Experience Vegan Philly Through the Eyes of Locals

Speaker 1: Ah, what a glorious day it is to be a colonial woman! Welcome to Philadelphia, the birthplace of our nation and the birthplace of both America's vegetarian and vegan movements. Today, this history-drenched city is a hotbed of veganism and home to some of the world's top restaurants and chefs who just happen to be vegan.

Speaker 2: Philadelphia is a very vegan city. Any restaurant I go into, I certainly support the vegan restaurants. But anywhere I go, there is no just fruit plate for me or pasta dish. People here speak vegan.

Speaker 1: No wonder the American Vegan Society has a cultural hub here and hosted its epic 1890s vegan Thanksgiving gala in Philadelphia, recreating and reimagining meatless recipes that are over a century old. This dress-up party was a blast to the past, complete with a very talented barbershop-style quartet. But on this night, the real star was the food. Rachel Klein, one of America's top vegan chefs, organized eight other chefs who veganized the meatless recipes from the November 1900 issue of Good Housekeeping magazine.

The chefs submitted their creations to Rachel, who ensured they were both Casey and historically accurate. When she's not going retro, Rachel Klein runs the highly acclaimed Miss Rachel's. Hi, Jamie. How are you?

Hi. Come on in. Yeah. Every night's a little bit different.

You a five-course dinner. You don't have to make any choices. You just sit down and the food comes flying at your face, but at like a nice pace. the city of brotherly love's most famous food is of course the Philly cheesesteak, and yes, you can get a vegan Philly cheesesteak.

Triangle Taverns is cheesy and delish. One-time winner of the best vegan cheese steak contest organized by the American Vegan Society, that organization even has a map of the more than 30 Philly restaurants that serve vegan cheese. Good to them. Every big city tries to lay claim to the best pizza, and Philly's 20th Street Pizza as a 100% vegan pizzeria is hell back on claiming that height for this city, and is winning over pizza lovers without a drop of dairy.

Speaker 3: We're constantly being told that the reason that people wouldn't go vegan was because of pizza, so that's really how it started. We figured out we got to tackle this pizza issue, so that was kind of how I got on it initially, and then it was kind of just you know we kept going.

Speaker 1: Variations of pizza in the form of bread with toppings have been around since Pompeii, but you can't say the same for vegan cheese. This themed party was designed to honor the 19th century's huge vegetarian movement, but along with lots of veggies, many recipes from the golden era of vegetarianism were heavy on the dairy. Today, however, vegan cheeses have gotten so good they've made dairy completely obsolete.

Speaker 4: Hi, I'm Kirsten Maitland. I'm the co-founder of Rebel Cheese. I've been vegan now for about 15 years, so a while, and I went vegan for the animals, for my health, and for the planet. Everybody says I can't go vegan because of the cheese, right?

There's always the one thing that is preventing them from going 100% vegan. So we believe if you can create something that tastes just as good as the dairy equivalent, then there are no more reasons why you can't go vegan anymore. And that's why I created Rebel Cheese is to make sure more people eat plant-based, even if it's a handful of meals a week. That compound impact of everyone doing that is huge.

We were just in Time Magazine Innovation of the Year. We were also on the Inc. 5,000 list.

Speaker 1: And what would a trip to Philly be without visiting Veg, named by Food and Wine Magazine as one of the most important restaurants of the past decade?

Speaker 5: Hey, my name is Rich Landell, and this is Veg Restaurant. I'm the co-owner here with my wife, Kate Jacoby.

Speaker 1: These two James Beard-nominated chefs create gourmet dishes featuring seasonal vegetables and bold global flavors that have earned national acclaim and numerous awards.

Speaker 5: When it comes to vegetables, we we made a very serious kind of effort that our direction here was going to be about every vegetable, especially the ones that we didn't love and the ones that don't get enough love. I mean, everybody loves cauliflower and potatoes and portable mushrooms, but there's a bunch of vegetables we didn't really care for, like Brussels sprouts and sweet potatoes, eggplant, which we made it our life's work to make delicious in ways that we've never seen them before.

Speaker 6: For co-owner Kate Dacoby, a James Beard nominated pastry chefs. Vegan desserts are key to changing hearts and minds. The first key desserts for me were two. One was a creme brulee, realizing that I could use coconut milk and add very little to it and transform it into what would be very satisfying to me as a delicious creme brulee.

