Reality Bites with Carol J. Adams

Reality Bites is a feature series focused on the relationships people have with food, what kinds of cooking they’re inspired and sustained by, and the ingredients and tools that help them along the way.

Writer and activist Carol J. Adams is the pioneer of feminist-vegan critical theory, as developed in her first book, The Sexual Politics of Meat. She spends a lot of time thinking about the ethics of what we eat and how we care for one another — and cooking and eating with those she loves. When she’s not researching, writing, or cooking, you may spot her around Dallas attending a protest for reproductive justice or adding banned books to the Little Free Library she and her husband maintain, or she might be walking her beloved rescue dog or riding her bike in her “Save Animals, Go Vegan” sweatshirt.

What is your morning routine like?

If I have a deadline, I work on that first thing; but I prefer the days when I wake up and head straight to write in my journal. Yesterday, the first thing I recorded was my dream. In my dream, I exclaimed, “It’s the first Saturday that I don’t have a deadline!” (The dream was wrong; I had this interview still to finish!). After I write in my journal, I often re-read an old journal and respond to whatever I find there. (I have been keeping a nearly daily journal since March 1996). Then, if I can continue to rein in my Calvinist desires to feel productive, I will read poetry, poetry criticism, or writings about syntax and writing. 

I’m not hungry when I first wake up, so before I work or write in my journal, I get myself a glass of water. About an hour later, I’ll get some tangerine juice. A couple hours later, I’ll have breakfast — I might have some whole wheat toast with avocado or my tofu ricotta cheese with some added nutritional yeast. Other choices include oatmeal, cashew yogurt with fruit, leftover rice and veggies, scrambled tofu, or buckwheat pancakes

tell us a little bit about your background and the food of your childhood. what did you eat growing up?

I grew up in a small town in Chautauqua County, New York. My mother and father met during World War II in Hawaii, where she was in the Red Cross and he was a Naval officer. After he completed law school, they settled in the area where he had grown up. My mother immediately became involved in the Parent-Teacher Association and successfully organized to get a new elementary school built. She and my father were quite a team. For instance, in the 1960s, she worked with a migrant committee trying to ensure the many migrant workers in our country were adequately housed and to help them re-settle if they wished. My father would help with legal problems. She was an early feminist, working to bring family planning resources to the county from the mid-1960s forward. He became a judge, and often presided over marriages for the wide variety of friends my mother made through her work. 

My two sisters and I (I am the middle sister), grew up in a huge Victorian brick house, which we ranged all over playing hide-and-seek, often hiding on top of the bookcases in the library. We were a family of readers; each sister had bookcases in our bedrooms. Outside in a barn were two ponies, and for a few pivotal years we were all horse-mad.

We were a middle-class family, and flesh foods were a central part of our meals. The owner of the main grocery store in our town kept parts of butchered animals in his walk-in refrigerator locker, and he would cut the specific cuts of meat my mother wanted — t-bone steak, or whatever. She also always wanted hamburger ground from a certain kind of animal muscle — I don’t remember now, but we were to ask for it and wait while it was ground up. I remember that I hated liver, and our milk glasses were deep red glasses, so I would pretend to chew the liver but then take a drink of milk and spit the liver into the glass at the same time.

But we also had Welsh rarebit or Asparagus hollandaise some nights. Mom came from a Norwegian community in Minnesota. She grew up eating leftsa, Rømmegrøt , Rullepølse, yukekage, and lutefisk, which she also served to us. My mother involved us in the making of leftsa — it’s made from mashed potatoes with flour, rolled out, and fried so it looks like a tortilla. One of her innovations was to actually use leftsa as a tortilla.

In the mid-1960s, she began to take cooking classes each summer at Chautauqua Institute. One year Chinese, one year Italian, etc. It would be just before we went on our annual weekly vacation to Cape Cod, and that week we would all become involved in the prep and production of the meals she had learned to make, learning the new cooking ingredients and techniques. It was quite fun!

what’s your earliest food memory?

When we helped my mother pick raspberries and currants in our backyard, and she made them into a jam, and she gave us the drippings, and they were still warm and luscious. Or was it a Christmas Eve when we were making spritz cookies? Or how I loved to eat liverwurst with mayonnaise on white bread? Or maybe in the backyard, grabbing ripe tomatoes from the field my father had rented to a local farmer (our land had 9 acres) — my younger sister Jane and I were joined by two of our friends; we each had a salt shaker and we sat there on the grass at dusk, salting and eating one tomato after another. Or maybe it’s when I asked my great uncle not to put gravy on my mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving, and he was furious that a four year old would speak up like that!

how would you describe your diet?

