OK, so now to business:

According to historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa, “historical, anthropological, and psychological studies suggest that women use appetite as a form of expression more often than men, a tendency confirmed by scholars as well as clinicians” (5), and her work traces the prevalence of so-called disordered eating in women from the phenomenon of anorexia mirabilis that took place in medieval Europe between 1200 and 1500 and during which “many women refused their food and prolonged fasting was considered a female miracle” (Fasting 43) to our present day understanding of the concept of anorexia nervosa as pathologically disordered. What is divinely inspired at one point is disordered at another, and what is obvious, both in Brumberg’s study and elsewhere, is that the concept of ascetic eating – even to the point of starvation – particularly among young women, has a long and complicated history.

 Catherine of Siena (1347-1380), who would be considered bulimic if she lived now.

For Kim Chernin, eating disorders serve as dysfunctional rites of passage for women in a society that does not allow for legitimate and transformative female rites of passage.  As such, the eating disorder is in some sense a misguided feminist attempt to form and then assert a fully realized female subjectivity into a space that does not adequately offer women roles that are distinct from, or not determined by, patriarchy.  Traditionally, rites of passage allow for the uninitiated participant to separate from and then reintegrate with his or her community.  Eating disorders, however, do not allow for reconnection with a clearly defined community that would then lead to the next stage of development, in large part because within Western culture, there are no female communities that are not inherently linked to and dependent upon male culture; women’s culture is, in effect, men’s culture. 

As a result, the “disordered” individual is stuck in time; according to Chernin, “much of the obsessive quality of an eating disorder arises precisely from the fact that food is being asked to serve a transformative function that it cannot carry by itself” (167).  Despite the fact that anorexia nervosa had been “known to physicians as early as the 1870s,” the American press did not start writing about anorexia until the 1980s (Brumberg 11).  And since the 1980s, an increasing body of research has explored the links between vegetarian and vegan diets and disordered eating, noting the possible connections that exist between women’s refusal to eat meat and anorexia nervosa.

In their 1986 study, Rao Kadambari, Simon Gowers, and Arthur Crisp conclude the following:

It can be said that vegetarianism within anorexia nervosa is probably associated with overall dietary restraint within the illness, with mothers who are themselves concerned about their weight, and with a family background wherein there is avoidance of contact with the feared outside world.  These findings invite testable hypotheses within new prospective studies. (544)

Since this study, others have followed.  In their 2000 study “Vegetarianism and Eating Disorders: Partners in Crime?,” Victoria Sullivan and Sadhana Damani assert that their own vegetarianism “never stopped [them from] eating” (265), and that, as vegetarians, they feel protective of that identity and “would like to be able to state categorically that there is no association between vegetarianism and eating disorders” (265).  But even as their study points to some contradictory findings with regard to the connection between eating disorders and a vegetarian diet, they ultimately note that “although the evidence on the whole is limited and contradictory, it does seem that there is at least a passing association between vegetarianism and dietary restraint, and possibly eating disorders” (265).

 

And more recent studies seem to corroborate and expound upon the connections between vegetarianism and anorexia, particularly within adolescent anorectics.  In his 2011 study Some we Love, Some we Hate, Some we Eat: Why it’s so Hard to Think Straight about Animals, Hal Herzog quotes a former vegetarian anorectic named “Staci” who notes that as a teenager, “being a vegetarian was a way for me to have more control over my body by taking the fat out of my diet,” and she notes as well that vegetarianism appealed to her because of its “righteousness:” “at that age, you want to have something that is strong and clear and righteous” (197). 

Finally, speaking of a 2012 study in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Melissa Jeltsen notes that, while this research does not argue that being vegetarian causes eating disorders or that being vegetarian is unhealthy, “it suggests vegetarianism can be a symptom of an eating disorder for some women,” given the fact that of women with histories of eating disorders, “68 percent said there was a relationship between the two,” and the researchers found “that 52 percent of women with a history of eating disorders had been vegetarian at some point in their lives” (Jeltsen). 

In all honesty, I find it completely unsurprising that vegetarianism and adolescent female anorexia are in some instances linked, even for reasons other than the fact that adolescent girls may very well lie about being vegetarian in order to abstain from eating.  But speaking of lying about behavior, adolescents lie all the time in order to hide subversive, counter-cultural, and dangerous behaviors from adults; anorexic teenagers are only one such example. 

