Real food pioneers like Mollie Katzen eat their veggies—and their meats.
I grew up in the Bay Area in the 1970s, an era in which Roots were a type of shoe, not something you dug out of the ground and put in your mouth. And while I was vaguely aware that we lived near the Central Valley—the land of fruits and nuts, a place that produced half the nation’s tomatoes, almonds, asparagus, and grapes—the connection of the valley to my dinner plate was mostly a mystery. Like many families of that time, we bought into the convenience-equals-progress mentality, the result being that the bulk of the veggies we served at mealtime—peas, spinach, mushrooms, even potatoes—came courtesy of the Jolly Green Giant.
Then when I was in my early 20s, a friend gave me Mollie Katzen’s Moosewood Cookbook—and my concept of cooking and eating vegetables changed forever. Self-published in 1974 and republished by Berkeley’s Ten Speed Press three years later, Moosewood was the recipe offshoot of a restaurant collective in Ithaca, N.Y., which Katzen cofounded and ran in the mid-’70s with various friends and family members.
Always a bit of a hippie wannabe, I immediately took to this whimsical handwritten ode to fresh produce and tofu with its scrawly little illustrations and asterisk-laden recipes, in part because it seemed both alternative and accessible—so very un-Julia Child. It was also the first time I had seen vegetarian recipes that not only looked tasty, but were presented with a dollop of humor and minus huge ladlefuls of self-righteousness. Far from imperious or intimidating, Katzen always seemed like she was rooting for you, gently coaxing you to try new things like tahini and mung beans and tree ears.
Not that Katzen grew up any greener than the rest of her generation. Speaking recently from her home in the Berkeley hills—where her 400-square-foot studio looks out, naturally, over a large vegetable garden—Katzen says that in her family’s kosher household in upstate New York, meat had to pass muster before making it to the table, while fresh vegetables “consisted of a potato, frozen green beans, and an iceberg lettuce salad.”
“They were relegated to the side,” she says, “but they were the part of the meal I always loved best.”
A petite and pixieish 59-year-old, who—with the exception of a head of neatly cropped gray hair—still looks much like she did in the photos of her early books, Katzen discovered the wonders of garden-grown food, along with Vietnam-era politics, while attending Cornell University. “In the 1970s vegetarianism was a statement of identity, a form of counterculture rebellion,” she recalls. “It expressed the way you live and care about the world. It reflected your personal choices.”
After Cornell, Katzen headed west in 1970 to finish her undergraduate studies at the San Francisco Art Institute, and fell in love with Berkeley. She returned to Ithaca in 1973 to start and work at the collective before moving permanently to Berkeley in 1981. (“I hate to make others feel bad, but Berkeley is like living in paradise,” she says.) Moosewood went on to become one of the best-selling cookbooks of all time, the first of many popular books Katzen would produce with Ten Speed, among them The Enchanted Broccoli Forest, Salad People, Pretend Soup, and Still Life with Menu.

Ari Derfel and Eric Fenster, born in the-personal-is-political ’70s, opened Berkeley’s Gather restaurant in December—the area’s newest take on ultra-organic, local, and sustainable dining. Photos by Carmen Troesser.
Katzen herself wound up as the national poster girl for vegetarian home cooks—the go-to gal for healthy, tasty, non-meat recipes prepared by people like me for countless dinner parties, picnics, book groups, and baby showers. In 1999, Health Magazine dubbed her one of five “Women Who Changed the Way We Eat,” along with Julia Child, Alice Waters, Deborah Madison, and Martha Stewart. In 2003, she cofounded the Food Literacy Project at Harvard University. In 2007, she was inducted into the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame.
And then last year, she did something that gained her more notoriety than any of these remarkable achievements: She published a cookbook containing recipes for meat-eaters. Get Cooking: 150 Simple Recipes to Get You Started in the Kitchen (HarperStudio) is a handy how-to guide for neophytes, providing shopping tips, step-by-step instructions, and easy recipes for home-cooked meals. Chock-full of trademark Katzen whimsy (“Acorn squash is a natural edible bowl that was born to be stuffed”), the new book offers veggie favorites such as mushroom-zucchini ragout over creamy polenta right alongside such meaty classics as Grandma Betty’s brisket and bacon-licious spaghetti alla carbonara.
