What's Going on with Eleven Madison Park is What's Going on with the Conversation about Meat In General

So let me get this straight: Eleven Madison Park went vegan to make a statement about food, and in the process forgot about the environmental impacts of vegetable waste and the equitable treatment of workers??? I’m so profoundly unsurprised, as a former vegan turned farmer and omnivore, who has spent the better part of two decades trying to add pith and meaning to the meat vs. non-meat dietary conversation. I’m so fucking exhausted. Not because people believe that a restaurant switching to a plant-based menu might have meaning. (It actually might.) I am exhausted because veganism continues to be used as a panacea for systemic, foundational issues in our food supply, and because the rhetoric around it has barely progressed or deepened since the 1970s. The recent piece in Bon Appetit by vegan advocate Alicia Kennedy was a good one. If there is an appropriate leader for a renovated vegan movement that truly wants to pursue system-wide ethical exploration (and not just virtue-signaling), Alicia is that leader. So I applaud her piece, which points out the charade of adopting a vegan banner as a sign of depth or progress while the deeper infrastructure of what makes food-- production, processing, waste, labor, access, flavor-- goes undiscussed. I am in favor of anything more than the boring, incessant, manure pile of an argument that goes something like: as long as it has no part of a living thing with an eyelash, it must be better! But am I supposed to be impressed that people looked past this veneer in the fine-dining restaurant review sphere? Oh, bravo. But no. I desperately want to know: What would it take for people to look past this veneer in general? To see the caper at Eleven Madison Park as a small and pricey metaphor for what has been going on with veganism, as a whole, for a LONG time?

I told myself I wouldn’t write about it, at first. I spend most of my time ignoring this dumb, all-consuming argument, and focusing more on filling the vacuous void all around it with thought and activism on what to do with meat systems if you have already decided to eat meat. Plus, voices like my own, that have been attempting to add nuance to the binary conversation about meat in the diet and on the land have been continuously and summarily ignored as part of a long American culinary tradition. The rules are basic: if it is binary and extreme, it is allowed in the popular conversation. If it powerfully suggests the need for intelligent nuance, it will line the waste baskets of editors from coast to coast. But I will nevertheless try again, at this moment when the problems with the menu overhaul at Eleven Madison Park are providing a window through the fog. Allow me to paint a picture of the actual situation with food. Picture a spreadsheet. There are three columns in this spreadsheet. Each column represents a truth that can stand side by side in the very capable brain of a human animal. See if you can hold it all:

In column one, it is true that animals in our food ecosystem can provide balance and nourishment to soils as well as human bodies, provided they are stewarded properly. There is an entire movement including farmers, scientists, dietitians, and advocates who are producing data, soil organic matter, and radical de-centralized systems to back this up. This is true, even alongside the information in column two:

In column two, it is true that the vast majority of the meat produced and processed in America is still the product of systemic and mechanized suffering and environmental degradation via industrial animal agriculture, and that food products from animals stewarded properly from farm to plate (via the systems mentioned in column one) are not accessible and available to every American meat-eater.

In column three, it is furthermore true that regardless of whether food is animal or plant-based, the American food system perpetuates epic-scale, catastrophic problems of corporate monopoly and consolidation, misdirected government subsidy, fossil-fuel dependence, environmental degradation, debilitating waste, worker oppression, inadequate processing, fragile distribution, fraught consumption, deplorable public health, and crippling hunger. Again, let it be emphasized that these problems cripple the entire food system and will not be addressed by focusing on meat consumption alone.

Our failure to engage in a brave, holistic, layered, multi-column conversation about the actual pursuit of an ethical food system makes headlines like Eleven Madison Park adopting a plant-based menu more re-tweeted than headlines about the sugar industry paying to alter dietary guidelines. Our failure to move the conversation about veganism or meat-eating that is real has Elon Musk buying Twitter more discussed than Steve Jobs and foreign governments buying American farmland. Our failure has The New York Times casting inquiry into the well-documented ills of the corporate meat lobby as “opinion”. Our failure to open ourselves beyond a black and white framework about personal consumption prevents us from building effective anti-trust legislation that would break up corporate monopolies controlling food supply and security. Our infighting keeps us from unifying to pursue state-level food freedom laws, that would open up communities and individuals' abilities to feed themselves.  But what’s at the shallow end of this pool of opportunities is this: Our ridiculous, obsessive, myopic, and overcooked conversation about vegans versus meat-eaters fuels itself. It produces shrugging and buying a Big Mac, or entire social media accounts with mega followings that exist to shame and blame each other, and it enables millions of young Americans to believe that an appropriate and radical form of activism for health, justice building, and environmental stewardship is simply shunning one food group while turning a blind eye to the giant black hole of problems in the food system that spans every food group. Oh, and then maybe tweeting about it, while maybe even taking an often-smug, triumphant nibble of a genetically altered, lab-produced, corporate-patented, sunless, “Beyond (TM)” nugget thing.

What’s going on with Eleven Madison Park is what’s going on with veganism in general. And, here’s a real kicker: In a less old but similarly simplistic negative feedback loop, it is also what’s going on with the conversation on the other side, which meme-shames vegans and tweets about eating as much meat as you like without any discussion of anything but dietary and soil implications. That’s right. I said it.  What’s going on with Eleven Madison Park is what is going on with the whole conversation about meat in general. It’s so exhausting. It’s terrifying. It’s stupid and making us stupider. Participating in this god-awful binary is placing eaters in a stalemate while politicians and corporations continue to pillage the land and control the food supply. OUR TIRED FIGHTING is lining the pockets of robber barons and social media moguls. It’s keeping us distracted while the powers-that-be are stripping the land of topsoil, sterilizing the remaining soil of plant roots and microbial life, vacuuming the nutrients out of leaves and stems, pumping human-edible grains into sophisticated grass-eating ruminants, dispensing edible grains into automobile tanks, saturating the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses, flooding drug and chemical inputs throughout the food supply, perpetuating a racist and oppressive labor infrastructure, obliterating biodiversity, investing in colonizing global food policy, knee-capping fertility from pollination to human reproduction, and inflaming the cells, brains and tissues of the increasingly congested, diabetic, dementia-consumed, cancer-riddled population. God FORBID we look up from this self-exonerating debate. And please, please don’t tell me that someone could lose a Michelin star over this.