Besides the fact that it is vegan, it’s very flexible. Being vegan gives me great joy! Every day I marvel at its sustaining power: Knowing that this is one of the ways I combine my ethical and political beliefs in a daily practice and at the same time that it offers such a remarkably expansive selection of foods. Cooking is inventive, it satisfies intellectual curiosity, even if at times I have to mark on a recipe “failure” instead of “tasty.”

I have some staples that are predictable: I love fruit salads; I eat yogurt about four times a week; I love creating dragon bowls (rice or another grain with air fried tofu and a variety of veggies — always some greens —and a topping, often tahini-flavored). I also make a tofu ricotta and use it on toast, with fruit salad, as ricotta in lasagna or spanakopita. It’s also great with kabocha squash. 

I like having reliable foods in my pantry and refrigerator that I can eat when I’m tired, or don’t want to cook, balanced by over-the-top cooking sprees of creating complex and wonderful dinners. 

how has your relationship to food changed throughout your life?

I realized I needed to become a vegetarian in 1973. As many aspiring vegetarians and vegans can attest, knowing one needs to stop eating animals and acting on that knowledge are different things. In the fall of 1974 I moved in with two other feminists who were vegetarians, and stopped eating anyone who had a mother. This was a liberating moment for me; within weeks I realized there was a connection between feminism and vegetarianism. I was vegetarian for more than ten years, before becoming vegan.

At the end of the 1980s, as I worked on completing the manuscript that became The Sexual Politics of Meat, I felt the need to name precisely the exploitation of the reproductive processes of female animals in the production of mammalian milk and eggs. I wanted a term that, I hoped, would unsettle the sexual commodification of female animals and I coined the term “feminized protein.” After that, I knew I needed to become a vegan. 

The first decade of the 21st century was a difficult time in my life. I shared caregiving of my mother with my sisters. Mom had developed Alzheimer’s disease. I discovered that my veganism moved to a deeper place during the most intense caregiving years. I was asked about this for an essay I wrote about caregiving, “Towards a Philosophy of Care Through Caregiving,” and I explained: “When there was so much I could not control, my veganism provided a reminder of some of the areas where I still had control and of the person I was beyond my full-time responsibility for an elderly person. When I felt isolated by my caregiving duties, veganism provided a sense of connection to others. The tenderness of my mother’s dying is wrapped within this as well. I had the opportunity to be a part of the completion of the mother-child relationship, but I am sadly aware that the mother-child relationship in animal agriculture is broken from birth forward. I had the full experience of a relationship, and farmed animals, especially cows and their calves, have nothing. Also, my mother had what I believe to be a good death; this made much more vivid the staggering nature of the bad deaths the other animals experience in becoming or producing food for nonvegans.”

I love where I am now in terms of food. Before it is anything else, veganism is an act of the imagination: We sense its possibility, we imagine what it means to an animal caught in the maw of the animal industrial complex, and then we act. Vegan cooking is also an act of the imagination. For instance, can I recreate Yorkshire pudding? (Now I can thanks to Gaz Oakley’s Vegan Christmas cookbook). 

In the mid 1970s I felt I should give up white sugar and white flour and chocolate and I created a check list to fill daily, showing successful avoidance. I was trying to create a form of accountability that would work. But that didn’t work; and I think the reason why it did not is that it’s not good to patrol oneself in that way. I suspect some people think veganism works like that, as a controlling and restricting approach to food. I wish they could know how totally liberating it is to discover the multitudinous ways to prepare the variety of foods available to a vegan. Even if I cooked a different recipe every day for the rest of my life, I would never be able to create all the dishes I am interested in. People think we are burdened by the responsibilities of veganism, that we fear scarcity, that it’s about rules and restrictions, and that we are worry worts about food. Veganism is actually a daily joyful reminder of our connection to others.

You have a Master’s degree from the Yale Divinity School. Is food related to spirituality or religion to you? If so, how?

For me the question of spirituality is a question of: how do I wish to live my life? To what am I committed? And I realized I wished to do the least harm possible while also working against oppression. I didn’t know when I turned 22 that my understanding of oppression would include animals, but after my pony’s death — when hunters were doing target practice in the woods behind our pasture — I realized I needed to include nonhuman animals in my activism, action, and compassion. As Karen Lindsey wrote in her 1975 poem “vegetarian”:

it takes so much to grow a body

so much pain

so much ridicule if the job’s done wrong.

flesh is meant to die; death

is necessary, perhaps even good, but it is not my job.

And if it’s not my job, why would I exploit others and allow others to kill or be killed for me? 

I also think spirituality offers a place to center gratitude, and I try to include forms of gratitude in my daily life. While I was caregiving for my mother, I started to include a list of five things I was thankful for each morning as I wrote in my journal. Now, here we are in 2024, and there are many things to be frightened of, especially Trump’s campaign and the threat of authoritarianism in our own country and throughout the world, climate change, Putin, and the regressive laws that result in forced pregnancies. By reminding myself of the small things I can be grateful for — seeing a heron fly by as I bike, the beauty of a meal, friendships, etc., — I feel better able to face all the things in the world that rightly make me anxious and that I want to do something about.

