As a Kansas City native, just seeing the words plant-based lifestyle makes me wince.
I see gangly, green plants, and then I see someone forcing me to eat them. As a lifestyle.
For 20 years, I’ve lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. And for 20 years, I’ve been a barbecue zealot, a proselytizer of the good life as only Kansas City knows it. (Gates and Bryants, Winstead’s and Topsy’s to name a few fundamentals)
But then the pandemic sent the world off its axis. And while the heroes went to work, many of us, sheltered-in-place, redirected the anxiety of the days into a drive to be productive, to self-improve.
Somewhere between working and keeping their homes from imploding, friends planted gardens, Marie Kondo-ed closets and Zoomed into the world’s online classroom.
I initiated an identity crisis by joining a vegan cooking class here in the land of sprouted tofu.
Under the secret cover of my N95-mask, I skulked around alien aisles of Whole Foods, looking for ingredients I’ve rolled my eyes at for years. Hemp hearts. Nutritional yeast. Chia seeds. (What about my chia pet from the 80s? Now I’m supposed to eat it?)
Class began. The teacher exuded light from her pores. The science is in, she said. Plant-based is better for individuals and the planet. She cooked. She taught. And the food was amazing: Golden brown falafel. Spinach pesto piadine. Chocolate ganache so creamy and divine you almost (almost) forgot it was made from avocados.
As the days passed, and with great ambivalence, I fell in love with things too embarrassing to mention publicly.
Then the postman dropped off a tall box: Topsy’s Popcorn, sent by my brother’s family to soften the blow of two lost graduations and the general misery of the world.
I ripped it open and pulled out the tin. My eyes fell onto the three perfect sections of candy-red cinnamon, caramel and cheese popcorn. I am not ashamed to say I wept.
Well, that was it. Before you could say tempeh, we were defrosting the slab of Gates ribs hidden away from our last trip home.
As the divine aroma of smoked brisket filled our kitchen, my mind flashed back to the countless times in my life that Topsy’s, Gates Bar-B-Q, Winstead’s and other tastes of home had been there. Like beloved, old friends, they arrived to help celebrate and consecrate our childhood birthdays and high school graduations, then our pre-nuptial dinners and baby births, and now, the high school and college graduations of those babies.
During another particularly harrowing chapter of our lives, my family had sent us Topsy’s. The mere sight of the tin, with its wintery Kansas City Plaza Lights scene, was medicinal, and for months I kept it out on the table as an ongoing prayer for better times.
There’s no doubt I will come out of this time a healthier, more enlightened cook. But life in quarantine has brought me to a more expansive appreciation of what it means to be well.
There is your health, and there is your soul. And sometimes the two are inextricably linked, be damned the saturated fat.
I don’t know when it will be safe enough to get on a plane and go back to Kansas City to see our family. I don’t know what will happen in the interim, except that any number of frightening and once unimaginable scenarios are possible.
What I do know, as my family leaned into our slab of Gates’ ribs followed by excessive amounts of Topsy’s, is that now more than ever, these ties to home are a treasure of love and comfort, of tradition and sacred memories.
And there’s no improving on that.
This article was originally published in The Kansas City Star.