Consider another.  First, if a person lies about being vegetarian – for whatever reason, whether to mask an eating disorder or to impress one’s girlfriend who is a vegetarian – but eats meat (is a carnivore) or does not eat anything at all (is an anorectic), one is not really a vegetarian; one is lying. End of story.  If someone lies about going to church as a cover for going to buy drugs, that lie could ostensibly happen for the same reasons: to mask an addiction (which anorexia is as well) or to impress one’s church-going girlfriend, but there do not appear to be any studies linking going to church to drug use (when the drug user is not, in fact, really going to church), while there are studies that continually link vegetarianism to eating disorders, even when the anorectic is not a vegetarian. 

I believe that these studies continue to proliferate because vegetarianism is represented within them via the same rhetoric of pathology that is used to describe anorexia and because female vegetarianism constitutes a choice that offers both a challenge to patriarchy and to a dietary norm dependent upon that patriarchy.  And, finally, because for young women, both anorexia and vegetarianism may be indicative, as Brumberg asserts about anorexia, of mentalities in transition” (Fasting 99); both are unrealized identity formations called upon to allow adolescent women to participate in rites of passage into a full adult female community that simply does not exist.

In all of this research, I have been able to find a singular study that challenges the abundance of others out there linking vegetarianism to anorexia.  B. Fisak’s 2006 “Challenging Previous Conceptions of Vegetarianism and Eating Disorders” does something that the other studies do not do: it examines the motives for vegetarianism and discovers, unsurprisingly, that vegetarians “tend to avoid animal products for ethical and health reasons rather than as an excuse or cover for dietary restraint” (199). The authors conclude that prior studies have argued that vegetarianism “may be an attempt to mask disordered eating” while their “study expanded upon prior research by making a variety of comparisons with psychometrically sound measures of eating disorders” to discover that “in contrast to previous findings, Vs and NVs [non-vegetarians] did not differ significantly on any eating disturbance measures” (198).  

To return to the concept of the ineffective rite of passage as it relates to both anorexia and vegetarianism, I want to posit an assertion that works to further differentiate vegetarianism from veganism, as I feel that one is not simply the more “severe” form of the other, even as, in these studies, if veganism factors in at all, it is as a "severe" form of vegetarianism (as per Rao et al).  By the way, this is a hypothesis, so don't kill me for making it.  

Terrible comic relief.  But you've got to be sick of reading by now.

For some young women caught shuttling between vegetarianism and anorexia, caught in a space that seems to support the perpetual linkage between the two, veganism may very well function as the culmination of a successful, feminist rite of passage, an identity category that allows food to serve the transformative function that anorexia unsuccessfully asks it to serve.  Because veganism may very well be less about dietary restriction and more about an anti-speciesist ethic, a shift from vegetarianism to veganism might allow for productive growth -- at least for some women. 

I know that in my case, at least, that was the scenario.  My vegetarianism was very much tied up with the eating disorder that fully manifested itself by the time I was 19, but I think that for women who find themselves in such circumstances, the connections between these two things – vegetarianism and eating disorders – are much more complicated than simply one serving as an excuse for the other. Without going into great detail about what solidified my decision to become vegetarian, not eating meat made sense to me, and I was not eating meat for ethical reasons; I have never doubted that reality, and I was not lying about the ethical commitment that made me decide to become vegetarian, even as my eating disorder thrived in tandem with my vegetarianism.  One was not a mask for the other, nor was one responsible for the other. 

At the time that I became vegetarian, I had not really cared about what was good for me; I just knew that I did not want to eat animals.  Years later, when I became vegan, I made a conscious choice to eat more fully and to eat better, to consume things that would make me healthy and strong, to eat food that was fresh, whole, and not processed.  The goal was as much one of self-empowerment as animal liberation – and because the connections between those two things were now clear to me, I was able to be empowered by this choice.  Becoming vegan, in its most feminist manifestation, meant doing something actively in response to a cultural stasis that dictated dietary behavior with which I simply did not agree.  I just had to figure out why I did not agree with it.  This time around, I was reacting in ways that felt fully conscious, and that consciousness has allowed me to eat – and live – more and better than I ever did before.