You have to get the sugar crust on top, just perfect. And then the other one is cheesecake. It's been my secret recipe forever. I take a lot of pride in it, and I genuinely feel like we, you know, people say they put love into things.

There's a lot of love in that cheesecake.

Speaker 2: And do you know that one of our newer vegan restaurants in Philadelphia just got a green Michelin star. Michelin came to Philadelphia. Pietro Lama. It is fabulous.

Michelin recognized this vegan restaurant.

Speaker 1: Michelin star Pietrimala is another Philly vegan gem that turns food into edible art. The chef owner Ian Gray contributed his genius with greens by putting his unique spin on the blistered green beans served at the 1890s vegan gala. All these talented chefs coming together to show the world that compassionate dining has always been a trend. It's as old as compassion itself.

The

Speaker 7: flavors we're we're developing here are, you know, simple and.

Speaker 1: Philadelphia's Walnut Hill College, where the 1890s-style vegan gala was held, is training the top chefs of tomorrow by pairing them with one of today's top vegan chefs, Christina Perilla of PBS fame. What does this event, this historical vegan Thanksgiving, personally mean to you? For

Speaker 8: me, the truth is, for me, this was a great opportunity to expose my students to vegan cooking, whether it's traditional from the 1900s or whether it's current vegan cooking, I run a course here that they can't graduate without. So anything I can do that exposes them to vegan cooking to show them that it's delicious, easy to do-that's really what it means-is to bring it here to the school.

Speaker 1: This renowned culinary college requires students to take a class on veganism in order to graduate. The president of Walnut Hill College recognizes that teaching chefs how to cook vegan is an essential part of their education in the culinary arts if they're going to succeed in today's restaurant and hospitality industries. The

Speaker 9: vegan course makes the students, the graduates, much more well-rounded. Vegan is not necessarily a trend. It's an important aspect in fine dining, in the kinds of restaurants and hotels, pastry shops that our students work in. So it's a perfect opportunity for them to get the hands-on education that they need.

So they're actually part of inspiring the future of great restaurateurs, restaurant owners, chefs, pastry chefs, hoteliers, and so on.

Speaker 1: It's clear that the future of food will be plant-based, if only to feed the world exploding human population on a finite planet. The

Speaker 10: biggest fact for me is that when my dad went vegan and started the American Vegan Society in 1960, there were 8 billion land animals killed for food worldwide each year. Now there are over 80 billion land animals killed for food worldwide each year. So we have to do something different.

Speaker 1: And the long journey to a plant-based future is what this historical gala was all about. One giant step for the movement was when Seth Tibbett launched tofurkey, the iconic turkey alternative, three decades ago. More recently, Ryan Howard's company, Chicago Vegan Food, hit the market with dandies, those wildly popular vegan marshmallows.

Speaker 11: Like any movement, these things never happen as fast as you want them to. But I do believe that we will see this ebb and flow throughout history, and it will continue to come back a little stronger. Go away. Come back a little stronger.

Go away. Come back a little stronger. I'm not worried.

Speaker 1: But what about the meat industry's ongoing public relations war against vegan products, especially plant-based burgers, falsely labeling them as ultra-processed.

Speaker 11: That's a defensive play by the meat industry. It would be naive to think that they weren't going to react to this massive vegan movement. It was everywhere.

Speaker 1: And there's Vanuary, one of the most effective vegan campaigns in history, growing from an idea in a kitchen in a new fold to a global phenomenon.

Speaker 12: Hi, I'm Wendy Matthews. I'm the CEO of Veganuary, and I've been vegan since 2014. We are growing in the United States. We've been here for five years.

It's taking a little longer than it is in Europe because it's a massive country, but we're making progress. 500 businesses participated last year. We've had some amazing U.S. celebs get on board, so I think you'll be hearing more and more about it in the U.S.

soon.

Speaker 1: So, for all these vegans celebrating the golden age of plant-based living, what's the bottom line?

Speaker 11: Go vegan. Tell your friends to go vegan. That's what it's all about: going vegan and being nice to people, spreading the word, keeping the faith. This is what we got.

Transcribed by https: //otter.ai