Diva Productions, Inc.
DCL
Angela Shelf Medearis calls herself The Kitchen Diva. She lives in Texas, likes to entertain guests with her ethnic vegetarian cooking, and has put out six cookbooks (and dozens of children's books). Her next project is Black Girl Goes Green! A Soulful Way to Save the Planet, a cookbook which will incorporate green living tips designed for a more urban, diverse audience, and organic and vegetarian recipes, along with the vegan ones she will create during a 21-day vegan pledge. By demonstrating creativity, she invites others to join in the delicious, eco-friendly fun.
WATCH VIDEO: Vegan Soul Kitchen with Emeril
Planet Green: You refer to yourself as an ethnic vegetarian
Angela Shelf Medearis: I think people feel more comfortable talking to me and asking me questions than they might be with someone who is white.
I think it's also more common for white people to be vegans than African Americans. For so long, people have considered vegetarian and vegan a totally white thing, and I think it's not so much from white people saying, that's so unusual
Even when I was working on the ethnic vegetarian cookbook, people were real surprised. When I had African Americans over for dinner, they would eat and enjoy it. Then I would say, that was made from tofu, or that wasn't really beef, that was seitan, that kind of thing. Nothing you ate was what you thought it was.
My favorite comment was during a committee meeting: I made dinner and halfway through, I said, there's no meat in there. A guy stopped eating and said, "I don't think I've ever had a meal where I didn't have meat. I didn't even notice it, I didn't miss it."
PG: You mentioned you like to talk to people when their mouth is full. Tell me more! ASM: (Laughs.) Food is a great starting point, and sometimes that's what you need when you're talking to people who are unsure, nervous, having certain racial prejudices.
The whole basis of racism really is a fear of the unknown. If you're an enlightened person, then what you do to overcome that is educate and you make them feel comfortable. And that's what I love about food, because I don't care who you are, what language you speak
I'm the product of a father who was in the military and we moved all the time, so I'm used to being in situations where i'm the only one who looks like me, or the only one who talks like I do. I've gotten used to people looking at me like I'm an alien, and figuring out a way to make them feel more comfortable, so that they can realize that I'm just like you are. At lunchtime I'm going to be hungry, give me a few hours I'm going to have to go find a bathroom.
It is similar with vegetarian and veganism, or with any kind of prejudice: I don't know anything about it, I've never been educated about it, I'm afraid to ask questions
That's what I really love about kids, they will ask you anything. When I'm trying to get adults to another level of thinking or encourage them to try something new, they won't try because if they fail
I think I was born without the adult gene: it doesn't bother me at all. I'll try and fail, it doesn't bother me. I really look forward to that kind of challenge.
PG: How else do you reach out to people through cooking? ASM: I've just done anything I can think of to provide the same kind of information that you probably get anywhere else, but in a much more entertaining and far less boring fashion than a lot of people who have the same type of message that I do.
The sad thing is most people have usually had vegetables only prepared one way, and so they don't really know what they taste like. One lady actually told me that she never ate cauliflower because she'd had it steamed to death. You can mess up some really good food, and in the process, ruin it for life, where you never want to try it again because it's so horrible.
And brussel sprouts, one study showed they were one of the most hated foods of all time.
I love brussel sprouts! ASM: I love them too, but you probably know how to prepare them correctly. But if you cook them until they're a brown, sad, and funky mess, and then make some child eat them, then tell them they're going to sit there until they're all gone, and then serve them again when they're cold because they didn't eat them at dinner, and all that kind of craziness, of course they're going to be hated.
When I prepare African American cuisine, it's very healthy. It's not African
Soul food is not healthy, but it can be made to be healthy. I like to use the media to flip the script of how African Americans are portrayed
We have a show on Hulu, we use a lot of pop culture spoofs. We have a show called Here's Okra—it's a cartoon with an okra pod that looks like a very famous talk show host. Okra interviews different foods that have been given a bad rap and gives them a forum to come out and vent. She interviews a block of tofu about the fact that tofu's boring. She did an interview with eggplant, who was accused of being bitter and she wanted to set the record straight.
[b]PG: You also have a newspaper column in Texas
I try do recipes that people know of, but with ingredients they're not used to adding. For instance I do a tofu macaroni and cheese that's really good. A lot of people eat macaroni and cheese as their main meal, and if you put the tofu in it
I talk a lot about ways you can conserve energy, recipes that are easy to prepare in the microwave. People don't have the time, or probably the passion that I do, for food, and it's a real joy for me to be able to discover things and share them with people so they can tackle their health in a different way, and also eat, and enjoy what they're eating without having to worry about, is this going to be really bad for me?