Including animal rights in the discussion about why women choose to become vegetarian or vegan certainly will not alleviate the negative discourse about veganism that pervades both the mainstream media and scientific studies of the links between non-normative diet and eating disorders, but it would certainly allow for more honest analysis, and it might empower instead of pathologize such a choice as having less to do with restricting female diet and more to do with making productive connections between health, feminism, and animal welfare.

If you have a narrative about veganism and eating disorders that runs counter to the various studies that continue to perpetuate linkages between vegetarian and vegan diets and anorexia, I would like to hear it – and with your permission, possibly use it in my own study.  Please send me your stories in 1000 words or less at lwright@email.wcu.edu or post them below.  And thanks in advance.

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Works Cited

Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa.  New York: Vintage, 2000.  Print.

Chernin, Kim.  The Hungry Self.  New York: Harper and Row, 1985.  Print.

Fisak, B. et al.  “Challenging Previous Conceptions of Vegetarianism and Eating Disorders.”  Eating and Weight Disorders: Studies in Anorexia, Bulimia and Obesity 11.4 (2006): 195-201.  Print.

Herzog, Hal.  Some we Love, Some we Hate, Some we Eat:  Why it’s so Hard to Think Straight about Animals.  New York: Harper, 2011.  Print.

Kadambari, Rao, Simon Gowers, and Arthur Crisp.  “Some Correlates of Vegetarianism in Anorexia Nervosa.”  International Journal of Eating Disorders 5.3 (1986): 539-544.  Print.

Sullivan, Victoria and Sadhana Damani.  “Vegetarianism and Eating Disorders – Partners in Crime?”  European Eating Disorders Review 8.4 (2000): 263-266.  Print.

Anthony Bourdain and Moby in Asheville

The other day, Jason got a text from Mackensy Lunsford, the most excellent food writer for the Mountain Xpress, asking if, as a local chef, he had any questions for Anthony Bourdain, who's coming to Asheville next weekend and who she was interviewing.  We talked about it, and he wrote back to ask a question.  Bourdain's response is in today's Xpress.  You can read the complete interview here. 


Here are some excerpts, including Jason's question:

Anthony Bourdain has not been to Asheville recently, despite rumors to the contrary. But he has a vague understanding of what we're about from a previous trip years ago for a book-signing. "I remember this hip island of enlightenment," says Bourdain, who doesn't recall much else about the visit, including the date. 
And while some may choose to attribute that lapse in memory to Bourdain's purportedly high-partying lifestyle in years past, it's more likely that it can be pinned on the fact that the chef-turned-writer has been, quite simply, just about everywhere you want to be — and plenty of places where you might not.



Bourdain is coming to Asheville again on Saturday, Nov 5, this time to talk about food and travel, and how life in general relates to both. He took more than a few minutes out of his day to chat with Xpress from the back of a car taking him from New York City to Waterbury, Conn. He lost reception several times (lucky for us, he was game about being called repeatedly). Bourdain had plenty to say about vegetarianism, food trucks, hunger and mediocrity.

***

Plant's Jason Sellers wants to know if you would be willing to visit his vegan restaurant to "quell some of that open animosity with some open-mindedness."

Listen, I'm perfectly OK with vegetarians practicing whatever they want to do. I just think they make for bad travelers. That's what pisses me off. If you're eating vegan for religious reasons, fine. What you do in your home — or hometown even — in the industrialized world, I'm OK with that. That's your personal choice. I think the notion that you can travel — and I'm not talking about Rome or Paris, of course you can call ahead and say, "do you have any vegetarian options?" You can't do that in the developing world without offending people ... It's awkward and hurtful to go to grandma's house and turn down the turkey. I just see it as rude and incurious.

OK, so thing the first: kudos to Mackensy.  There's this nice and not-too-subtle Bourdain's-a-bit-of-a-drunk-and-can't-be-bothered-to-remember-when-he-was-here bit.  Then there's the inclusion of the backhanded compliment that we're a "hip island of enlightenment" in what I can only assume is a state of redneck provincialism, which counts as nothing more than an insult to the entire state of North Carolina.  But I love Mackensy mostly because she's always been supportive of Jason, has always helped him promote his work, going so far as to mention both Jason and Plant prior to introducing Sandy Krebs, the new chef at the Laughing Seed, in an interview that she conducted last week with Krebs.


