Meat is at the heart of the Dominican Republic’s cuisine. In the northern part of the country, where chef Blenlly Mena’s family is from, the meat of choice is usually goat – it is served at weddings, as well as throughout the nine-day mourning period to honor a loved one’s death.
So it is goat that Mena, who grew up in New York City, considers the ultimate celebration meal. Or she did, until she went vegan in late 2015.
She was living in Los Angeles at the time – the promised land of sun-kissed models Instagramming their raw food detoxes. Mena tried a raw food challenge to better her chances as a contestant on a YouTube series called The Fittest Winner.
“As I was looking up recipes, I discovered the word vegan,” she says. As she realized she didn’t miss meat and felt physically and spiritually healthier, the discovery stuck. But when she left Los Angeles for a stint teaching English in South Korea nine months later, finding tasty vegan food became a concern.
“Korean food was very heavy on seafood and meat,” she says. She started to cook at home, using Korean spices and ingredients from her adopted home, as well as Dominican staples, like plantain. She posted her dishes on Instagram and YouTube, gained a following, and soon found herself with an informal second job as a prep cook for fellow foreign teachers.
When she returned to the Bronx in the summer of 2017, where nearly a quarter of the population is Dominican, she launched Next Stop Vegan, a prepared meal delivery service, from her mother’s kitchen. She quickly outgrew the space as word spread that her vegan chimis – a take on the Dominican hamburger usually made with seasoned ground beef and covered in its own secret sauce – were absolutely stellar. A year later, a line of more than 250 people attending the Bronx Night Market, a local food fair featuring mostly meat, were willing to wait a half-hour to try Mena’s vegan cuisine.
But this warm reception was far from preordained. When Mena first moved back to the States, her family was skeptical of her enthusiasm for her new way of eating, certain it was just a phase. Mena says in general her community can be resistant to changing their diets.
“They think that nothing can be recreated without the meat, because in the Dominican [Republic] we’re very into our roots and the naturalness of what it is,” she says. In a culture where goat and other meat feel like a cultural imperative, being vegan may seem like voluntarily giving up lifelong traditions.
The connection between food and culture runs so deep that what we eat can affect whether we feel full afterwards, according to Krishnendu Ray, a professor at New York University. “I have now lived in the United States for more than 20 years,” says Ray, a native of India, “and I don’t feel full until I have eaten rice.” The Dominican Republic’s equivalent would be la bandera – the flag – and it always includes meat.
“It’s centerfold to our dishes,” says Arturo Feliz-Camilo, who has written multiple Dominican cookbooks. “If there’s no meat, people feel like they’re not having a real meal.”
It’s this association of a certain food with an identity (meat = culture = non-negotiable) that Next Stop Vegan is trying to get rid of and replace with a more inclusive view of veganism – one that has a place in every culture. Mena is one in a growing chorus of responses to the entrenched image that all 9.7 million Americans who identify as vegan are tiny blond women sanctimoniously nibbling on salads.
According to Jenne Claiborne, the truth about veganism’s roots in the US is much more diverse than it’s perceived to be. Claiborne, the Los Angeles-based author of the vegan lifestyle blog Sweet Potato Soul, says she didn’t meet any white vegans until young adulthood when she took a job at a plant-based bakery named Peacefood Cafe in New York City.
“I actually didn’t hear of this thing of it being a white thing until quite recently, when the movement has grown,” she says.
Her father’s family were members of the Hebrew Israelite community, a spiritual sect started by descendants of African slaves, who eschew meat. As University of North Texas historian Jennifer Jensen Wallach wrote, many black nationalists viewed vegetarianism as a way of rejecting the culture that slavery forced upon them. That culture includes the agricultural industrialization that often makes meat the cheapest option for a population systematically shut out of economic stability.
“It’s important for people of color to wake up to the fact that this food is hurting us,” Claiborne says. “It’s keeping us down.”
Similar calls to action are afoot in other cultures too. In 2015, Luz Calvo, an ethnic studies professor at California State University, published a cookbook with their wife, Catriona Rueda Esquibel, called Decolonize Your Diet. It features vegan Mexican cuisine and a manifesto in favor of reclaiming ancestral wisdom. “Many of the less healthy aspects of the Mesoamerican cuisine came about as the direct result of colonization,” Calvo writes in the book.
In the process of reclaiming healthier ways of eating and embracing veganism, people of color find themselves in a complex process that involves convincing their friends and relatives that the sacred cows – or goats – of their food traditions should be released.
Ray sees this happening in the food studies lectures he teaches at NYU: nearly a decade ago, he said, the vegans speaking up in his classes were primarily young white women evangelizing about the ecological and animal welfare benefits of giving up meat. Now those students are increasingly diverse, with black students specifically emphasizing “what bad industrial habits have done to their communities”.
Mena’s task is more local. She wants people to understand that vegans are just normal people who don’t eat meat, and foregoing it doesn’t make them any less Dominican. This is an idea her own sister and business partner, Ana Baez, has taken some time to accept – she’s not completely vegan but she’s getting there.
“My co-worker recently sent me a text message, and said to ‘Come eat – I have goat.’ And I felt bad for the goat!” Baez says, incredulous.
Mena explained: “It’s a prestigious dish; it’s a celebratory dish. If someone passes away, we do a nine-day ceremony after the death, you serve goat. It’s a cultural thing. So when you let go of that, and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, I’m not part of this celebratory moment now.’”
Still, Mena is pleasantly surprised by the impact she has had on the people around her in the past year. “I didn’t think my culture would actually want to be part of this,” she says. “Now most of my family members are either transitioning or vegan.”
In October, Mena, three relatives and a family friend converged at Next Stop Vegan’s new commercial kitchen in the Bronx’s Parkchester neighborhood. I had a hard time finding the place housed in a former Chinese takeout joint. Its windows were fogged with condensation and its security barrier was partially lowered, forcing me to duck to get in. Inside, it was warm, and the air was heavy with pepper and garlic. It smelled like a perfectly seasoned meatloaf was cooking, but without the underlying gaminess of animal flesh.
The five women, spread among the industrial-sized cooktop and multiple card tables serving as prep stations, peeled and chopped onions, peppers, squash and chayote while simultaneously making 10 different dishes for that week’s clients. Those vegetables were incorporated into dishes like chopped cheese (made from quinoa “beef”, that perfect meatloaf I smelled), rice and beans, and vegetable platters.
Mena’s mother, Ana Moncion, kept appearing with taste tests of the food for everyone in the kitchen like bulgur – a whole grain with a meaty mouthfeel – and a light chickpea soup. I perched at the takeout window eagerly devouring everything she put beside me, eyeing the samples that sat untouched beside the other women too busy cooking the dishes to try them.
They had about 65 deliveries scheduled for that week, their goal was 100. That night in the kitchen the room was filled with talk of storefronts and expansions. They’re spending weekends through mid-January hosting a booth at the New York Botanical Garden’s nighttime winter event series, a ticketed event she hopes will broaden her clientele.
“You [don’t] have to be this Mother Teresa when you’re vegan,” says Mena. It’s a diet choice that doesn’t have to include any degree of cultural separation. You eat food that’s healthier for both you and the planet, and you won’t even notice that the sancocho – a stew – lacks seafood and the chopped cheese is actually grains covered with a mix of root vegetables, nutritional yeast and nut milk. You’ll just think, this is delicious.