To anyone who’s been paying any attention to Katzen’s food philosophy over the years, Get Cooking is hardly controversial. For one thing, Katzen had already co-authored a weight-loss book for omnivores (Eat, Drink, and Weigh Less) in 2006. For another, while she’s long espoused a diet of “garden- and orchard-based” foods, and vocally opposed feedlots, factory farming, and fast food, Katzen is not a vegetarian. In fact, as far back as Moosewood, she was voicing her aversion to the Vegetarian Doctrine, writing in the book’s introduction that “there is no specific dogma attached to the Moosewood cuisine. . . . Perhaps most of Moosewood’s customers are not strict vegetarians (or vegetarians at all), but they are drawn to the restaurant for the experience of a meal cooked with skill and care.” Still, among fans who automatically linked Katzen’s name with bean curd and sprouts, the book was the equivalent of bringing baby back ribs to a PETA potluck.
“I got some critical mail from anti-meat activists who felt betrayed,” Katzen says. “The thing is, I have never been an activist against meat. To love vegetables doesn’t mean you have to choose sides. Many people have ascribed an anti-meat stance to me, but you won’t find any of that in any of my books. I’m trying to steer away from these lines in the sand. I see healthy eating as a continuum. Wherever you get your protein from—beans, meat, cheese, tofu—I still want everyone to eat more plant foods.”
Divorced, with grown children—a son who dances with the Mark Morris Dance Group and a daughter who attends U.C.L.A.—Katzen says that far from being a meat-hating dogmatist, she has always simply advocated staying low on the food chain, making greens, grains, nuts, and legumes the dominant ingredients of the diet. She even avoids the term vegetarian, preferring “vegetableist” or “vegi-centric.”
“There’s this idea that being vegetarian is all about what you’re not eating. But I see it as a big tent—eating as sustainably as we can, sourcing as sustainably as we can. The emphasis is less on keeping meat off the plate, and more on filling the plate up with vegetables and whole grains, so there’s less room for any meat. Meat, if any, should be the condiment,” she says.
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Katzen’s philosophy, it turns out, was way ahead of its time—even for the green-obsessed East Bay. The meat vs. plants debate took root here decades ago, but only in the last few years do activists and foodies alike finally seem to be hearing the call of sensible moderation. These days, the local, sustainable, organic, farm-to-table mantra is being taken up by scores of healthy diet and environmental advocates. Most famously, Berkeleyite Michael Pollan instructs readers of his 2008 manifesto, In Defense of Food, to “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.”
Other new literary offerings, such as The Healthy Hedonist and Almost Meatless (both from Ten Speed), underscore the recent sea change in mainstream attitudes toward vegetarianism, once a polarizing, politicized term that either suggested some kind of Commie plot or a tenet of left-wing virtue. With the publication of hot seller The Flexitarian Diet, Dawn Jackson Blatner’s 2008 prescriptive for people “who want all the health benefits of a vegetarian diet—but can’t imagine giving up meat,” plant eaters even have a blond and perky pop-culture face.
Nationwide, the proliferation of farmers’ markets, increasing availability of organic and humanely raised meats, conceptual coupling of factory farming and global warming, and the populist rise of the green movement have taken the teeth out of the old radical stereotype.
In our neck of the woods, where pioneering food movements and the counterculture have always lived in the same co-op, the shift is perhaps more surprising.
Vegetarian history here dates at least as far back as 1971, when Frances Moore Lappé, a former U.C. Berkeley graduate student in social work, published the hugely influential Diet for a Small Planet, arguing that a plant-based diet could feed the world more efficiently and nutritionally than a meat-based one.
That same year, Alice Waters began picking baby lettuces out of Bay Area backyards for Chez Panisse—predating the term locavore by 30 years. Two years later, Ned Getline opened Smokey Joe’s Cafe (“where the elite meet to eat no meat”) on Shattuck Avenue just a block from Chez Panisse, hailing it as one of the first vegetarian restaurants in the country (it’s now the site of the mostly organic Guerilla Cafe).
After graduating from Cal in 1969, John Robbins, heir to the Baskin-Robbins ice-cream fortune, turned his back on buttercream and went on to become a powerful eco-food advocate, founding EarthSave International in 1988. His 1987 treatise, Diet for a New America, which connects the dots between diet, health, factory farming, and inhumane treatment of animals, has become something of a bible for the modern sustainable food movement.
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While the number of entirely meat-averse eaters in the United States still remains statistically small, consider that even 15 years ago, less than 1 percent of the population identified as vegetarian, according to a Roper Poll conducted by the Vegetarian Resource Group. In 2009, a Harris Interactive survey by the same organization upped that number to 3 percent, or 6 to 8 million adults. Perhaps more notable, however, is that in the group’s 2008 poll, when asked how often they order vegetarian dishes at restaurants, more than 50 percent unabashedly answered “sometimes,” “often,” or “always.”
Vegetarian “now has a positive connotation,” the group concluded, “as many people who are not actually vegetarian call themselves vegetarians.”
