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Rachel Ama and the Trouble with Apolitical Food - Vice
The rising vegan YouTube star treads carefully around the tangled politics of race and veganism. For her, making accessible plant-based recipes is a form of activism.
Vegan food is not a fad. Rachel Ama is keen to stress this to me as we stand in the kitchen of her north London home, watching over a pot of simmering pasta sauce. “I want that narrative to go away,” the vegan cooking YouTuber shares, breaking jackfruit into soft, fat flakes and stirring it into the tomato sauce for her vegan ‘juna’ (jackfruit ‘tuna’) pasta. “Because in cultures all around the world people are not necessarily saying ‘this is vegan’, they're just eating vegetables and getting on with it.”
And Rachel is right. Within Caribbean cooking, for example, a community of plant-based cooks has held fast, creating a legacy that stretches across generations. Traditionally, there’s the vegetarianism and veganism of those in the Rastafari movement following an ital diet. A new generation of health-conscious Jamaican vegans is also shaking things up in the country’s big cities. And here in the UK, young people are working to build on that heritage, staking out a place in the largely white and middle-class vegan landscape with plant-based incarnations of the flavours their parents and grandparents used to cook.
The rising vegan YouTube star treads carefully around the tangled politics of race and veganism. For her, making accessible plant-based recipes is a form of activism.
Vegan food is not a fad. Rachel Ama is keen to stress this to me as we stand in the kitchen of her north London home, watching over a pot of simmering pasta sauce. “I want that narrative to go away,” the vegan cooking YouTuber shares, breaking jackfruit into soft, fat flakes and stirring it into the tomato sauce for her vegan ‘juna’ (jackfruit ‘tuna’) pasta. “Because in cultures all around the world people are not necessarily saying ‘this is vegan’, they're just eating vegetables and getting on with it.”
And Rachel is right. Within Caribbean cooking, for example, a community of plant-based cooks has held fast, creating a legacy that stretches across generations. Traditionally, there’s the vegetarianism and veganism of those in the Rastafari movement following an ital diet. A new generation of health-conscious Jamaican vegans is also shaking things up in the country’s big cities. And here in the UK, young people are working to build on that heritage, staking out a place in the largely white and middle-class vegan landscape with plant-based incarnations of the flavours their parents and grandparents used to cook.