You’ve described your work as feminist-vegan critical theory. Can you tell us a bit more about how nutrition and food, for you, are related to culture, feminism, and critical theory? Is eating a political act?

As nutritionist Virginia Messina and I write in Protest Kitchen: “What happens in the kitchen doesn’t stay in the kitchen.” In that book, we link veganism with earlier social justice food boycotts, saying “Your food choices are far more powerful than you imagine. … [A] vegan diet, a pattern built around plant foods, can be part of your response against misogyny, racism, environmental destruction, and climate change and for food justice and compassion. … [T]he simple act of incorporating more vegan food into your daily life can empower your resistance.” We explain the relationship between nostalgia and regressive politics, and the faux idea of the 1950s that the right-wing promulgates, with meat and milk on the menu and women in the kitchen. Protest Kitchen began as The Anti-Trump Diet.

We also talk about how eating well is a critical part of an effective self-care routine. We explore the relationship between stress and depression and systemic inflammation; and describe how people who follow traditional plant-based diets have been found to have a lower risk of depression. The book was written out of respect for activism and out of love for activists. We wrote it to help others more easily bring veganism in line with their politics. We really hoped it would help progressives and radicals to revise their view of veganism as something private and unimportant.

How did you develop the ideas you write about in The Sexual Politics of Meat?

For The Sexual Politics of Meat, my work began in 1974, in the rush of excitement after experiencing the revelation of the connection between a patriarchal world and eating animals. I followed up on every reference I discovered in books I read; I spent long hours in library stacks, took notes on 3 x 5 cards, read the footnotes and endnotes of books to find other sources. I probably wrote 12 drafts at least! I spent fifteen years trying to figure out what the connection was, how to explain it, and what sort of tone I should have. I thought about it and dreamt about it, and all the while I was an activist in Western New York, where I started a hotline for battered women with my spouse, was part of a group that sued a city for racism in housing, helped to organize the first cooperatively owned mobile home park in New York State, challenged a radio station license because of the racism of the owner, and helped migrant workers find permanent housing. I am so indebted to this activism for helping me think about overlapping oppressions. 

The Sexual Politics of Meat came out more than 30 years ago. What impact has the book had over its lifespan and how do you see its relevance today?

It’s been gratifying to see how The Sexual Politics of Meat became one of the books providing a model for placing animals in the center of scholarship, helping birth the fields of critical animal studies and ecocriticism.

When the book was published, I was amazed at all the readers who began to send me evidence of the connections I drew in the book. I have a veritable museum of matchbox covers, t-shirts, hot sauces, bumper stickers, menus, advertisements, photographs of billboards, and other items that inscribed the connection between the oppression of women and the oppression of animals. These graphic examples required me to keep thinking about the subject. Why was there such a regressive use of sexualized images for animals who it is assumed we can eat? Why are animals depicted as desiring their own death? 

In The Sexual Politics of Meat I talked about “the racial politics of meat” and how racism is perpetuated when it is assumed that meat is the only or best protein. The reclamation of the food heritage of pre-Conquest peoples, led by vegans of color is transforming food practices. Mainstream newspapers are beginning to recognize the role of Black and Brown communities in developing vegan awareness, through their coverage of vegan Soulfests, restaurants, education, and recipe development. The narrative that identified veganism as white has been unsettled, along with the whiteness narrative that accompanied colonization’s meat and milk-centered displacement of traditional food practices. 

I am an author who keeps wishing her book was no longer so relevant. Sadly, we haven’t gotten there yet. One of the most noticeable cultural trends around the sexual politics of meat in the past thirty-five years is the increased anxiety the subject prompts as the gender binary and the foods assigned within the binary erupt into multiplicity. In the binary world of the sexual politics of meat, there is no gender fluidity, no exception to what “real” men eat. Men are expected to keep participating in the construction of manhood by eating animals and renewing one’s man card at every meal. If, after 9/11, a focus on men as heroes became part of the reclamation of wounded masculinity in the United States, the election of Barack Obama as President in 2008, revealed how white this wounded masculinity was. In response, white supremacists weaponized eating meat, eggs, and mammalian milk. They drank cow’s milk to “preserve the white race;” they highlighted platters groaning with flesh, and they flung the term “soy boys” around trying to offend any liberal they could, vegan or not.

What’s always in your fridge and pantry?

Tahini, soy milk, yogurt, dried beans, seaweed, tangerine juice, fruit, brown rice, tamari, chili crunch, flavored balsamic vinegars. I want to praise flavored balsamic vinegar for a minute. It’s such a wonderful way to add flavor. Maple balsamic vinegar in my yogurt; a great salad dressing made from white Cascadian raspberry balsamic vinegar with Persian lime olive oil — so simple and so delicious.