So back to that Bourdain interview.

First of all, Bourdain's response doesn't really seem to answer the question, to respond to the invitation to break bread and to "quell some of that open animosity with open mindedness."  My friend Lori started a Facebook page devoted to getting Bourdain to Plant.  And I know that there are people out there who will be openly protesting, because of his harsh anti-vegetarian rhetoric, Bourdain's presence in Asheville.  In Jason's question is a genuine effort to engage in dialogue, and it's an effort that is met with complete dismissal.  And not even dismissal: Bourdain's response is a rehash of his tired diatribe against non-carnivous diets.

At least this time, he doesn't invoke the term "hezbollah."

Second -- and apropos of absolutely nothing -- Bourdain goes off on how offensive vegetarianism is to people who live in the "developing world."  We're in Asheville, but whatever.  


Of course, Bourdain's "developing world" argument completely ignores the fact that the Western world, the so-called "developed" world, has historically been the part of the world where meat has been central to diet; in terms of diet, many of the cultures of the so-called "developing world" have been based on a starch with animal protein added only occasionally.  In The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol J. Adams links increased meat eating with capitalism and patriarchy in the West and with racism towards plant-based cultures: “into the twentieth century the notion was that meat eating contributed to the Western world’s prominence” (31).  As support, she quotes nineteenth-century English physician George Beard’s analysis of the superiority of “civilized” meat-eating peoples over the “rice-eating Hindoo and Chinese and the potato-eating Irish peasant” who were all kept in subjugation to the English, which he refers to as a “nation of beef-eaters” (qtd. in Adams 31).


Third: "vegetarians make for bad travelers," says Bourdain.  My sense is that stupid arrogant carnivores make for bad travelers when they turn down the hospitality of their vegan hosts, eh?  Oh, and both Jason and I have been to this so-called third world and eaten vegan and had really significant discussions with people we've supposedly offended.  Anywhere on the planet, I imagine, people are, and should be, willing to talk about what they eat and why they eat it just as much as they should be willing to engage in any other political discourse -- and in our experience, they have been.  


People elsewhere -- people in the "developing world" -- aren't such children that they need protection from differences of opinion, or differences in diet; they don't need to be championed by the patronizing impulse of someone like Bourdain.  What he does when he makes his pro-developing world argument is to speak for the developing world.  And don't let Bourdain's rhetoric convince you that food isn't political -- or that it's only political in the sense that veganism functions as a silencing of other perspectives; the opposite seems to be more accurate.  Vegetarianism and veganism function as affronts to Bourdain's white male carnivorous Western privilege: his speaking for other cultures is more of a silencing than an act of communal eating.  


Anthony: pretend to give a shit about "other" cultures.  Use this argument to sound like a humanitarian.  Gorge yourself on the foods of "other" cultures.  Come home.  Get drunk.  Talk shit.


Then: "What you do in your home — or hometown even — in the industrialized world, I'm OK with that." And then: "it's awkward and hurtful to go to grandma's house and turn down the turkey. I just see it as rude and incurious."  Grandma doesn't live "in the industrialized world?"  Fallacy from tradition much?  Just cause something's been the case, it should always be the case?  People have always eaten turkey, at grandma's house (in the industrialized world); therefore, people should always turkey at Grandma's house.  


Perhaps a bad analogy: I had a great uncle who died when I was about 15.  When I was very young, he sat me down and made me repeat after him: "eeny, meeny, miny, moe.  Catch a nigger by the toe."  As I said, I was very young.  I did what he asked.  What's the harm, right?  He'd always used that word, I suspect.  Refusing to repeat after him would have been "awkward and hurtful."  


I can't help but think of a Charlie Brown Thanksgiving when reading Bourdain's quote above.  Thanksgiving, the holiday with which I (and I would imagine most U.S. citizens) associate turkey and grandma, is based on a colonial model of genocide.  Turkey, likewise. At least in its current, often factory farmed incarnation.  The Meleagris gallopa, wild North American turkey, was a symbol of sacrifice for many native peoples: "the spirit of turkey is free, and opens up the channels between us and others on a meaningful level."  Open channels allow for communication, even about such subjects as why one might not want to eat turkey.


Oh, and "rude and incurious"?  That's what you are, at least in the developing world, if you don't eat meat.  Sounds more like Bourdain than anyone: rude not to respond to Mackensy's question.  Incurious not to take Jason up on the invitation.