Clearly, this is no longer your hippie granny’s tofu movement. Less concerned about labels and political statements, conscientious consumers have given birth to a whole new gastronomic lexicon: vegetarian with benefits, VB6 (vegan before 6 p.m.), recession flexitarians (people who are eating less meat because they can’t afford it), opportunivores (free food seekers, from backyard gleaning to dumpster diving), Häagen Dazs vegans, aquatarians, freegans (similar to opportunivores, a movement that advocates salvaging discarded food from supermarkets and wild foraging), and so on.
In the East Bay, where you can’t swing a gluten-free tortilla without hitting 18 varieties of organic lard-free beans (a list on the website bayareavegetarians.org shows some 120 vegan- or vegetarian-friendly dining options from Alameda to Dublin), even preposterous green dining concepts are accepted without so much as a raised eyebrow.
In the April 1, 2009 issue of the East Bay Express, writer Cassie Harwood lampooned Berkeley’s “cutting-edge tastes” with a review of the fictitious Second Life Café, specializing in “composted” cuisine. Peppered with quotes from owner and former dumpster diver Oscar Solaris about the virtues of decomposed “mature” foods, she expounded on her experiences sampling “humus hummus” and wine made from old fruit, sugar, and moldy bread.
Readers reacted with expected gusto—though not with a barrage of LOLs. In a written response, one commented that “the thought that there are ‘perpetual out-the-door lines’ is simply frightening to me. But it continues to underscore the fact that Berkeley residents . . . will stop at nothing in their quest to [be] the weirdest people on the face of the Earth.”
A second commentator admonished that “if you can compost farm wastes in the Third World you could in fact be feeding quite a lot of people.”
Their willingness to suspend disbelief highlights—in neon—the point that in the über-eco East Bay, standing out among the mostly meatless crowd can be a challenge. Genuine dining-out options for herbivores range from low-budget ethnic to sit-down white tablecloth. On any given day you can sample vegan soul food (Oakland’s Souley Vegan), vegan sushi (Cha-Ya in Berkeley), entirely raw, living vegan cuisine (Berkeley’s Café Gratitude), and haute vegan macrobiotic food (Manzanita in Oakland). As for what lies ahead, who knows: the Second Life Café may be just around the corner . . . for real.
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Perhaps no local venue epitomizes the modern fresh face of organic, local, and sustainable better than Gather, the new restaurant that opened last December in Berkeley’s David Brower Center (purportedly the greenest building in the East Bay and home to the Earth Island Institute, the Redford Center, the Women’s Earth Alliance, and other nonprofits).
If Katzen is the arms-outstretched Earth Mother of the movement, owners Ari Derfel and Eric Fenster are its meticulous, market-savvy offspring. At Gather, they take the “reduce, reuse, recycle” mantra to obsessive heights. Nothing comes in or goes out of the restaurant that hasn’t been documented and accounted for—from the hundreds of thrift-store belts stitched together to create the stylish leather banquettes, to Chef Sean Baker’s strict adherence to root-to-shoot, snout-to-tail cooking. Not sure if that cumin comes from a fair trade farm? Ask for “The Source Book,” an index that traces the life cycle of each ingredient used in the restaurant, down to and including oils, spices, animals, and vegetables.
“Everything that walks through the door gets used, from watermelon rinds to the last bean,” insists Fenster, talking over the din of the packed dinner crowd on a weeknight in January. “We’re not just seasonal, we’re microseasonal, we’re hyper-sustainable.”
It’s a cause that both have embraced with a zealousness that’s admirable—if not a little overwhelming. In 2001, the two entrepreneurs founded Back to Earth, which, they claim, was the nation’s first all-organic catering business. Then in 2007, Derfel embarked upon a personal garbage-analyzing odyssey, saving every scrap of trash he created, and painstakingly organizing and filing it in bins until he had collected 96 cubic feet. (Shades of “the personal is political,” the activist slogan of the ’70s—the same decade in which Derfel and Fenster were born).
Studying Derfel’s detritus helped shape the partners’ philosophy at Gather. The fight for food justice, they concluded, isn’t about animal vs. vegetable (about 50 percent of Gather’s menu is vegetarian and vegan) or about foods being certified as organic by a government agency. The way they see it, the big issues are scrupulous sourcing, minimal processing and transport (roughly 80 percent of the meat and vegetables served at Gather comes from within 300 miles of the restaurant), zero waste, and fair, ethical wages and pricing.
The result, as executed by chef Baker, is exquisitely fresh and flavorful cuisine that is as fascinating to read about in “The Source Book” as it is to eat. Amid tables carved from a Sonoma high school’s old bleachers and light fixtures crafted from recycled vodka bottles, artisanal plates of house-cured meats share equal billing with a vegan “charcuterie”—an herbivorous fantasy involving five intricate preparations, a dozen different vegetables, and at least as many vendors.
