"All we believe in is punk rock and tofu"
One of my recent obsessions, within the context of Austin food businesses, is Zucchini Kill bakery. It’s a tiny little cupcake shop in a vegan food truck park called Possum Park. As you can probably guess by the name, it’s informed by a feminist punk ethos. Everything is vegan, gluten-free, and soy-free, which makes it a great allergy-friendly option for folks who want a cupcake but can’t walk into just any bakery for a sweet treat. It’s among a growing group of women-owned food businesses in Austin geared toward those who choose to (or have to) avoid animal products and other problematic ingredients.
In my dissertation, which I wrote a lifetime ago, I dedicated a chapter to “feminist vegetarian ideologies.” I wouldn’t use the word “ideologies” today — I use the word “rhetorics” instead, as that’s a more nuanced way to describe the phenomena I analyzed. In fact, I’ve long mulled picking up that chapter and expanding it into a (book-length?) examination of vegan rhetorics.
The premise of the chapter was how Bloodroot, a feminist bookstore and vegetarian restaurant in Connecticut, and Isa Moskovitz of Post Punk Kitchen use vegetarian and vegan cookbooks to stake their claim in conversations about patriarchy, sexual violence, corporate food, the environment. Food — particularly vegetarian/vegan food — is both the medium and the message.
Like Zucchini Kill, the Post Punk Kitchen cookbooks (Post Punk Kitchen, Vegan With a Vengeance, Vegan Cupcakes, Veganomicon) employ a discourse of revolution from a punk perspective. For Moskowitz, punk “taught me to question everything. Of course, in my case that means questioning how to make a Hostess cupcake without eggs, butter or cream.” But why the need to make a Hostess cupcake without eggs or dairy? The tendency of punk cuisine to interrogate mainstream food practices serves two purposes: to protest hegemonic injustices and to opt out of the corporate foodstream.
Dylan Clark defines punk cuisine in his 2004 article, “The Raw and the Rotten: Punk Cuisine”:
Many punks associate the ‘civilizing’ process of producing and transforming food with the human domination of nature and with White, male, corporate supremacy. Punks believe that industrial food fills a person’s body with the norms, rationales, and moral pollution of corporate capitalism and imperialism. Punks reject such ‘poisons’ and do not want to be mistaken for being White or part of American mainstream society. A variety of practices, many dietary, provide a powerful critique against the status quo.
For most punks, however, meat-eating is collaborative with an unjust social order, one punks typically define as patriarchy. Given that punks oppose social hierarchies, and given that they locate themselves in staunchly patriarchal societies, they generally find the need to subvert male supremacy in everyday life. Vegetarianism […] helps to differentiate punks from the Mainstream, neatly corresponds to punk egalitarian values, and offers a direct challenge to the gender relations perceived in meat. […] In the daily praxis of punk, vegetarianism and veganism are strategies through which many punks combat corporate capitalism, patriarchy, and environmental collapse.
So, by this logic, to develop a vegan simulacrum of the iconic black cupcake with the stark white curlicue of frosting on top is to offer up a version of the mainstream that is stripped of its associations with corporate capitalism and environmental collapse, and is inherently feminist.
Zucchini Kill picks up where PPK “left off,” so to speak (Isa Chandra now owns a vegan restaurant in Omaha called Modern Love, and Terry Romero has published her own vegan cookbooks), not only in naming their business after the classic 90s riot girl band, Bikini Kill, and reminding people to get their L7 tickets, but also in picking up the mantle of replicating iconic corporate treats in the form of “cream coffins” (Twinkies) and “riot grrl” cupcakes (Girl Scout Samoas). But also, they extend punk’s egalitarian ethos in that there is something for everyone at Zucchini Kill, whether you’re allergic to soy or gluten or you choose to eat a cruelty-free diet. You still have to navigate allergens at other vegan shops (there’s a very lovely vegan ice cream shop near our house that has literally nothing my daughter can eat, because she’s allergic to tree nuts and most of their bases are almond or cashew).
In my dissertation, I argued that Bloodroot and PPK’s cookbooks served as “the tangible, material representation of a community of women with political, social, and cultural concerns at their center, who choose to use the tools available to them in order to create the kind of world in which they wish to live.” And I think that the same argument could be made about Zucchini Kill, especially because the shop also has items for sale by female artists and women-owned businesses and they dedicate their limited donation budget to organizations that benefit women, animals, LBGTQ, musicians, and the environment.
At the end of the day, it’s just cupcakes (and other baked treats) we’re talking about here. But when it seems like every hour brings harrowing and scary news, it’s heartening to know that there are people just down the road from my house who are living their values, made manifest in an obsession-inspiring golden mylk cupcake. And that gives me hope, a rare commodity these days.