Anyway: I did an internet search for "Moby contact information."  Moby will be in town for Moogfest tomorrow.  We called the number that came up. The person who answered is no longer his agent, but he forwarded our invitation to break bread on to Moby's current representation.  That was yesterday.  


Today, we got a call letting us know that Moby will be at Plant for lunch tomorrow.  All it took was an invitation, an offer to break bread, here in the "first" world.  And this is not a plug for Moby...except that it is.  Thanks, man.

Plant. Is. Food.

Jason Sellers, that guy that I've been living with for well over a decade, opened Plant today, so most of this entry will be me bragging about him.  Jason is one of those people who just seems good at everything that he does.  He's one of those people I often envy for what appears to be an uncanny ability to do anything well.  Here's a case in point: we were hanging out at the Bywater with friends a few weeks ago.  The Bywater is this really cool concept bar/recreation area on the French Broad River.  I call it a kind of summer camp with booze: in addition to the bar, there's about an acre of land with picnic tables, horseshoe and cornhole games, grills, and fire pits.  You can bring your own food and grill out, sit by the river, play the games.  You can bring your dog.  You can tube down from the Wedge, climb out of the water, and head into the Bywater -- at least that's what a whole cadre of folks had done the day we were there.  I haven't tried it yet, but I will.

As an aside, I worry a bit about the fact that the grounds are laid out as follows: bar, railroad track, river.  Sound like a recipe for disaster to anyone other than me?

No river, here, but you get my point, right?

There's a bimini ring toss game as well, the goal of which is to swing a ring tied to the end of a string in such a way that it lands on a hook attached to a wall.  This is not an easy task.  I stood there and threw the freaking ring over and over and never got it on the hook.  Jason took one practice swing, then a second, then got the ring on the hook.  And then did it over and over.  In exasperated and highly competitive frustration, I gave up and got another beer.

So it's this sort of thing that seems unnerving to me, Jason's ability to do things with such seemingly little effort.  But the truth is something altogether different -- and the ring toss example works to explain it.  I just kept throwing the ring, thinking that if I just threw it enough times, it would land on the hook.  Which it didn't.  If it had, I would have then gone back and then tried to replicate the process by which I succeeded. And that's my method with most things: produce a lot of scholarship, for example, hope that some of it is good, then go back and replicate the model on which the "good" is based, then get bored and move on to something else.  I hang pictures on the walls by trial and error, thereby leaving lots of holes, rather than measuring anything out.  I have a tendency to believe that many things that I do are good enough to suffice and don't necessarily need to be better, to be perfect.

I actually find it odd to write these things; I've always considered myself a perfectionist -- and perhaps in some ways I am...in the ways that have to do with appearances, with wanting to appear competent and capable of everything that I do.  But in many essential ways, I'm not.  I'm happy to let things slip; I'm happy, for example, to paint the bathroom walls without taping the trim, even if it means that I get some paint in the wrong places.  It saves time, even if it's not perfect.  And perhaps this is about being a bit of a risk taker, or being impulsive, or being just this side of dangerous.  Or perhaps it's just about being sloppy.

Not Jason.  Jason's the antithesis of sloppy.  Jason measures everything that he does, and he weighs all the options before acting.  He got that ring on the hook on the third try not only because he considered the problem of the ring and the hook -- the weight of the metal in his hand, the length of the thread, and his position relative to the wall -- before he let it go, but also because he paid careful attention to what he did wrong the first and second times; he doesn't come at things backwards, doesn't allow himself to continue to make errors.  He gets it right because he takes getting it right very seriously -- perhaps moreso than anyone else I know.  And once he gets it right, he keeps working to get it more right.  He got the ring on the hook, but maybe he could get the ring on the hook with his eyes closed.  Maybe he could get the ring on the hook using his non-dominant hand.

So back to Plant: Plant is vegan.  Plant is a restaurant based on an ethical principle to which Jason adheres absolutely and to which his business partners, Leslie Armstrong and Alan Berger, adhere as well.  And that ethic is, in fact, the driving impulse behind the place.  Jason had been a long time vegetarian when I met him in 1997; we became vegan after we moved to Massachusetts in 1999.  And Jason has always been a chef at heart, has always been interested in food and in the politics behind how and what we eat.  He went to culinary school at the Natural Gourmet in Manhattan in 2004, and he worked in the city at Candle 79 before moving with me -- very much against his heart's desire to stay in New York -- to Asheville, where he became head chef and kitchen manager at the Laughing Seed.