“Vegetarianism comes down to preferences,” says Fenster. “Some people feel that the healthiest diet for the planet is vegan. From my perspective, the earth is made of many landscapes and some landscapes are best suited for grazing and pasture lands.”
Adds Derfel, “We’re not about preaching to people. We’re trying to respond to what the community is asking for. Strict dogma just leads to divisiveness.”
Like his peers at Gather, self-described “eco-chef” Aaron French of the popular Sunny Side Café, with locations in Berkeley and Albany, takes a pro-choice line on contents of the dinner plate. “Elitism is counterproductive,” he says. “I’m not about 100 percent purity, I’m about awareness. I want people to enjoy my food and maybe learn more about sustainable options.”
French, a vegetarian-trained cook with a master’s degree in ecology from San Francisco State, represents another emerging trend in the food field—environmentalists with science and business smarts. While studying birds and monkeys, he lived with Baka pygmies in Cameroon for two years and went on to win awards from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Today, not only is Sunny Side’s environmentally savvy chef the author of The Bay Area Homegrown Cookbook, slated for publication next year by Voyageur Press—he’s also an MBA candidate at the Haas School of Business at Cal.
At Sunny Side—whose six-year-old Solano Avenue location is touted as the first green-certified restaurant in Albany—you won’t find those ubiquitous heart icons drawing attention to low-calorie dishes. You will, however, see small globes scattered about the menu: These represent low-carbon emissions choices. Such visual reminders, French believes, push diners to choose more earth-friendly foods—even if popular breakfast dishes such as his tofu scramble are regularly ordered with a side of (humanely raised) bacon.
But even in Berkeley—which has eagerly embraced obscure foodstuffs ranging from arugula and radicchio to cardoons and dulse—French says supporting small producers can be tenuous. Business acumen, he believes, is the key to success for the sustainability movement. “We’re a business-driven society,” he says. “All the papers and think tank reports are not going to move culture. Innovation has to come from a successful business model.”
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Producing the next crop of effective food advocates is on Katzen’s mind these days, too. Like Slow Food Movement founder Carlo Petrini, she has worked with the University of New Hampshire to help create and develop a first-of-its-kind eco-gastronomy major. Part of a joint degree program with the schools of agriculture, hospitality, and business, Katzen says students “will come out and work to change agricultural policy.”
“For me, that is the work,” she says. “Michael Pollan has made people aware of how important it is to source your food well. Eco-gastronomy majors will come out with a literacy of food sourcing for the next generation.”
Meanwhile, Katzen is also gearing up to take on her next foodie cause—nudging Americans off their posteriors, away from the remote control, and back into their kitchens—an issue that she began to ponder in Get Cooking. “I wonder how many people are munching junk food (or just plain not-very-good food) while watching gourmet cooking on a screen?” she muses. “We’ve become a nation of nutrient- and flavor-challenged food voyeurs.”
In one of her next books, Katzen wants to address what she calls the “armchair tourism” of cookbooks and TV shows that have “nothing to do with your own dinner.”
“I definitely want to do a book of super-simple recipes—three- to five-ingredient dishes,” she explains with infectious excitement. “I want to address people’s stress levels about cooking.”
Over a career that has spanned 30-plus years and more than a dozen books, Katzen has never wavered in her belief that creating “healthy, delicious, colorful, inspiring, economical, and accessible” meals is not rocket science. It can and should be attempted by ordinary folks, she suggests, without a lot of fuss and certainly without judgment.
And if you live in the Bay Area, the inspiration and motivation is right outside your door. “Living among all this beautiful produce does something to our culinary brains,” Katzen says. “I walk into Monterey Market and I’m absorbing through the pores of my skin what I feel about produce, what I want to make for dinner. That’s my inspiration, my self-medication. I walk the aisles and inhale and I’m in heaven.”
As for me, the proof is in the pudding, or more precisely, in the spicy eggplant purée, a recipe from Still Life with Menu that is so sauce-stained and dog-eared by now that last night I had to scrape off the page with a paring knife to figure out how much lemon juice to add.
Still Life suggests you pair this spicy riff on baba ghanoush with hot pasta, a combo that would never have occurred to me, but which turns out to be a revelation of Italian-Middle Eastern fusion. That, in a nutshell, is Katzen’s genius—always encouraging readers to think a little outside the box, if not just a touch outside their comfort zones. She wants their taste buds, not their prejudices and preconceived notions, to do the talking. And in the end, there’s room for everyone at the table.
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San Francisco journalist Bonnie Wach’s writing has appeared in publications ranging from The New York Times Magazine to the San Francisco Chronicle. She last wrote for The East Bay Monthly on California’s Living New Deal project.