What are your go-to recipes?

My tofu ricotta. I eat it on whole wheat toast or Dave’s 12-grain buns for breakfast, eat it with baked kabocha squash, sprinkle it over a Greek salad, and use it in lasagna and spanakopita. Non-vegans love it. I serve it with crackers or my own rosemary-garlic bread. They ask for the recipe and then report serving it too. A neighbor lets me use her pool in the summer and in return I give her tofu ricotta, which she absolutely loves. I also use it to make vegan pizza, which my son loves.

Essential cookbooks? Books about food history, culture, or critical theory?

For food history, I love Alicia Kennedy’s, No Meat Required, Jonathan Kauffman’s Hippie Food, Howard Williams’s The Ethics of Diet.  I’d also like to recommend Ecofeminism, the anthology that Lori Gruen and I edited. Those essays, and their citations will provide a wonderful reading list for critical theory. And I do love my book Burger. I had so much fun writing its history as a dissenter to hamburger eating!

I own over 500 vegetarian and vegan cookbooks. I also have three-ring binders that organize the recipes I collected over the years. The binders have titles like: Instapot, aquafaba, keepers, Dragon’s bowls, quick breads and muffins, cheese, etc. Talking with college students, animal rights activists, vegan chefs, and scholars as I traveled around the world, I've collected wonderful recipes. Some of them are reproduced in the books I authored or co-authored, pictured above.

You could say there have many different eras in my development as a cook. For instance, I was becoming a vegetarian in the 1970s, and key cookbooks from this era include Laurel’s Kitchen, Vegetarian Epicure, and The Moosewood Cookbook. Then in the early years when I was becoming a vegan, my cookbooks included any of the books by Joanne Stepaniak, Jennifer Raymond’s The Peaceful Palate, and so many others. I learned how to make the best egg-free pecan pie from Miriam Kasin Hospodar’s Heaven’s Banquet (I veganized the butter she calls for). I learned about the basic Dragon bowl from Leslie McEachern’s The Angelica Home Kitchen, a cookbook based on the restaurant in the East Village, now sadly closed. 

And then there are the cookbooks that never got written:

• My first book, a cookbook, 5th grade: my idea was to have a different animal on each page and introduce the recipe, many of which I had learned at Girl Scout camp. Sadly, my mother found the pages on the kitchen counter where I had been making one of the dishes and threw them away. (They were at that point covered with gunk from cooking).

• The mid-1970s manuscript for my book on feminism and vegetarianism that I withdrew from publication because I didn’t feel the theory was yet fully “cooked” contained vegan recipes that I collected from 50 or so feminist vegetarians living in the Boston-Cambridge area whom I had interviewed.

• It’s Vegan, Y’all: I was working with a fantastically creative Texas vegan chef, Shirley Wilkes-Johnson, who I had known for years. When we were near completion, and just after we talked with a publisher who was offering us a contract to do a Texas vegan barbecue book, she had a massive stroke and died. 

• When my co-authors and I were working on a book about the novel Frankenstein, we had fun imagining that the monster wrote a cookbook entitled Well-Fed and Undead: A Monstrous Vegetarian Cookbook that would include things like “meals that don’t cost you an arm and a leg” (example: Bloody easy pudding), or “Bran for brains” muffins, “finger foods” like tofu croutons, and “Meals on the Run,” (example for zombies: hoofu, tofu that tastes like a human). I have so much fun being a vegan!

what are your favorite restaurants, cafes, and bakeries?

Reverie Bakeshop — I love their s’more cake. I was taking one of these to my son for his birthday, flying to Baltimore. The owners told me to freeze it overnight and it would travel fine. You should have seen the reaction of the TSA agents at the airport! It was so much fun.

Nuno’s Tacos & Vegmex Grill — vegan Mexican food! Oh my!

TLC Vegan Kitchen — Troy Gardner is the chef/owner. He is a remarkable chef. He worked with me when a Food Network show on the history of burgers was coming to interview me. I suggested that they include the making of vegan burgers. I gave Troy recipes for veggie burgers from the 1900s, 1930s, and 1940s, and he made them, as well as his own signature burger. It was so fantastic. When the film crew arrived at his place, they were all hungry, so first he fed them with some of his magical creations (not those historic burgers). We also worked together for the 2020 election through “Feed the Polls” which was a project to provide food at voting sites in areas in Dallas that were deemed food insecure. Troy provided 250 of his burritos with corn and black bean relish, rice, taco seasoning, Impossible crumble, house made queso, with a side refried beans and salsa, and 250 of his Nolabola wraps with blackened vegan shrimp, lettuce, arugula, spicy sauce and house made potato chips.

header photo by Jo-Anne McArthur for The Unbound Project, all images provided by carol j. adams, edited by meghan racklin