Leslie, Jason, and Alan.

Jason has been working to get it right for a long time, and he's succeeded in ways that seem inconceivable to me.  And I should know: I've been present for the entirety of his culinary journey.  The food that he's making now is the food he's always wanted to make.  It's delicious, savory, entirely plant based, and incredibly refined in both presentation and flavor combinations.  One of my friends declared, after eating lunch there today, that the space in which Jason works should be declared a holy pilgrimage site.

For Jason, getting it right is still something that can be improved upon; getting it right is just another place from which to start.  And I can't wait to see what happens now.

Oh, and Anthony Bourdain is coming to town, or so the rumor goes.  If he shows up, I'm sending him an invitation to Plant.  Bring it.

Plant and Dracula

Well, I've been away from this blog long enough to have forgotten how to sign in...  The end of the semester nearly killed me (it often does), and I'm just now surfacing from beneath it.  It was the year of service for me: I directed the Graduate Program in English, served on the Liberal Studies task force, the International Studies advisory committee, both the college and university Program Prioritization committees, and was the Secretary of the Faculty, which means that I was also de facto on a bunch of other committees...  And I directed two fabulous MA theses and have been a reader for several more.

I won't be secretary of the faculty next year, so that's a huge obligation lifted.  I hope to be able to start researching and writing again, as I've pretty much taken the whole year off (wrote one book review during 2010-11).  So far, this summer I've written an article on Margaret Atwood's Surfacing -- a piece for which I'm getting paid (!) -- and that's it.  The vegan body project is my next priority, though, and I've just finished reading an article called "Love at First Beet: Vegetarian Critical Theory Meats Dracula," which was written in 1996 by J. E. D. Stavick.  If I'm going to write about our contemporary vampires' less bloody diets, it seemed wise to start with Dracula, the bloodiest progenitor of all his touchy feely descendants.

Stavick's essay is the only scholarly thing out there that looks at Bram Stoker's Dracula from the perspective of vegetarian critical theory, and this piece is also heavy (if not particularly adept) in its use of postcolonial theory.  Take the following statement, which pretty much sums up the argument: "the threat to English consumption is the threat of reverse colonization, which in this text is manifested in the vampire invasion of England by the powerful consumer 'Other,' Count Dracula, who threatens England with his violation of the meat hierarchy" (26).  That hierarchy, as defined by Stavick and others, is dependent on the privileging of "bloody meat, especially beef, over all other foods" (24).  It's an interesting and, for the time, original analysis.

Mmmmm.  

So I promise to write more.

But in the meantime: Plant!  And by Plant, I mean Jason's restaurant, which is coming along nicely.  Here's the latest from the Mountain Xpress:

Planting a Different Seed

It didn't take long for the building at 165 Merrimon Ave. recently vacated by Beans and Berries to get snatched up. Longtime Laughing Seed chef Jason Sellers is joining former Rosebud Video owners Alan Berger and Leslie Armstrong to open a completely vegan restaurant there that they’ve decided to call "Plant."

Why Plant? "Because 'plant' is food to us," Sellers says. "It's the most rudimentary expression of what food is. It's sustenance and the core of our expression. Everything here will be plant-based."

To the partners, Plant expresses a philosophy of animal-product-free living and a celebration of good food.

"We're thrilled," Armstrong says. "It's so exciting to be able to take all of the things that are important to us and create this new entity. And, to be able to partner up with Jason ... how much better could you get?"

***

"We will serve flavor-sophisticated, multiculturally influenced food, using techniques that we like the best to intensify flavors based on what's available to us at the best time," [Sellers] says. "The emphasis is food from the ground up. It's exciting for us to be unique among restaurants in Asheville, as well as unique among vegetarian restaurants in Asheville."

If you're having a hard time envisioning what all of that really means, you may not be alone. That's because the chef, trained at the Natural Gourmet Institute in New York, tightly intertwines his culinary creations and his life philosophies. Fortunately, Sellers is not all talk.

***

I. Can't. Wait.  :)